(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back with Atri Basu who is Cisco's resident philosopher who also holds a master's in computer science. We're going to have to unpack that a little bit. And Necati Cehreli, who's technical lead at Cisco. Welcome, guys. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Happy to be here. >> Thanks a lot. >> All right, let's get into it. We want you to explain how Cisco validated the Zebrium technology and the proof points that you have that it actually works as advertised. So first Atri, first tell us about Cisco TAC. What does Cisco TAC do? >> So TAC is otherwise it's an acronym for Technical Assistance Center, is Cisco's support arm, the support organization. And the risk of sounding like I'm spouting a corporate line. The easiest way to summarize what TAC does is provide world class support to Cisco customers. What that means is we have about 8,000 engineers worldwide and any of our Cisco customers can either go on our web portal or call us to open a support request. And we get about 2.2 million of these support requests a year. And what these support requests are, are essentially the customer will describe something that they need done some networking goal that they have that they want to accomplish. And then it's TACs job to make sure that that goal does get accomplished. Now, it could be something like they're having trouble with an existing network solution and it's not working as expected or it could be that they're integrating with a new solution. They're, you know, upgrading devices maybe there's a hardware failure anything really to do with networking support and, you know the customer's network goals. If they open up a case for testing for help then TACs job is to respond and make sure the customer's, you know questions and requirements are met. About 44% of these support requests are usually trivial and, you know can be solved within a call or within a day. But the rest of TAC cases really involve getting into the network device, looking at logs. It's a very technical role. It's a very technical job. You need to be conversed with network solutions, their designs, protocols, et cetera. >> Wow. So 56% non-trivial. And so I would imagine you spend a lot of time digging through logs. Is that true? Can you quantify that like, you know, every month how much time you spend digging through logs and is that a pain point? >> Yeah, it's interesting you asked that because when we started on this journey to augment our support engineers workflow with Zebrium solution, one of the things that we did was we went out and asked our engineers what their experience was like doing log analysis. And the anecdotal evidence was that on average an engineer will spend three out of their eight hours reviewing logs either online or offline. So what that means is either with the customer live on a WebEx, they're going to be going over logs, network, state information, et cetera or they're going to do it offline where the customer sends them the logs it's attached to a, you know, a service request and they review it and try to figure out what's going on and provide the customer with information. So it's a very large chunk of our day. You know, I said 8,000 plus engineers and so three hours a day that's 24,000 man hours a day spent on log analysis. Now the struggle with logs or analyzing logs is there by out of necessity, logs are very contrite. They try to pack a lot of information in a very little space. And this is for performance reasons, storage reasons, et cetera, but the side effect of that is they're very esoteric. So they're hard to read if you're not conversant if you're not the developer who wrote these logs or you aren't doing code deep dives. And you're looking at where this logs getting printed and things like that, it may not be immediately obvious or even after a little while it may not be obvious what that log line means or how it correlates to whatever problem you're troubleshooting. So it requires tenure. It requires, you know, like I was saying before it requires a lot of knowledge about the protocol what's expected because when you're doing log analysis what you're really looking for is a needle in a haystack. You're looking for that one anomalous event, that single thing that tells you this shouldn't have happened, and this was a problem right. Now doing that kind of anomaly detection requires you to know what is normal. It requires, you know, what the baseline is. And that requires a very in depth understanding of, you know the state changes for that network solution or product. So it requires time to near and expertise to do well. And it takes a lot of time even when you have that kind of expertise. >> Wow. So thank you, Atri. And Necati, that's almost two days a week for a technical resource. That's not inexpensive. So what was Cisco looking for to sort of help with this and how'd you stumble upon Zebrium? >> Yeah, so, we have our internal automation system which has been running more than a decade now. And what happens is when a customer attach log bundle or diagnostic bundle into the service request we take that from the Sr we analyze it and we represent some kind of information. You know, it can be alerts or some tables, some graph, to the engineer, so they can, you know troubleshoot this particular issue. This is an incredible system, but it comes with its own challenges around maintenance to keep it up to date and relevant with Cisco's new products or a new version of a product, new defects, new issues and all kind of things. And when I mean with those challenges are let's say Cisco comes up with a product today. We need to come together with those engineers. We need to figure out how this bundle works, how it's structured out. We need to select individual logs, which are relevant and then start modeling these logs and get some values out of those logs, using PaaS or some rag access to come to a level that we can consume the logs. And then people start writing rules on top of that abstraction. So people can say in this log I'm seeing this value together with this other value in another log, maybe I'm hitting this particular defect. So that's how it works. And if you look at it, the abstraction it can fail the next time. And the next release when the development or engineer decides to change that log line which you write that rag X or we can come up with a new version which we completely change the services or processes then whatever you have wrote needs to be re-written for the new service. And we see that a lot with products, like for instance, WebEx where you have a very short release cycle that things can change maybe the next week with a new release. So whatever you are writing, especially for that abstraction and for those rules are maybe not relevant with that new release. With that being said we have a incredible rule creation process and governance process around it which starts with maybe a defect. And then it takes it to a level where we have an automation in place. But if you look at it, this really ties to human bandwidth. And our engineers are really busy working on you know, customer facing, working on issues daily and sometimes creating news rules or these PaaS are not their biggest priorities so they can be delayed a bit. So we have this delay between a new issue being identified to a level where we have the automation to detect it next time that some customer faces it. So with all these questions and with all challenges in mind we start looking into ways of actually how we can automate these automation. So these things that we are doing manually how we can move it a bit further and automate. And we had actually a couple of things in mind that we were looking for and this being one of them being this has to be product agnostic. Like if Cisco comes up with a product tomorrow I should be able to take it logs without writing, you know, complex regs, PaaS, whatever and deploy it into this system. So it can embrace our logs and make sense of it. And we wanted this platform to be unsupervised. So none of the engineers need to create rules, you know, label logs, this is bad, this is good. Or train the system like which requires a lot of computational power. And the other most important thing for us was we wanted this to be not noisy at all because what happens with noises when your level of false positives really high your engineers start ignoring the good things between that noise. So they start the next time, you know thinking that this thing will not be relevant. So we want something with a lot more less noise. And ultimately we wanted this new platform or new framework to be easily adaptable to our existing workflow. So this is where we started. We start looking into the, you know first of all, internally, if we can build this thing and also start researching it, and we came up to Zebrium actually Larry, one of the co-founders of Zebrium. We came upon his presentation where he clearly explained why this is different, how this works and it immediately clicked in and we said, okay, this is exactly what we were looking for. We dive deeper. We checked the block posts where Zebrium guys really explain everything very clearly there. They're really open about it. And most importantly, there is a button in their system. And so what happens usually with AI ML vendors is they have this button where you fill in your details and a sales guys call you back and you know, explains the system here. They were like, this is our trial system. We believe in the system you can just sign up and try it yourself. And that's what we did. We took one of our Cisco live DNA Center, wireless platforms. We start streaming logs out of it. And then we synthetically, you know, introduce errors like we broke things. And then we realized that Zebrium was really catching the errors perfectly. And on top of that, it was really quiet unless you are really breaking something. And the other thing we realized was during that first trial is Zebrium was actually bringing a lot of context on top of the logs. During those failures, we worked with couple of technical leaders and they said, "Okay if this failure happens I'm expecting this individual log to be there." And we found out with Zebrium apart from that individual log there were a lot of other things which gives a bit more context around the root cause, which was great. And that's where we wanted to take it to the next level. Yeah. >> Okay. So, you know, a couple things to unpack there. I mean, you have the dart board behind you which is kind of interesting, 'cause a lot of times it's like throwing darts at the board to try to figure this stuff out. But to your other point, Cisco actually has some pretty rich tools with AppD and doing observability and you've made acquisitions like thousand eyes. And like you said, I'm presuming you got to eat your own dog food or drink your own champagne. And so you've got to be tools agnostic. And when I first heard about Zebrium, I was like wait a minute. Really? I was kind of skeptical. I've heard this before. You're telling me all I need is plain text and a timestamp. And you got my problem solved. So, and I understand that you guys said, okay let's run a POC. Let's see if we can cut that from, let's say two days a week down to one day, a week. In other words, 50%, let's see if we can automate 50% of the root cause analysis. And so you funded a POC. How did you test it? You put, you know, synthetic, you know errors and problems in there, but how did you test that, it actually works Necati? >> Yeah. So we wanted to take it to the next level which is meaning that we wanted to back test is with existing SaaS. And we decided, you know, we chose four different products from four different verticals, data center security, collaboration, and enterprise networking. And we find out SaaS where the engineer put some kind of log in the resolution summary. So they closed the case. And in the summary of the SR, they put "I identified these log lines and they led me to the root cause" and we ingested those log bundles. And we tried to see if Zebrium can surface that exact same log line in their analysis. So we initially did it with archery ourself and after 50 tests or so we were really happy with the results. I mean, almost most of them we saw the log line that we were looking for but that was not enough. And we brought it of course to our management and they said, "Okay, let's try this with real users" because the log being there is one thing but the engineer reaching to that log is another take. So we wanted to make sure that when we put it in front of our users, our engineers, they can actually come to that log themselves because, you know, we know this platform so we can, you know make searches and find whatever we are looking for but we wanted to do that. So we extended our pilots to some selected engineers and they tested with their own SaaS. Also due some back testing for some SaaS which are closed in the past or recently. And with a sample set of, I guess, close to 200 SaaS we find out like majority of the time, almost 95% of the time the engineer could find the log they were looking for in Zebrium's analysis. >> Yeah. Okay. So you were looking for 50%, you got the 95%. And my understanding is you actually did it with four pretty well known Cisco products, WebEx client, DNA Center Identity services, engine ISE, and then UCS. Unified pursuit. So you use actual real data and that was kind of your proof point, but Atri, so that sounds pretty impressive. And have you put this into production now and what have you found? >> Well, yes, we've launched this with the four products that you mentioned. We're providing our TAC engineers with the ability, whenever a support bundle for that product gets attached to the support request. We are processing it, using sense and then providing that sense analysis to the TAC engineer for their review. >> So are you seeing the results in production? I mean, are you actually able to reclaim that time that people are spending? I mean, it was literally almost two days a week down to you know, a part of a day, is that what you're seeing in production and what are you able to do with that extra time and people getting their weekends back? Are you putting 'em on more strategic tasks? How are you handling that? >> Yeah. So what we're seeing is, and I can tell you from my own personal experience using this tool that troubleshooting any one of the cases, I don't take more than 15 to 20 minutes to go through the Zebrium report. And I know within that time either what the root causes or I know that Zebrium doesn't have the information that I need to solve this particular case. So we've definitely seen, well it's been very hard to measure exactly how much time we've saved per engineer, right? Again, anecdotally, what we've heard from our users is that out of those three hours that they were spending per day, we're definitely able to reclaim at least one of those hours and what even more importantly, you know, what the kind of feedback that we've gotten in terms of I think one statement that really summarizes how Zebrium's impacted our workflow was from one of our users. And they said, "Well, you know, until you provide us with this tool, log analysis was a very black and white affair, but now it's become really colorful." And I mean, if you think about it log analysis is indeed black and white. You're looking at it on a terminal screen where the background is black and the text is white, or you're looking at it as a text where the background is white and the text is black, but what they're really trying to say is there are hardly any visual cues that help you navigate these logs which are so esoteric, so dense, et cetera. But what Zebrium does is it provides a lot of color and context to the whole process. So now you're able to quickly get to, you know using their Word Cloud, using their interactive histogram, using the summaries of every incident. You're very quickly able to summarize what might be happening and what you need to look into. Like, what are the important aspects of this particular log bundle that might be relevant to you? So we've definitely seen that. A really great use case that kind of encapsulates all of this was very early on in our experiment. There was this support request that had been escalated to the business unit or the development team. And the TAC engineer had really, they had an intuition about what was going wrong because of their experience because of, you know the symptoms that they'd seen. They kind of had an idea but they weren't able to convince the development team because they weren't able to find any evidence to back up what they thought was happening. And it was entirely happenstance that I happened to pick up that case and did an analysis using Zebrium. And then I sat down with a TAC engineer and we were very quickly within 15 minutes we were able to get down to the exact sequence of events that highlighted what the customer thought was happening, evidence of what the sorry not the customer what the TAC engineer thought was a root cause. And then we were able to share that evidence with our business unit and, you know redirect their resources so that we could chase down what the problem was. And that that really shows you how that color and context helps in log analysis. >> Interesting. You know, we do a fair amount of work in theCUBE in the RPA space, the robotic process automation and the narrative in the press when our RPA first started taking off was, oh, it's, you know machines replacing humans, or we're going to lose jobs. And what actually happened was people were just eliminating mundane tasks and the employees actually very happy about it. But what my question to you is was there ever a reticence amongst your team? Like, oh, wow, I'm going to lose my job if the machine's going to replace me or have you found that people were excited about this and what's been the reaction amongst the team? >> Well, I think, you know, every automation and AI project has that immediate gut reaction of you're automating away our jobs and so forth. And there is initially there's a little bit of reticence but I mean, it's like you said once you start using the tool, you realize that it's not your job, that's getting automated away. It's just that your job's becoming a little easier to do and it's faster and more efficient. And you're able to get more done in less time. That's really what we're trying to accomplish here. At the end of the day, Zebrium will identify these incidents. They'll do the correlation, et cetera. But if you don't understand what you're reading then that information's useless to you. So you need the human you need the network expert to actually look at these incidents, but what we are able to skin away or get rid of is all of is all the fat that's involved in our process like without having to download the bundle, which, you know when it's many gigabytes in size and now we're working from home with the pandemic and everything, you're, you know pulling massive amounts of logs from the corporate network onto your local device that takes time and then opening it up, loading it in a text editor that takes time. All of these things are we're trying to get rid of. And instead we're trying to make it easier and quicker for you to find what you're looking for. So it's like you said, you take away the mundane you take away the difficulties and the slog but you don't really take away the work the work still needs to be done. >> Yeah, great. Guys, thanks so much appreciate you sharing your story. It's quite, quite fascinating. Really. Thank you for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome. >> Excellent. >> Okay. In a moment, I'll be back to wrap up with some final thoughts. This is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California. It's the Cube. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. We're here in San Diego Convention Center for Cisco Live 2019. I'm Stu Miniman and my co-hosts Dave volante. Lisa Martin's also been here for our three days, wall to wall coverage with about 28 to 30,000 here in attendance for the 30th anniversary of the user and partner show for Cisco. Happy to welcome to the program our first time guest, Jeff Scheaffer, who's Vice President of Product Management Strategy inside of Cisco. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu, glad to be here. >> Alright, so Jeff DNA center, some of the environments that you have. There were some announcements on Monday, why don't we start there? Walk us through the updates to the product line. >> Thanks Stu. So we're really excited, right. >> So as you know, with Cisco, we're really building out the intent based network, in support of digital transformation for all of our customers. And one of the key aspects of the intent based network is that we have incredible programability in the network, all supported through the DNA see controller. And this week, we're really excited. We announced two new innovations in the controller. One was incorporating a new set of analytics and machine learning capabilities as part of our assurance package so that we can more quickly troubleshoot network issues. And the third is being able to connect together the multi dev environments. So how do we stitch together, the software defined access to the Software defined WAN, to the software defined data center so that we can lay digital services across the entire network. >> Stu: Yeah, it's a story we've been watching the last couple of years at Cisco is that this move to software in many ways as a unifying factor. >> Yes. >> Used to be I had all these product lines, and I need to learn the interfaces, as my friends that come to the show for many years, when you said single pane of glass, there's like, come on that's spelt P-A-I-N. Today's world, it's an API economy. And what's been really interesting to watch the last... Recently, a lot of times, it's that ml and AI underneath that spans and helps automate a lot of those pieces underneath the covers now. >> Yes, absolutely, it does. So the thing we're excited AI is a broad topic as you know. And underneath that umbrella we have built in new capabilities around the machine learning, the ability to do deep learning, as we look at anonymized data sets in the cloud on deduce patterns that people don't know yet. And then thirdly, we're looking at machine reasoning. So how do we take that the analytics to pinpoint or identify anomalies in the fabric of the network in these new IBM fabrics and then be able to couple that with a set of orchestrated automation so that we can we can emulate the behavior that a network engineer would normally do in order to troubleshoot and diagnose problems and so we're that much faster at identifying them, pinpointing the root cause and then actually being able to give recommendations if not automatically fixing it, the recommendations to resolve the issues. >> So the programability aspect, of course, we're here in the DevNet zone. So, can we dig into that a little bit? I mean I'm imagining by that, it allows me to provision, bandwidth performance, certain levels, all through API calls and it's through software. And I can set thresholds, I can talk more about what that does for me as a customer. >> Sure. So in general, within DNA center, we have a kind of very rich programability capability. It's very much an API first developed controller. So everything that we can do within the controller is a setup of published and curated API's. And those API's come in different categories. So we have API's that are around the automatic configuration and the provisioning of the network infrastructure. Very much, Dave as you're suggesting that you can run as a headless entity inside of a if somebody like a lot of service providers and partners are using this to offer a service to their end customers. And so they can automatically provision out the network and they can do that in support of new applications. We're really actually excited with that in our partnership with Red Hat, we just introduced a new set of answerable plugins as an example, to support a DevOps process by which software developers build new applications as part of that DevOps code pipeline. By using the answerable plugins, we can actually drive automation into the network to provision the networking in support of those apps. So a lot of capabilities there. >> So is the uniqueness of that you can actually do that or is the uniqueness that you're Cisco. >> I know. So to a large part of it... In terms of the way things have been done historically, and this is that most of the time, if you were to look at how do you configure a network, it was device by device and it was through command line interfaces. >> Right. >> And it's error prone, it's complex, it's cumbersome, it takes a lot of time. And so what we've done with the network controllers, is by moving above the top of the intent based network, we're actually able to automatically configure and provision either policy through policies, either QoS or segmentation for security and do that in a very automated way. And to be able to do it in a scalable way. So that is an amusing new kind of configuration mechanisms we're very proud of the work we're doing around NetComp and YANG Models and that's something that's very unique in the way we're approaching that in the market today. >> Yeah, Jeff, historically, one of the concerns was the network. It's tied to the application wasn't as tight there. It's like you talked about networking people, it's just the water that runs through the pipes that we watched with first with ACI now with intent based networking. We're getting closer and closer to that application, especially you talk about multi domain what's going on at ties right with the microservices architectures that are coming on there. So as the applications get more complicated, the network needs to be able to understand what's happening there and respond to what's needed and give back the services that they need. >> Yeah. So I think building on where you're taking that conversation, one of the really kind of key or anchor points of the whole idea around the multi domain integrations that we provided, when we bring together Software Defined access, the software defined when and the software defined data center. We're using the the rich API's that exists in all of our controllers, whether its DNA see for software defined access, whether it's vManaged for the software defined WAN, or whether it's ACI around the software defined data center. And we're integrating all three of these controllers so that they can do a couple of really important things for customers. So in the context of the application. So the very first thing is how do we provide for segmentation? So segmentation is about how do we provide access policy and drive that into the network so that the right users have access to the right applications and other people don't. And then being able to use the programability. If the user moves from say the campus to the branch, we can automatically have the policy follow the user. If the application moves from the data center to the cloud, We can have the policy automatically follow the application and that way we always ensure that the right people have access to the right applications at the right time. The other use case around the around the API's and the multi domain segmentation is that to the extent an application needs quality of service. We think about an 82% of the US we move forward in time or roughly 82% of the traffic on the internet is starting to become video on the networks and like an 8k video is 7.29 terabits per second. So how do you ensure that there's enough bandwidth and enough quality of service to ensure the latency of like virtual reality or augmented reality where latency matters. And so the other thing we're doing with policy is provisioning up the Qos, so that as you configure it in the data center, it's honored in the software defined WAN and it's honored it all the way to the end user in the software defined access. >> Stu you were saying earlier how traditional is like don't touch my network, right, okay. So Jeff, my question is if you look over the last 10 years, as you bring in the software design defined data center and infrastructure programmable and infrastructure, infrastructures code. How is that change? And is it changing the relationship between infrastructure pros and application developers and application development heads? >> Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So kind of comes from two different angles. So number one, from the extent that every software development organization becomes more and more of a DevOps organization and they want to be able to deliver value, the experience, the velocity around the applications to production, as they go through those code pipelines through the DevOps practices, they need to be able to automatically provision out test environments, they need to be able to automatically provision out the pre stage and then automatically promote the applications into production environments. And that's what why it's so important, for example, as we as we mentioned earlier about the answerable plugins that allow the configuration of the network in support of application DevOps teams. The second thing that we find with the network engineers themselves, to the extent we've defined everything as software defined. We have this rich set of digital services that we're starting to manage in these infrastructures and through the controller that programability, the controller, network engineers are having to evolve their capability. And so, you know, we're really excited that the show that Susie Wee, who leads our DevNet program introduced a whole new category of offerings in support of how you start to become both not only a network engineer, but also development aware through for example, the DevNet automation exchange, by making DevNet certifications available through Cisco certifications. And by hosting these curated communities, where we're able to contribute new applications that run on top of our controllers. We're able to contribute new integrations, new automation, logic, new AI, ml logic, everything that's possible. And by curating it, it means it's curated code, but then it's stored in very common repositories like GitHub. It's still really excited with everything she's doing. If Cisco is going to prime the pump with initially right with apps and code started-- >> We've been priming the pump. But we've actually over the last little bit, we've developed a number of partnerships. So we have over 25 partners that have built value added applications and integrations for example, DNA center, we have a number of partners that have actually taken DNA center and wrapped it with a new kind of a new service offering a solution offering to the network. I'll give you a great example. So one of our partner that Tall tale. So what they've done is they've taken DNA Center at the core and our ability to quickly provision wireless infrastructure. And they've wrapped it with a hook telling solution for Convention Center. So think about a convention center, you have a large space, multiple concurrent shows, every one of them setting up their own wireless network with their own SSID. And so the ability to set these up, tear these down, resolve problems quickly in these high density spaces. And they built out completely as a solution on top of the programability of DNA center and our IBM infrastructure. So it's a very exciting time. >> Alright, so Jeff, some new things announced but I also want you to touch on I believe, about a year ago, API and programability was launched. What lessons learned? What feedback from the customers? Give us the update. >> Yeah, so we launched the programability. And as we mentioned before, it's a kind of a very broad ecosystem of capability. Now, the first thing about, programability is really meant to do a couple of key things. One, and probably most important, is to enable all of our customers to be able to make sure that everything's fit for purpose. So how do we integrate into their existing enterprise ecosystems. And so we know we're API first, we have SDK sample apps, we have a bunch of out of the box integrations that use all these SDK for example, integrations with service now and others. And so that's new. The second thing that we're doing with all of the program abilities, we're using it to enable the community. So the challenges we all know, in technology spaces, is that the rate of innovation continues to expand. It's like innovation is on the sphere. You know, it's the surface area of the sphere. And as every year progresses, that surface area gets bigger. The rate of innovation gets bigger and the ability to keep up with that, exceeds the capacity of most organizations. So the best way to harness that is a community based approach. And if you don't have communities, if you don't have programability, if you don't take that strategic approach, it's very hard to stay current and relevant to the market of the future. So that's another big thing that we're really excited by is being able to track that community and then an ecosystem of partners in development. >> Great, Jeff, want to just give you the final word, a lot going on in your space, any final customer takeaways or things you want people to walk away from your team from Cisco Live 2019. >> Yeah, so the present thing that I'm most excited by is that as we look at the transformation of networks, from kind of the device centricity to how do we manage segmentation in these multi domain fabrics. And do that in support of ensuring quality of experience, so the bandwidth and the latency and support of the applications. Ensuring the segmentation and the secure, being able to minimize the attack surface on these new infrastructures by driving segmentation through the fabric. It really takes kind of a systems approach to this, which is how we bring the intent based network together with, for example, the new Cat9K family from Cisco and then bringing DNA centered the controller together. By bringing those two things together. We're really helping to change the entire architecture of the industry for the next 20 years. So very excited to be here. Thank you guys. >> Excellent. >> Dave: You are welcome. >> Well, Jeff Schafer, really appreciate all the updates. Congratulations on what's going there. For Dave volante, Dave, you have a final word to say. >> Well go Bruins is the only thing I can think about right now Stu. >> That's what I was expecting you to say. So Dave Volante I'm Stu Miniman. We back, getting towards the end of three days wall to wall coverage here from San Diego, for Cisco Live 2019. Thanks for watching the Cube (techy music)

(funky music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Peter Burress, and welcome to another CUBE conversation from our beautiful studios in wonderful Palo Alto, California. Enterprises have always struggled with how they're going to add more end points into their networks. More users, more devices, more machines, they need better speeds, lower latencies, greater security. How are they going to do it? Well, we've got a new set of standards coming along within the wifi world as well within the cellular world, to provide those greater densities, lower latencies, higher performance. Wifi Six is what we talk about within kind of the extension of the 802.11 family of protocols, but Wifi Six, like every other significant transformation has required that enterprises think differently about certain attributes of networking. So to have that conversation, we got Sachin Gupta who's a senior vice president of Cisco here, Sachin, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks Peter, very excited to be here. >> Alright, look, so I'm a CIO, and I am working with my team to incorporate these new technologies that are going to improve the quality of my endpoint services, and I'm looking at Wifi Six. What am I mainly worried about as I think about adopting these new technologies? >> So just before we just get into adopting of the new technologies, why are you going after Wi-Fi 6, like what's the reason for the CIO? And quite simply it's, all of the new use cases that are coming on, like everything, all the IoT endpoints have to connect securely, all the bandwidth hungry end users, and the immersive experiences I'm looking to enable, it could be augmented reality, it could be virtual reality, all those are driving a need for me to rethink access, and rethink the network overall. And Wi-fi 6 is one critical component of that. Wi-fi 6 promises four times the capacity, lower latency, a greater range, so the things you talked about in your set-up. So it's a wonderful technology to start addressing some of those problems, but in of it's own it's not sufficient. You got to go well beyond the standard in order to address the CIO problem. >> Okay, so specifically, so think about some of the adoption problems. I got the use cases nailed down, how am I thinking about where things are going to go? Am I going to have to lay out the network differently? What kinds of practical things do I have to start thinking about? >> Well first of all, you have to think about why are you moving, where are you moving with Wi-fi 6. So again, capacity, lower latency, better battery life, the new use cases it enables. After that you need to make sure that whatever you're going to connect, will interoperate. Right? So look, sometimes a standard comes out and it can take a few years before the endpoints and the infrastructure actually get the maximum capability from the new standard. And so we worked proactively with the likes of Samsung, with the likes of Intel, to make sure those endpoints, which any of the new Samsung Galaxy S10, already supports Wi-fi 6. Interaccess points work together to give you the best experience possible. So that's sort of step one. But there's many other things we need to think through. We're also thinking about the problem of just onboarding onto Wi-fi. You know the experience to onboard onto cellular, right? >> Oh, sure. >> You get off airplane mode >> And it works. >> It just works, you're on. What's the experience like on Wifi? >> Well it's certainly not just getting a message from my local carrier that I'm now roaming. You got to get on, yeah it's a lot more involved, you got to authenticate, exactly. >> Give me your phone number, give me your room number, I'll text you something, get on to the It's cumbersome, okay? And we want to make Wifi onboarding to something we call open roaming. Open roaming is a Cisco project, it's a consortium we've set up. That takes all the venue providers and the identity providers, brings them together. So that when you go round, and you roam with Wifi, you onboard the network just like you onboard with cellular. >> So get essentially the same experience you get in the cellular world. >> Same experience. It makes it easy for you to get connected. So those are some of the basic things, but you got to go beyond that then. Now you have to worry about, okay, what do those endpoints require, alright? Well, first of all you need to recognize what the endpoint is. Is this a light bulb, or is it a heart-rate monitor, is it a tablet of some sort, what is actually connecting? So for device recognition, and to understand the experience you're getting, I need virtual analytics. And that's something the infrastructure now needs to provide. So we for the first time now, we've embedded our own ACIG, our own silicon inside the access point. So that we can get visibility from layer one to seven. And now we can pinpoint, what is the device, is it behaving in a compliant way, and how do I deliver the right experience for it. So these are some of things to think about as you move, it's a yes I want Wi-fi 6, but again tying in back to the problem you're looking to solve, how does the entire solution address your problem. >> Alright so we've identified some of the issues that have to be addressed here, and Wifi Six is here. You said the Galaxy S10 already supports it. >> Our access points are shipping, yes. >> So talk to me about the role out of some of these new technologies, these new devices from Cisco, and how customers are going to have to think a little bit differently as they start to plan out their new network structure. >> That's a great question. So I think it's not about hey, I'm just going to roll out new AP's. You should really rethink networking. What am I trying to provide here? And that's why we came out with an architectural approach across the board which is intent based networking. And what we're really talking about there is how do you automate all of the things that IT needs to do, to deliver the security and experience for all of those users and things. How do you get the data, the power of data, the analytics out? And how do you deliver security and policy. >> But it's in the context of the application and the work that's being performed. >> Yes, it's the users and devices and the applications and data. What are you trying to achieve? That's what intent based networking is all about. And so, I love how your asking the question because if you think about the wireless AP's, we only talk about the top already with the endpoint, right? But then I think about the switching architecture, are you segmenting all of that traffic? Is it fully automated? Do you have an identity and policy engine? Can I take the location data that's coming out? Cause remember these APs now are multilingual. They speak BLE, they speak Zigbee and Thread, they're also Wi-fi 6. So how do I take the location data and deliver new business outcomes? How can I tell you that the wheelchair has left the premises? How can I tell you how many people walked in your store, verus walked outside it? How do I get you better asset utilization? Those outcomes are provided at the software step at the top. So you should really be thinking about what am I trying to do for my business, and what architectural approach allows me to deliver those outcomes that I'm looking for. And yes, Wi-fi 6 APs are one critical component there, but you should think about the entire solution though. >> So we got new access points that are Wifi Six enabled ready to go, how far back does this change go into the network? >> So the Wi-fi 6 APs, the beauty of these Wi-fi standards is they're backward compatible. So you can take all kinds of older endpoints, multiple generations, and get them to work in a Wi-fi 6 new environment. So that's nice because it's not a rip and replace of all your clients, when you put the new APs in, they're backward compatible, that's always the case. And a lot of the new software stack and the technology that I talked about with intent based networking, works with at least the two previous generations as well. So if you want some of that telemetry and analytics and security, you can start getting that with some of the APs you may already have, and then when you bring in Wi-fi 6, it's sort of purpose built for that architecture. >> Alright, so we've talked a lot about the use cases of the business side, let's spend a little bit of time describing the fact that you've got the sidecar co processor for analytics inside the APs. How is that going to change the work of IT, the work of network management and administration and security? >> That's a great one So, I'll give you one example of what that does. Today, if you want to go troubleshoot a wireless issue, you're literally walking around with a sensor acting like a client to go figure out what the behavior is, what's going on, how do I figure out what the interference is, why is the experience bad, right? Can take you hours, weeks, days, it's very costly. These new APs, and with our solution with W-fi 6, first of all, I get data with my relationship with Apple from the endpoint. So I get the view from a real client. Then on the access point itself, with that co processor, I can get layer one to seven data and packet captures to see did you fail during authentication, was there some sort of RF issue that's happening, what exactly is happening that's interfering with what's going on? Or, maybe the problem is not even there, it's somewhere else in the network. And the beauty of our Cisco DNA Center solution, which is our controller in intent based networking, is we see end to end. We see the entire network and we can help you pinpoint where that issue is and save a whole bunch of money you'd spend troubleshooting, to deliver the right experience. >> But it sounds as though some of the, historically, some of the analytics associated with network administration was very focused on the device. Intent based network is intended to focus on the application and service that's being provided, but the analytics didn't follow. So know what you're saying is we're going to follow the analytics so that the applications, the services become primary citizens within the network. >> That's exactly right So you have to be able to look at the client holistic view, the application performance holistic view, and the performance of each network element, and that's what the co processor that we talked about helps. Now another thing we did is, that portfolio now, on the enterprise side, we now run the same operating system that also helps simplify for IT. The entire access network with the Catalyst 9000 series, the new access points are called the Catalyst 9100, and we're making it part of one brand and one family, because it's one OS, one programmable architecture, one operational environment if you will, that simplifies the job of IT significantly as well, and then we're also introducing obviously with Wifi Six, our cloud managed Meraki access points to support those deployments as well. >> Alright so one more question on this and then I want to talk about something else in a second. But the beauty, or the essential feature of networking has to be a degree of openness. So new access points can talk to each other, new devices can talk to each other, et cetera. These are new technologies as you said they're going to roll out and diffuse, hopefully very very rapidly, but there will be both enterprise, but also some other network supplier issues. How is Cisco ensuring that your leadership and your thought leadership but also your engineering leadership gets into those other organizations at an appropriate rate so this entire industry can adopt and change and introduce these new kinds of capabilities. >> So I talked about that new family of the Catalyst 9000 series. Let me start there. So all the protocols we support are open interoperable so you can have my switch somebody else's AP, somebody else's AP my switch, all those combinations work. It supports net config open API's programmable models. We expose those through a Cisco dev net. So we have the largest developer community on top of sort of a networking infrastructure where you can write applications that can automate or can get data >> Or services? >> Or deploy services in a very open way. And then we do the same thing at our controller layer. On Cisco DNA Center, fully open so you can have partners ecosystem delivering services and applications on top of the network, on top of that controller. So we think about openness from every angle, and that's how you have to be in a networking world, right? I mean you need to be able to connect to anything. >> Right. Every significant change in networking, someone always presumed it was going to lead to various behavior by the leader to try to somehow close it down. You're saying that's not what's happening here. We're trying to dramatically extend the benefits and capabilities of networking because those enterprises need new use cases. >> But we are saying though, that if you buy that campus architecture, access architecture through Cisco, you're going to get a degree of consistency and automation and analytics and security that's unmatched. So you might as well go, but if you want to compose that with different components, that's absolutely doable. >> Alright, so one last question. The historical norm has been I get a cell service and I get Wifi. Cell had certain positive benefits, and Wifi had other positive benefits. We're talking about Wifi Six, but also we got to talk about 5G. How are the two of them going to work together in your estimation? >> Look, from a wireless standpoint, the problems that you're trying to solve are the same, right? I need more capacity, I need lower latency, more deterministic, better battery life, they're the same. So you need to solve those when you're in an SP outdoor ubiquitous environment, or whether your sort of indoor, where you have predominantly Wifi and that's where most of your traffic flows. So Wifi Six and 5G, it's a beautiful thing that they're both trying to allow you to be in this wireless first, cloud driven world, where most of your apps and data sit in the cloud, and where your experience is really optimized by the data and telemetry that's coming out of the infrastructure. So for me, it's not an or question, it's Wifi Six and 5G that allow you to start solving that problem. >> So everything just as we have today just more, better, faster, lower power. >> Yes, can I add one more thing? >> Of course! >> I just kind of need to do this, okay? So look, when you think about the wireless infrastructure and chaining that out, I talked about how it effects the rest of the network, right? So you do need to think about upgrading your switching infrastructure, we call it being wired for wireless, okay? So with that, we also introduced a new product called the Catalyst 9600. That's a modular core switch, so you're like why are you bringing this up Sasha? >> No, I know why you're bringing it up. >> After 20 years, we are providing the next generation of the Cat 6k, Cat 6k is iconic, it's the foundation of tens of thousands of mission critical networks in the world. This is next-gen, it's more than 10x the capacity, if you have all these endpoints and access points that have more capacity, you need to think about a switch that's bigger factor. >> Scales! >> But fits into intent based networking fully programmable the same way. Just want to do a shout-out for, look we've talked about every aspect of this. APs, switches, identity, everything. >> We're offering, Cisco is offering and the enterprises are going to adopt new classes of network technology at the endpoints, faster, better, but that's going to lead to new use cases, new services, and it's just going to drive that much more complexity and routing and switching and patching thorough the network, you got to be able to scale. >> Right, you have to think about all the components. >> Absolutely. Sachin Gupta is the senior vice president of Cisco, we've been talking about how to think through Wifi Six upgrades. Thank you very much for being on the CUBE. >> Thank you, Peter. >> And once again I'm Peter Burress, and this has been a CUBE conversation. Until next time. (funky music)

Upbeat techno music >> Live, from Barcelona Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to The Cube's exclusive coverage, here in Barcelona, Spain, for Cisco Live Europe 2019. I'm John Furrier. With hosts this week: Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman, here all for three days. So, we're wrapping up Cisco Live 2019, here in Europe. Guys, we're breaking it down. We had some great editorial segments, where we unpacked everything here. But, as we look back over the show, I want to get your observations and insights into, kind of what's going on with Cisco, the secret formula around why DevNet- their developer program; which also has Devnet Create, which is cloud native- is growing very rapidly. Huge resonance with the customer base in Cisco. It's created a revitalization of Cisco, as a company. And you can see that permeating throughout the organization with their branding, how the teams are organized, and they're engineering their products. Is this the future model for all infrastructure companies that don't have a cloud? And why is that successful? And then other observations. Guys, we'll start with DevNet. The very successful program, led by Susie Wee, Senior Vice President and CTO, executing flawlessly how to transform a community, without killing the old to bring in the new. Stu. >> Yeah, John, it's been fascinating to watch. We've talked about the ground effort, a lot of hard work by a small team, build a community. Last year, over 500,000. We hear they're at 560,000 people using this tool. Four and a half years ago, you know, Cisco- mostly a hardware company. It really- what I've seen over the last year or two, they were talking about software, but I've really seen deliverables here. You talk about CloudCenter Suite, you talk about the DNA Center platform; if they're a hardware company, there's a disconnect between what's going on in the DevNet zone, and what's happening in the company. But, we've seen rallying around software solutions. I've heard from the partnering system, from the customers: this isn't Cisco of a few years ago. Very fragmented, lots of lines of businesses, lots of different things. I remember back when Chambers announced, like, "oh, we've got, you know, 37 different adjacencies we're going to go into." No. Now it's: solution suites and platforms and, you know, DevNet- it is a unifying force of what they're doing. That's a great term, John. Love it. And see, that transformation of being a software company, that DevNet set some of the groundwork, and we heard the CIO of Cisco saying that, you know, security and the developer activity, are his partners in crime. Helping him, driving change, and... >> And they did a nice clever play on words: Data Centered. And that's kind of a shot across the bough of the classic data center, which shows it is a cloud world. And data is a center part of it. And, I think the API-centric economy's certainly doing it. But, Dave, I want to get your thoughts, because you asked a question to Susie Wee of DevNet- a very important question Other companies couldn't be successful with developer programs. Cisco has been. What's the secret formula? Well, I asked Amanda Whaley, who's her right-hand woman around what's going on, and she said, "well, there's no secret formula..." Guess what. There is a secret formula. They're being humble. But seems to be content- seems to be the unifying force of the community. They understood the need, they saw the future around cloud native and API's, being a very important connection tissue- connective tissue, for this cloud native world, and an upstream path for Cisco. They understood the future, knew the need, and they provided great content. The sessions and the education are open, inclusive, very education oriented. But, conversations with their peers have been key. TheCUBE's been here, talkin' to... They treat everyone the same, not the big pitches. Real authentic and genuine content that allowed people to learn and grow, and connect with others. To me, I think that is kind of- this is one of my observations. Your thoughts, Dave, on that. >> Yeah, so... First of all, there is a secret formula. And, this is the new blueprint, or the blueprint that infrastructure companies should be following. Cisco's clearly leading there. I think it's content and community. And, they're used their programmability, of their infrastructure, and they've socialized that. They've developed the technology. They say big companies can't innovate; DevNet is a real solid innovation. And it's- we witnessed all week, people coming in, training, learning; these are network engineers. They're learning new skills. They're learning how to be developers. And that is, to me, a huge innovation in business model, in technology. It's creating a flywheel for them. So, they've created- they've come up with the idea, that the network is a data platform. And it's now, also, become an application development platform. On which, they're deploying applications all over the place. Edge, we heard applications being deployed in police vehicles! And so, this is a very important trend, and from what I can tell, they're way ahead of other infrastructure companies: HP, I don't see this, they talk that game. Dell EMC; we talked about code. You know, IBM trying to make it happen with Bluemix. Oracle owns Java, and it still sort of struggles to own the development, developer marketplace. >> So, Dave, I love what you say there. I saw Jack Welch speak a number of years ago, and he's like, "eh, people always tell me all the time that big companies can't innovate." He's like, "well, maybe big companies, but what are companies made up of? Companies are made up of people, and people can innovate." And I think that's- you know, the key there is, it was very people-focused. Absolutely, content. When you talk about what were the big sessions here: oh, they're doin' Java, they're doin' kubernetes. It's like, okay, wait: is there a connection to Cisco products? Absolutely. Is it a product pitch in a product training? There's plenty of that going here! People need that. People built their careers out of Cisco. But this new career? A big question question I had coming in, is: it's a multi-cloud world, you know... Infrastructure, developer, and everything. Cisco's a piece of that. You know, how do they make sure that they get- sticking this with them, and helping them to build their career, and move forward. There's going to be some nice activity, there. And, you get a good glow, and you know, Cisco makes themselves relevant in those communities. >> The other observation that I saw, and I want to get your reactions to it, guys, is: that we saw Scale- and we talk about this all the time in theCUBE. Scale is now table stakes, to compete in this global landscape. But, complexity with multi-cloud, and these things, is there. Every major inflection point in the industry- abstraction layers and software, and/or hardware advances- certainly, Moore's Law kicks in and helps that. But, it's been software abstractions that have really moved the needle, because that's where you can have complexity, and still remove it; from an integration standpoint, from a consumption standpoint. This seems to be- Cisco's buying into this, across the companies, Stu- software. Not just hardware. They've coupled it, but they all work together. This is the magic of DevNet, the magic of API's. It's the magic of an internet operating system. Your thoughts. >> Yeah, and look- we talked to a number of the companies that were acquired by Cisco over the last few years, and I think those are helping to drive some of the change. You have, of course, APT is the big one, Duo in security; companies that were born in the cloud, and helping to move that change along the way, and John, as you said, that unifying factor of, "we're rallying," it's not just, the new Chip Stubbs standing up on the- and saying, "you know, okay, we spent millions of dollars in developing this thing, everybody go out and sell that." It's now- there's co-creation, you're seeing that evolution of that partner ecosystem. And, it's a challenging change, but Cisco is, you know, moving in the right direction. >> It starts at the top, too, Stu. And, I wanted to make a point of- we learned, also- and this is learning for me. Chuck Robbins is behind all this, okay. The CEO has identified DevNet, and said, "this is strategic to our company." All new products now, that are introduced at Cisco, will have API support and a DevNet component. This is a radical change from Cisco of the past. This means that every solution, out of the box- literally- and software, will have that in there. So, with API's and DNA Center, those are two areas to me, that I think will really be a tell sign. If Cisco can execute on the DNA Center, and bring in API's and a DevNet- a real supporting community behind every product; I think the programmable network will be a reality. >> So, help me squint through this. You know, we talk to a lot of people, we go to a lot of shows. We're gettin' the Kool-Aid injection from the DevNet crew here- but, there's real substance. We're going to challenge some of the other companies that we work with. Some of the other infrastructure companies. The IT business, it's like the NFL. It's a copycat league. So, HP is going to say, "oh, we got ATI's." EMC, Dell: they're going to say the same thing. But, what's different here... I mean, clearly, you see it in the evidence of being able to cultivate a community of developers. >> Of course. >> Is it because of the network? >> No, it's management. HP has people- I've talked to them on theCUBE- that believe in cloud native. The company just doesn't fund them properly. They've got the smallest booth at the events, they're always, you know, a partner booth. They're part of an adjunct of something else. HP and Tony O'Neary, I don't think is funding open cloud native... Or certainly the marketing people, or product people, are not funding developers. >> Well, certainly not to the degree that Cisco is, obviously. >> There's no physical signs of any kind. We go to all the shows. >> What about Dell? What about Dell EMC? >> I think Dell EMC is kind of keeping it open, but there's no coherent group. I can't, in my mind's eye, point to one group, saying, "wow, they're kickin' ass." >> They got bigger problems now. It's how you consolidate the portfolio... >> What is- Michael Dell's state of goal, is for Dell to be the leading infrastructu&re company out there. There's a big hardware component of that. Absolutely, they participate in open source, they have some developer- API's are great, and they love standards. But, you know, this is a software movement. >> Yeah. >> Infrastructure's code is where they're going. VMWare, you know, they've made some pushes and moves, in this space... >> With developers? >> Not big developers... >> But, where are the developers? They had their operators on the IT side, so- back to Dell for a second. I think Dell Boomi is one signal, I've seen some sign there. But then- and that's still relatively new, but there's no one- there's no DevNet for Dell. On VMWare... >> People Labs is someone that is helping customers learn to code, do that kind of activity. But, you know, broadly across the Dell family, I haven't seen as much. >> I think VMware has a good ecosystem. I think they have good technical people. I don't think they need a developer program, per se. I think they need more of an operator program. I think that's VMWorld. You go to VMWorld and you see a lot of the partners, and how they integrate in. >> So, who are the favorites in the developer world? Obviously, Microsoft, and MUS... >> I mean, to me, it's Amazon- as a kid in a candy store, if you're a developer, you're all over Amazon. They have great stuff, they're always introducing new candy for the kids, all the time. New services; Amazon, number one. Azure, I think- not so much, in my mind. I think it's a lot of legacy, there, with Azure. But, they are- they're puttin' up the numbers on the profit, and you know my stand on Azure. I think Azure's sandbagging the numbers. But, the growth's there, it's going to be a matter of time. I think, Azure, is on the path. And they have the legacy developer program, world class, Microsoft. Microsoft is in the Cisco kind of wheelhouse. If they can transform their existing developer community, to be cloud native, they hit a home run. >> Yeah, but, John, you were talking about IT ops, out there; Microsoft does great in that. They've got a lot of big push there. They absolutely- the DotNet developers are there. You go to the Build conference, they play. We go to CUBECon, and a lot of the developer shows, and Microsoft, strongly there... >> No, let me just clarify my point. Let me clarify my point on Microsoft. Yes, they have a pre-existing, huge, development. They've been successful by the core competancy, no doubt. Cisco had a developer community: all networking. So, I think Microsoft has that legacy win, but they have to transform, and go the next level. The question is, do they have that. So- with Azure, I'm saying... >> What about Google? You guys were at the Google Cloud Show last year, we'll be there again in April. >> Yeah, you got to put Google in the mix. No doubt, I mean, no question. And, what about Red Hat? With IBM, on the developer front? >> Yeah, look, when you talk to the developers, and all the- a lot of the training their doing, if you've got LITIC skill sets, you've got a leg up in a lot of these environments. There are a lot of developers. It's not like people at Red Hat- some, are like, "oh wait, 6here's my first hoodie, and I'm going to learn to start code." They're already there. They're in this ecosystem. Red Hat: huge part- everybody we just talked about, Red Hat has a strong piece in there. That's one of the reasons why IBM bought them, Dave, is to help ride that wave. >> That's expensive, but they got the ingredients now. >> Red Hat's- check, I love those guys. Google has a lot of developers. They contribute heavily in open source. But, in terms of a Google community, that's really the CNCF in my mind. I think they're doing great job stewarting CNCF, but there's not a lot of people- users, in the Google ecosystem, they've got tons of developers. And, that's an opportunity for Google, in my opinion. >> Well, let's bring it back to Cisco. So, are we in agreement that they've got a leg up on the other infrastructure competitors... >> Yeah, I do. >> Specifically, as it relates to developers. >> They have a huge leg up, but I think it's even bigger that that. I think that this company is going to skyrocket, if they crack the code on network programmability. They're at the early stages now, you're talking about intro to Python, they give more advanced classes... Give them 24 months, if they continue momentum on DevNet, that's the tipping point, in my mind. Two years, they could own everything, and just be a whole other level company, if they crack the code. 'Cause the network is the value. Payload, network effect, this is the new normal in today's.. >> It's a big challenger. I mean, it's really not- and, the networking companies, for years, haven't been able... The Aristas, and the Junipers, haven't been able to unseed them, as the leader. They still got 60 percent of the marketplace. >> DMWare- DMWare and Cisco. >> DMWare, alright. >> DMWare and Cisco, 'cause DMWare and Amazon, that's a lethal combination. I think that's what I'm going to watch, the frenemy action between DMWare and Cisco. I think that level of where NSX, and what Cisco's trying to do, within ten paces of that working. >> Well, and Outpost is the hybrid infrastructure. Does that eventually become a multi-cloud play? Maybe it's a few years off, but... >> Yeah, absolutely. Look, we've watched- a year ago, we were saying, "okay, Google's a strong partner to Cisco, how 'about AWO's?" Well, they're integrating with kubernetes, they're starting to do more with AWS. It's always an interesting partnership with Amazon. Cisco's got lots of products in the marketplace, they're growing in that environment, but Amazon's learning from everybody and can potentially be a threat down the road to where Cisco is. And, I'd love to see Cisco doing more in the Microsoft space, too. >> We'll be watching Cisco, over the year. We're going to continue to go deep on Cisco. We got the Cisco Live North America Show on the cal... >> San Diego. >> This year in San Diego. So, we'll see theCUBE there, for multiple days, as well. Of course, we'll be following all the traction of software define everything, as the world goes completely cyber, dark, encrypted; whatever it is, we're going to be covering it. Well, thanks for watching. I want to give a shout out to the crew. Good job, guys. Well done. Thanks for watching theCUBE here, in Barcelona. I'm Jeff Furrier with Dave Vellonte, Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello, everyone, welcome back to theCUBE coverage here in Barcelona, Spain, of Cisco Live! Europe 2019. I'm John Furrier, Stuart Miniman here in the DevNet Lounge. We've been here all week, three days of coverage, we're on day three. Our next guest is Mandy Whaley, who's the Senior Director of Developer Experience for Cisco DevNet, CUBE alumna, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks so much, glad to be here. >> So what a success, we've interviewed you many times. DevNet has now tipped over to the point where over half a million developers in the Cisco ecosystem here, using APIs and cloud-native tools. Upped their game, big time, congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you very much. It's been a very exciting progression since the beginning of DevNet, which was around four and a half years ago. So it's been great to see the community and learn and progress along that way. >> Well, I just want to say, while we're on camera, how proud I am of you guys. Because being there and watching you guys use all your resources and grow this organization to the point where the influence in Cisco has been so massive. You're on the right side of history. All products are now having API, Susie Wee said. So this is now not just a corner group within Cisco, this is now part of the machinery. >> It is, and it's really, we are having APIs across the whole portfolio and up and down the stock, so from the device level up to the controller level, up to the orchestration level. So that's really exciting to see that. And over those years with the progression of DevNet, we've just become more connected into, we're part of our engineering organization, which I think is a great place for a developer group to be, because you have that strong connection to the engineering groups. But just having more and more parts of that portfolio connected in with the developer piece has been really exciting. The other thing that I think has been great about the growth of the community, and what I always notice when we're at Cisco Live!, is that the developer advocates that we have, which are part of my team, it's the people that matter so much. They are really there trying to help people learn, help them move to the next step, and they really care about the community, as much as the community cares about them. And so when we all get together at an event like this, it's fantastic to be able to see that. >> And people are going through the journey, have been there for multiple years now, and new people are coming in at an accelerated rate, the flywheel's going ... >> That's right, yeah. So my first day at Cisco I taught the first Coding for Network Engineers class that we offered at Cisco Live! many years ago. And what's great is that I've seen some of the people who were in that first class, and they're back here today. And now they're doing Kubernetes and Istio and really advanced stuff, and they've really taken that basics that they got and just ran with it, and added more skills, which is great to see. But then we're also seeing just as many new people coming in and that kind of snowball effect of the community scaling up and helping each other and kind of pushing the boundaries. >> Mandy, we've always seen education has always been a strong foundational piece of Cisco Live! I remember back, first time I came to Cisco Live! was over a decade ago, and people were getting their CCIE certification. Give us a little bit of the breadth and depth, because, you know, it's my fourth time in the DevNet Zone, it's always expanding, as you said Kubernetes and Istio and Java were overflowing sessions here, so ... >> Yes, absolutely, so the way that we structure the learning in the DevNet Zone, we have a big focus on hands-on. We have small group workshops, where people are coding during the workshop, and those are many times just completely overflowing, people standing around, soaking it up, sitting on the floor coding. You know, it's been great to see that. But the main things that we have, we have the workshops, and then we have bigger classroom sessions, which cover concepts or even things like culture change, like Dev and Network and Ops working together. Right, like kind of extending on those topics. And then we have a lot of demos going on around the Zone, too. We've got a couple new things this year. One of those is our Start Now zone. This is a new zone within the Zone that we created this time. And it was for the people who said, "I'm really new, I haven't programmed in a while, "I'm not sure if a full-on developer workshop "is right for me, "I want a place to start." So we called it Start Now. And what's going on in that zone is all day, every day, the Intro to Coding, Intro to REST APIs workshops running back-to-back. And every single one of those sessions has been booked full and waitlisted full for the whole week. So that's been great, to see that many people getting started. And then we also have something really new in that zone, which is one-to-one mentoring. So we wanted to give people a chance to come in and say, "I work in data center networking, "I don't know where to start. "Help me, point me in the way, and get me started." So we have people from our advocacy team there, people from the wider DevNet team, people from all across Cisco there as mentors, helping them get started with, like, "This is a great API for you to start with, "these are kind of the basic skills you want to dive into." And just having those conversations a lot of times gives people the push to kind of jump into these new topics. >> What are some of the highlights in the DevNet Zone? Some great demos, the workshops, the classrooms are key. But there's also other demos-- >> Yeah, there's one demo that's been really popular, and it's actually an augmented reality demo, and it uses our DNA Center networking APIs. And what it does, is you can scan a wireless access point, and it will recognize it, and then, using the APIs, bring up all the information about that access point. You can also directionally find where is the nearest access point to me? Like, if you're an engineer who maybe needs to fix something. And then the other thing that's cool is you can turn it on, and in an augmented reality way, see the signal strength overlayed over the space that you're in. So you can troubleshoot and find issues. And our goal with building that demo was, when you think about networking APIs, typically you think about maybe dashboards, automations, which are fantastic and do a lot for you, but we also like to push the boundaries on the kinds of apps that people could think about building, and that augmented reality one is a great one to show that. >> What are the popular sessions? We've seen some overflow, what's getting traction? What's the key booked sessions? >> So we've had two big launches at Cisco Live! overall this week around IOT and also the new ACI data center networking, ACI Anywhere announcements. So the sessions related to those have, of course, been very popular, people jumping in. The Kubernetes, the Istio sessions have been very popular, DNA Center, a lot of people like skilling up on those APIs. And then a lot of the things that are, getting started with Python, learning about different libraries that are relevant to the network automation world. All of those have been really popular, as well. >> Some of the feedback I've gotten from the community is, of course there's the great stuff here, but it's what you do year-round. So the labs are available all the time, I know there's more events and just ongoing learning. Maybe you could share a little bit beyond that. >> Yeah, so we spend a lot of time trying to connect this experience to the online, because not everyone is here, right? In fact, most of the people aren't, they're out in the world. And so all the workshops that are taught here, there's a DevNet Learning Lab that you can do the same material, available online. And then we have our DevNet Sandbox, which is hosted labs. If you don't have a spare network laying around, or you don't have a Kubernetes cluster to work against, you can just instantly reserve them, and a lot of times they are configured in ways that help you do certain use cases. And then we have a new thing that was just launched prior to getting here, which is actually called our Learning Paths, which give a really curated experience around four, you know, enterprise, networking, programming, like, do these eight things. So it's real specific. So that's an exciting thing. The other new thing is Code Exchange. Have you guys heard about Code Exchange? >> Yeah, good buzz about this, explain that. >> Yeah, so we wanted to make it really easy for our developers to find code to start from, so you're not starting from scratch, right? So maybe you want to find something for ACI written in Python, so Code Exchange is a place on DevNet, you can go in, you can search, you can filter by technology and language, and then you get back a curated list of GitHub repos, of projects that people have published on GitHub. So it just helps people discover the things that the community is working on and people can share their code there, as well, and then it'll be featured in that way. So this has been really great, especially for, maybe people new to programming, they don't want to start from a blank page. I don't know that anyone likes starting from a blank page. But it's great, they can find projects, modify them, and start to, we're starting to build out use cases there, as well-- >> It's faster learning. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So, Mandy, I got to ask you, one of the things that has been impressive is you guys saw the future early with APIs. I mean, anyone in the cloud business kind of saw that, but you brought it into Cisco, DevNet. DevNet became that core community that's now programmable with the network. There's still the cloud-native, you have DevNet Create, another event, another kind of concept bringing cloud-native and networking together. Kind of an experiment a few years ago, theCUBE was there, covering it. >> Yeah, that's right. >> And remember? That's evolving, can you share the progress of DevNet Create? >> Yeah, absolutely. So DevNet Create is a smaller, much, much smaller conference than Cisco Live!, and it's solely focused on our developer community, and it is where we really try to connect in with cloud-native, we connect in with a lot of ISVs who may be building cool applications with Cisco partners of all types. It's also very community-driven. We try to have about 80% of the content, 80 to 90% of the content, be from the community, that comes in through the call for papers and is presented there. And so it's a very fun, very conversation, you know, connect people from different parts of the industry together, and get them thinking about what's possible with, we call it, "where apps meet infrastructure." So that includes things like IOT, new kinds of interactions, like voice and location and things like that. So it's coming up, it's in April, it's in Mountain View, and we're really excited, we're heavy into the planning for that right now-- >> April 24th, I believe. >> Yes, April 24th. >> I love how you bring the two worlds together, because there's more learning, shared experiences, but also that's what's happening with Cisco and the world. >> That's right, yeah. >> It's coming together, so you guys are out front on that. Look forward to seeing that. Okay, final question for you, I'll put you on the spot here. >> Oh, no. >> What's it like for you, personally, because you know we've had conversations in the past on theCUBE, and also in person, around the commitment that the DevNet team has, the vision that they saw, and now that it's becoming real, how do you feel, what are some of the learnings that you've had, looking back a few years? >> That's great, I mean, I feel really proud of our team is one thing that's really theirs. As a leader within DevNet it's great to see that the commitment that the team puts in, has the results that we're seeing, and to see them be proud of it is great. And I'm proud of our community, as well, 'cause they're excited. And it's energizing, right? It's great to see that coming together and know that some of the beginnings, when there was a lot of, you know, maybe not everyone understands what we're trying to do, and there's, you know, what is the reason for Cisco diving into developer? And all those kinds of questions, that we're seeing that all come to fruition is pretty exciting. >> Dave Vellante asked Susie Wee about the success of the program, and others have tried, you guys have been successful. So I'll ask the question, what does it take to be successful, to stand up and, or transform a preexisting community with modern, cool tools, without, kind of burning down the old to bring in the new, how do you rise that up, what's the strategy? What's been successful, what's the formula? >> (laughs) I don't know if there's any formula. We always say that, it was interesting because, starting a developer program for Cisco was this really hardware-focused company moving toward software. There was no playbook for how to do developers for this. That was actually one of the reasons I came to Cisco, it was really exciting. And, you know, what we have done a lot is listen to the community, and ask the community, you know, what they are seeing and how we can help, as well as asking that question internally at Cisco. >> Mandy, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I know you're busy, great job, great success, we can certainly testify that your team's working hard, and the team is crankin' out great material. We're in the DevNet Zone-- >> They're also partying hard, John. >> (laughs) >> Yeah, they play hard, see we don't say "party." It's not politically correct. Thank you so much for your support. Great to cover you guys, great content, great people, smart people in theCUBE. That's our formula, we love working with you. >> Thank you so much. >> More live coverage here in the DevNet Zone after this short break. Stay with us. (upbeat electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi everyone welcome back to the theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live! Europe 2019. I'm John Furrier and my co-host Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante is out there as well co-hosting this week. Our next guest is John Apostolopoulos who's the VP and CTO for the Enterprise Networking Business, Unit Lab Director for the Innovation Labs. Here to talk with us about AI and some great innovations. John thanks for coming on theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thank you for inviting me, pleasure to be here. >> So, Cisco has some big announcements, the messages coming together certainly the bridge for the future, bridge for tomorrow, whatever the phrase is. You know, kind of looking at that new world connecting on premise, cloud, ACI anywhere, hyper-flex anywhere, lot of complexity, being mis-tracked the way with software, separate from the V-Comp from the hardware, lot of scale in the cloud and IoT and all around the edge. So software is a big part of this. >> Oh yes. >> So can't help but think, okay complexity, scale, you see Facebook using machine learning. Machine learning and AI operations now, a real conversation for Cisco. >> Yeah. >> Talk about what that is, how are you guys looking at AI, and machine learning in particular, it's been around for a while. What's your thoughts on Cisco's position and opportunity? >> Sure, yeah. Cisco's been investing or using AI for many, many years. What happens to Cisco, like most companies, we haven't really talked about the machine learning as a term because machine learning is a tool used to solve different problems. So you talk about, what are the customer problems we have? And then we saw, no matter how good our solution is, but we haven't really talked about the details about the how but, we've using at Cisco, like myself from past careers and so forth for many many years some machine learning. Security has been using it for multiple decades for example. >> And where's the use case for machine learnering, because it's one of things where there's different versions and flavors of machine learning. Machine learning we know powers AI and data feeds machine learning, so do you have all these dependencies and all these things going on, how do you...how should someone think about sorting through machine learning? >> Well machine learner itself that term is a very broad term, it's almost as big as computer science, right? So that's where a lot of the confusion comes in. But what happens is you can look up what types of problems we want to solve, and when you try to look at what types of problems we want to solve, some of them...for example some problems you can exploit the fact that the laws of physics that apply and if the laws of physics apply, you should use those laws. We can either figure out that if we drop this, this will fall at some speed by measuring it and using a machine learning or we have gravitational force and friction with the air and re-account for that and figure it out. So the many ways to solve these problems and we want to choose the best method for solving each one of them. >> And when the people think about Cisco, the first reaction isn't "Oh machine learning... innovator." What are you guys using machine learning for? Where has it been successful? What are you investing in? Where's the innovation? >> Sure sure, so there's a lot of problems here that come into play. If you look at...if you look at a customer problems, one example is all the digital disruption. We have on the order of a million devices, new devices coming on to the network every hour throughout the world. Now, what are those devices? How should you treat them? With machine learning we're able to identify what the devices are and then figure out what the network caches should be. For instance when IoT device you want to protect it, protect it from others. Another big topic is operations. As you know people spend, I think it was The Gardner identified that people spend about sixty-billion dollars per year on operations costs, why is it so much? Because most of the operations are manual, about 95% manual, which also means that these changes are slow and error-prone. What we do there is we basically use machine learning to do intelligent automation and we get a whole bunch of insights about what's happening and use that to drive intelligent automation. You may have heard about Assurance, which was announced at Cisco Live, one year ago at Barcelona and both in the campus with DNA Center we announced Cisco DNA Center Assurance and the data center went out, network and network analytic engine. And what both of these do is they look at what's happened to the network, they apply machine learning to identify patterns and from those patterns, identify, is there a problem, where's the problem? How can we...what's the root cause and then how can we solve that problem quickly? >> John, can you help us connect where this fits in a multi-cloud environment? Because what we've seen the past couple of years is when we talk about managing the network, a lot of what I might be in charge of managing, is really outside of my purview and therefore I could imagine something like ML is going to be critically important because I'm not going to be touching it but therefore I still need to have data about it and a lot of that needs to happen. >> Yeah, well one of the places ML helps with multi-cloud is the fact you need to figure out which...where to send your packets, and this comes with SD-WAN. So with SD-WAN we often have multiple paths available to us and let's say with the move to Office365, people are using the SaaS service and they want to have very good interactivity. One of the things we realized is that by carefully selecting which path we can use, at the branch and the campus too, we could get a 40% reduction in the latency. So that's a way we choose which colo or which region or which side of Office365 to send the packets to, to dramatically reduce latency. >> What's the role of data? Because when you think about it, you know, moving a packet from point A to point B, that's networking. Storage acts differently 'cause you store data data's got to come back out and be discovered. Now if you have this horizontal scalability for cloud, edge, core coming into the middle, get of the data 'cause machine learning needs the data, good data, not dirty data you need clean data. How do you see that evolving, how should customers then be thinking about preparing for either low-hanging use-cases. Just what's your thoughts and reaction to that? >> Yeah well the example you gave is a very interesting example. You described how you need to get data from one point to another, for instance, for my device to a data center with applications over the cloud. And you also mentioned how the many things between. What we care about, not necessarily the application data, we care about... You know we want to have the best network performance so your applications are working as well as possible. In that case we want to have an understanding of what's happening across a path so we want to pull to telemetry in all kinds of contexts to be able to understand, is there problem, where's the problem, what is it, and how to solve it. And that's what Assurance does. We pull this data from the access points the switches, from the routers, we pour, pull in all kinds of contextual information to get a rich understanding of the situation, and try to identify if there's a problem or not, and then how to solve it. >> Its the classic behavioral, contextual, paradigm of data but now you guys are looking at it from a network perspective and as the patterns changed the applications centric, programmability of the network, the traffic patterns are changing. Hence the announcements here but intent-based networking and hyper-flexed anywhere. This is now a new dynamic. Talk about the impact of that from an AI perspective. How are you guys getting out front on that? It's not just North, South, East, West, it's pretty much everywhere. The patterns are, could be application specific at any given point, on a certain segment of a network, I mean it's complex. >> Yeah, its complex. One of the really nice things about intent-based network and those, it fits in really nicely and that was by design, 'cause what happens with intent-based networking, as you know, a user expresses some intent if it's something they want to do. I want to securely onboard the SIoT device, and then it gets activated in the network, and then we use Assurance to see if it's doing the right thing. But what happens is that Assurance part, that's basically gathering visibility and insight in terms of what's happening. That's using machine learning to understand what's happening in the network across all these different parts that you mentioned. And then, what happens is we take those insights and then we make intelligent actions and that's part of the activation. So this...with intent based network in this feedback loop that we have directly ties with using the data for getting insights and then for activation, for intelligent actions. >> John, always want to get the update on the innovation lab, is there anything particular here at the show or, what's new that you can share? >> So we're looking at extending IBN to the cloud, to multi-cloud, to multiple devices so there's a lot of really fascinating work happening there. I believe you're going to be talking to one of my colleagues later, too, T.K. He's, I think, hopefully going to talk about some of the machine learning that's been done and that's already prioritized as you know in encrypted thread analytics. That's an example of where we use machine learning to identify if there's malware in encrypted traffic. Which is really a fascinating problem. >> That's a hard problem to solve. I'm looking forward to that conversation. >> So some members of Cisco, Dave McGrew, in particular, Cisco Fellow, started working on that problem four and a half years ago. Because of his work with other colleagues, he was able and they were able to come up with a solution. So it was a very complicated problem as you saw but through the use of machine learning and many years of investment, plus the fact that Cisco's access to Talos which has, they know the threats throughout the world. They're a list of data in terms of all kinds of threats that's massive. That's pretty powerful. >> The volume, that's where machine learning shines. I mean you see the amount of volume of data coming in, that's where it could do some heavy lifting. >> Exactly, that's one of Cisco's strengths. The fact that we have this massive view on all the threats throughout the world and we can bring it to bear. >> Network security foundation only just creates so much value for apps. Final question for you, for the folks watching, what's in you opinion the most important story here at Cicso Live Barcelona, that people should be paying attention to? >> I think how we are trying to extend across all these different domains and make it like one network for our customers. This is still a journey and it's going to take time but with intent based networking we can do that. We're going across campus, WAN, data center to multi-cloud. >> How hard is cross domain, just put it in perspective. Cross domains reversal and having visibility into these, from a latency, from a physics standpoint, how hard is it? >> It's quite hard, there's all kinds of technical challenges but there's even other sorts of challenges. This is WiFi, right? IEEE 802.11 defines the QoS standard for wireless and that's completely different than how the internet group ITEF defined it for wired. So even between wireless and wired, there's a lot of work that has to be done and Cisco's leading that effort. >> And having all that data. Great to have you on John, thanks for spending the time and demystifying machine learning and looking forward to this encrypted understanding with machine learning, that's a hard problem, looking forward to digging into that. Again, truly, the breakthroughs are happening with machine learning and adding values with application centric world. It's all about the data, it's theCUBE bringing you the data from Barcelona, I'm John with Stu Mini, stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, its theCUBE, covering Cisco Live! Europe, brought to you by Cisco, and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain, for Cisco Live! Europe 2019, I'm John Furrier, with my co-host Dave Vellante as well as Stu Miniman has been co-hosting all week, three days of coverage, we're in day two. We're here with very special guest, we're in the DevNet Zone, and we're here with the leader of the DevNet team of Cisco, Susie Wee, Senior Vice President, CTO of Cisco DevNet, welcome, good to see you. >> Thank you, good to see you, and I'm glad that we have you here again in the DevNet Zone. >> You've been running around, it's been super exciting to watch the evolution, we chatted a couple of years ago, okay we're going to get some developer-centric APIs and a small community growing, now it's exploding. (Susie laughs) Feature of the show, the size gets bigger every year. >> It was interesting, yeah, we took a chance on it right? So we didn't know and you took this bet with me is just that the network is becoming programmable, the infrastructure is programmable, and not only is the technology becoming programmable, but we can take the community of networkers, IT infrastructure folks, app developers and get them to understand the programmability of the infrastructure, and it's really interesting that, you know, these classes are packed, they're very deep they're very technical, the community's getting along and, you know, networkers are developers. >> Yeah you know, you nailed it, because I think as a CTO, you understood the dev-ops movement, saw that in cloud. And I remember my first conversation with you like, you know, the network has a dev-ops angle too if you can make it programmable, and that's what it's done, and you're seeing Cisco's wide having this software extraction, ACI anywhere, hyperflux anywhere, connected to the cloud, now Edge. APIs are at the center, the DNA Center platform. >> Yes! >> API First, very successful project. >> Yes yes, it's-- >> This is the new DNA of Cisco is APIs, this is what it's all about. >> It is, it is and you know, like at first, you know, when we started this journey five years ago a few of our products had APIs, like a few of them were programmable. But you know, you don't take your network in overnight, it's programmable when you have this type of thing. But we've been building it in, and now practically every product is programmable, every product has APIs, so now you have a really rich fabric of yeah, security, data center, enterprises and campus and branch networks. Like, and it can now, put together really interesting things. >> Well congratulations, it happened and it's happening, so I got to ask the question, now that it's happening, happened and happening, continuing to happen, what's the impact to the customer base because now you're now seeing Cisco clearly defining the network and the security aspect of what the network can do, foundationally, and then enabling it to be programmable. >> Yeah. >> What's happening now for you guys, obviously apps could take advantage of it, but what else is the side effect of this investment? >> Yeah so, the interesting thing is, if we take a look at the industry at large, what happens is, you kind of have the traditional view of, IT, you know, so if you take a look at IT, you know, what do you need it for? I need it to get my compute, just give me my servers, give me my network, and let's just hope it works. And then it was also viewed as being old, like I can get all this stuff on the cloud, and I can just do my development there, why do I need all of that stuff right? But once you take it, and you know, the industry has come along, what happens is, you need to bring those systems together, you need to modernize your IT, you need to be able to just, you know, take in the cloud services, to take the applications come across, but the real reason you need it is because you want to impact the business, you know, so kind of what happens is like, every business in the world, every, is being disrupted right, and if you take a look, it has a digital disruptor going on. If you're in retail, then, you know, you're a brick and mortar, you know, traditionally a brick and mortar store kind of company, and then you have an online retailer that's kind of starting to eat your lunch, right, if you're in banking, you have the digital disruption like every, manufacturing is starting to get interesting and you know, what you're doing in energy. So all of this has kind of disruption angles, but really the key is that, IT holds the keys. So, IT can sit there and keep its old infrastructure and say, I have all this responsibility, I'm running this machinery, I have this customer database, or you can modernize, right? And so you can either hold your business back, or you can modernize, make it programmable and then suddenly allow cloud native, public, private cloud, deploy new applications and services and suddenly become an innovative platform for the company, then you can solve business problems and make that real, and we're actually seeing that's becoming real. (laughs) >> Well and you're seeing it right in front of us. So a big challenge there of what you just mentioned, is just having the skills to be able to do that but the appetite of this audience to absorb that knowledge is very very high, so for example, we've been here all week watching, essentially Cisco users, engineers, absorb this new content to learn how to basically program infrastructure. >> That's right, and it's not Cisco employees, it's the community, it's the world of like, Cisco-certified engineers like, people who are doing networking and IT for companies and partners around the world. >> And so, what do they have to go through to get from, you know, where they were, not modernized to modernized? >> Yeah, and actually, and that's a good way 'cause when we look back to five years ago, it was a question, like we knew the technology was going to become programmable and the question is, are these network guys, you know, are these IT guys everywhere are they going to stay in the old world are they really going to be the ones that can work in the new world, or are we going to hire a bunch of new software guys who just know it, are cloud native, they get it all, to do it all. Well, it doesn't work that way because to work in oil and gas, you need some expertise in that and those guys know about it, to work in, you know, retail and banking, and all of these, there's some industry knowledge that you need to have. But then you need to pick up that software skill and five years ago, we didn't know if they would make that transition, but we created DevNet to give them the tools within their language and kind of, you know if they do and what we found is that, they're making the jump. And you see it here with everyone behind us, in front of us, like they are learning. >> Your community said we're all in. Well I'm interested in, we've seen other large organizations infrastructure companies try to attract developers like this, I'm wondering is it because of the network, is it because of Cisco? Are there some other ingredients that you could buy, is it the certified engineers who have this appetite? Why is it that Cisco has been so successful, and I can name a number of other companies that have tried and failed, some of them even owned clouds, and have really not been able to get traction with developers, why Cisco? >> Well I mean, I think we've been fortunate in many ways, as we've been building it out but I think part of it, you know like the way any company would have to go about you know, kind of taking on programmability, dev-ops, you know, these types of models, is tough, and it's, there's not one formula for how you do it, but in our case, it was that Cisco had a very loyal community. Or we have, and we appreciate that very loyal community 'cause they are out there, workin' the gear, building the networks like, running train stations, transportation systems you know, running all around the world, and so, and they've had to invest a lot into that knowledge. Now we then, gave them the tools to learn, we said, here's coding 101, here's your APIs, here's how to learn about it, and your first API call will be get network devices. Here's how you automate your infrastructure, here's how you do your things, and because we put it in, they're grabbing on and they're doing it and you know, so, it was kind of having that base community and being respectful of it and yet, bringing them along, pushing them. Like we don't say keep doing things the old way yes, learn software, and we're not going to water down how you have to learn software. Like you're going to get in there, you're going to use Rest APIs, you're going to use Postman, you're going to use Git, and we have that kind of like first track to just get 'em using those tools. And we also don't take an elitist culture like we're very welcoming of it, and respectful of what they've done and like, just teach 'em and let 'em go. And the thing is like, once you do it, like once you spend your time and you go oh, okay, so you get the code from GitHub, I got it, now I see all this other stuff. Now I made my Rest API call and I've used Postman. Oh, I get it, it's a tool. Just, once you've done just that, you are a different person. >> And then it's business impact. >> Then it's business, yeah no and like then you're also able to experiment, like you suddenly see a bigger world. 'Cause you've been responsible for this one thing, but now you see the bigger world and you think differently, and then it's business impact, because then you're like okay, how do I modernize my infrastructure? How can I just automate this task that I do every day? I'm like, I don't want to do that anymore, I want to automate it, let me do this. And once you get that mindset, then you're doing more, and then you're saying wait, now can I install applications on this, boy, my network and my infrastructure can gives lots of business insights. So I can start to get information about what applications are being called, what are being used, you know, when you have retail operations you can say, oh, what's happening in this store versus that store? When you have a transportation system, where are we most busy? When you're doing banking, where is like, are you having mobile transactions or in-store transactions? There's all this stuff you learn and then suddenly, you can, you know, really create the applications that-- >> So they get the bug, they get inspired they stand up some quick sandbox with some value and go wow-- >> Or they use our DevNet Sandbox so that they can start stuff and get experi-- >> It's a cloud kind of mindset of standing something up and saying look at it, wow, I can do this, I can be more contributing to the organization. Talk about the modernization, I want to get kind of the next step for you 'cause the next level for you is what? Because if this continues, you're going to start to see enterprises saying oh, I can play in the cloud, I can use microservices. >> Yes. >> I can tap into that agility and scale of the cloud, and leverage my resources and my investment I have now to compete, you just mentioned that. How is that going to work, take us through that. >> Yeah and there's more, in addition to that, is also, I can also leverage the ecosystem, right? 'Cause you're used to doing everything yourself, but you're not going to win by doing everything yourself, even if you made everything modern, right? You still need to use the ecosystem as well. But you know, but then at that stage what you can do and actually we're seeing this as, like our developers are not only the infrastructure folks, but now, all of the sudden our ISVs, app developers, who are out there writing apps, are able to actually put stuff into the infrastructure, so we actually had some IoT announcements this week, where we have these industrial routers that are coming out, and you can take an industrial router and put it into a police car and because a police car has a dashboard camera, it has a WiFi system, it has on-board computer, tablets, like all of this stuff, the officer has stuff, that's a mobile office. And it has a gateway in it. Well now, the gateway that we put in there does app hosting, it can host containerized applications. So then if you take a look at it, all the police cars that are moving around are basically hosting containerized apps, you have this kind of system, and Cisco makes that. >> In a moveable edge. >> And then we have the gateway manager that does it, and if you take a look at what does the gateway manager do it has to manage all of those devices, you know, and then it can also deploy applications. So we have an ability to now manage, we also have an ability to deploy containers, pull back containers, and then this also works in manufacturing, it works in utility, so you have a substation, you have these industrial routers out there that can host apps, you know, then all of a sudden edge computing becomes real. But what this brings together is that now, you can actually get ISVs who can actually now say, hey I'm an app developer, I wanted to write an app, I have one that could be used in manufacturing. I could never do it before, but oh, there's this platform, now I can do it, and I don't have to start installing routers, like a Cisco partner will do it for a customer, and I can just drop my app in and it's, we're actually seeing that now-- >> So basically what's happening, the nirvana is first of all, intelligent edge is actually possible. >> Yes. >> With having the power at the edge with APIs, but for the ISVs, they might have the domain expertise at saying, hey I'm an expert on police, fire, public safety, vertical. >> Yes. >> But, I could build the best app, but I don't need to do all this other stuff. >> Yes. >> So I can focus all my attention on this. >> Yes. >> And their bottleneck was having that kind of compute and or Edge device. >> Yes. >> Is that what you're kind of getting at? >> Yeah, and there's, exactly it was because you know, I mean an app developer is awesome at writing apps. They don't want to get into the business of deploying networks and like even managing and operating how that is, but there's a whole like kind of Cisco ecosystem that does that. Like we have a lot of people who will love to operationalize that system, deploy that, you know, kind of maintain it. Then there's IT and OT operators who are running that stuff, but that app developer can write their app drop it into there, and then all of that can be taken care of. And we actually have two ISVs here with us, one in manufacturing, one in utilities, who are, you know, DevNet ISV partners, they've written applications and they actually have real stories about this, and kind of what they had to say is, like in the manufacturing example, is okay, so they write, they have this innovation, I wrote this cool app for manufacturing, right? So there's something that it does, it's building it, you know, they've gotten expertise in that, and then, as they've been, they're doing something innovative, they actually need the end customer, who does, the manufacturer, to use it, and adopt a new technology. Well, hey, you know, I'm running my stuff, why should I use that, how would I? So they actually work with a systems integrator, like a channel partner that actually will customize the solution. But even that person may not have thought about edge computing, what can you do, what's this crazy idea you have, but now they've actually gotten trained up, they're getting trained up on our IoT technologies, they're getting trained up on how to operationalize it, and this guy just writes his app, he actually points them to the DevNet Sandbox to learn about it, so he's like, no let me show you how this Edge processing thing works, go use the DevNet Sandbox, you can spin up your instance, you can see it working, oh look there's these APIs, let me show you. And it turns out they're using the Sandbox to actually train the partners and the end customer about what this model is like. And then, these guys are adopting it, and they're getting paying customers through this. >> Did you start hunting for ISVs, did they find you, how did that all transpire? >> It kind of happens in all different ways. (laughter) >> So yes. >> Yeah yeah, it happens in all different ways, and basically, in some cases like we actually sometimes have innovation centers and then you have you know, kind of as you know, the start-up that's trying to figure out how to get their stuff seen, they show up, we look for it. In our case in Italy, with the manufacturing company, then what happened was, the government was actually investing and the government was actually giving tax subsidies for manufacturing plants to modernize. And so, what they were doing was actually giving an incentive and then looking for these types of partners, so we actually teamed up with our country teams to find some of these and they have a great product. And then we started, you know, working with them. They actually already had an appreciation for Cisco because they, you know, in their country, they did computer science in college, they might've done some networking with the Cisco Networking Academy, so they knew about it, but finally, it came that they could actually bring this ecosystem together. >> Susie, congratulations on all your success, been great to be part of it in our way, but you and your team have done an amazing job, great feedback on Twitter on the swag got the-- (laughter) Swag bag's gettin' a lot of attention, which is always a key important thing. But in general, super important initiative, share some insight into how this has changed Cisco's executive view of the world because, you know, the cloud had horizontal scalability, but Cisco had it too. And now the new positioning, the new branding that Karen Walker and her team are putting out, the bridge to tomorrow, the future, is about almost a horizontally scalable Cisco. It's everywhere now so-- >> Yeah the bridge to possible, yeah. >> Bridge to possible, yes. >> Yeah well I mean, really what happens is, you know, there was a time when you're like, I'm going to buy my security, I'm going to buy my networking, I'm going to buy my data center, but really more and more people just want an infrastructure that works, right? An infrastructure that's capable that can allow you to innovate, and really what happens, when you think about how do you put all of these systems together, 'cause they're still individual, and they need to be individual in best in class products, well the best way to put 'em together is with APIs. (laughs) So, it's not that you need to architect them all into one big product, it's actually better to have best in class, clearly define the APIs, and then allow, as kind of modularity and to build it out. So, really we've had tremendous support from Chuck Robbins, our CEO, and he's understood this vision and he's been helping, kind of, you know, like DevNet is a start-up itself, like he's been helping us navigate the waters to really make it happen and as we moved and as he's evolved the organization, we've actually started to get more and more support from our executives and we're working across the team, so everything that we do is together with all the teams. And now what we're doing is we're co-launching products. Every time we launch a new product, we launch a new product with the product offer and the developer offer. >> Yeah. >> So, you know, here we've launched the new IoT products. >> With APIs. >> And, with APIs, and IOX and App-posting capabilities and we launched them together with a new DevNet IoT developer center. At developer.cisco.com/iot, and this is actually, if you take a look at the last say half year or year, our products have been launching, you'll see, oh here's the new DNA Center, and here's the new DevNet developer center. You know, then we can say, here's the new kind of ACI, and here's the new ACI developer center. Here's the new Meraki feature, here's the new ACI-- >> And it's no secret that DNA Center has over 600 people engineers in there. >> Yeah (laughs) >> That public information might not be-- >> You know, but we've actually gotten in the mode in the understanding of you know, every product should have a developer offer because it's about the ecosystem, and we're getting tremendous support now. >> Yeah a lot of people ask me about Amazon Web Services 'cause we're so close, we cover them deeply. They always ask me, hey John, why is that, why is Amazon so successful I go, well they got a great management team, they've got a great business model, but it was built on APIs first. It was a web service framework. You guys have been very smart by betting on the API because that's where the growth is, so it's not Amazon being the cloud, it's the fact that they built building blocks with APIs, that grew. >> Yes. >> And so I think what you've got here, that's lightening in the bottle is, having an API strategy creates more connections, connections create more fabric, and then there's more data, it's just, it's a great growth vehicle. >> Absolutely. >> So, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> So is that your market place, do you have a market place so it's just, I guess SDKs and APIs and now that you have ISVs comin' in, is that sort of in the plan? >> We do, no we do actually so, so yeah so basically, when you're in this world, then you have your device, you know, it's your phone, and then you have apps that you download and you get it from an app store. But when we're talking about, you know, the types of solutions we're talking about, there is infrastructure, there is infrastructure for you know, again, utilities companies, for police stations, for retail stores, and then, you have ISV applications that can help in each of those domains. There's oftentimes a systems integrator that's putting something together for a customer. And so now kind of the app store for this type of thing actually involves, you know, our infrastructure products together with kind of, and infrastructure, and third-party ones, you know, ISV software that can be customized and have innovation in different ways together with that system integrator and we're training them all, people across that, but we actually have something called DevNet Exchange. And what we've done is there's actually two parts, there's Code Exchange, which is basically, pointers out to you know, source code that's out in GitHub, so we're just going out to code repos that are actually helping people get started with different products. But in addition, we have Ecosystem Exchange, which actually lists the ISV solutions that can be used as well as the system's integrators who can actually deliver solutions in these different domains, so you know, DevNet Ecosystem Exchange is the place where we actually do list the ISVs with the SIs you know, with the different platforms so, that's the app store for a programmable infrastructure. >> Susie, congratulations again, thank you so much for including us in your DevNet Zone with theCUBE here for three days. >> Thank you for coming to us and for really helping us tell the story. >> It' a great story to tell and it's kickin' butt and takin' names-- (laughter) Susie Wee, Senior Vice President and CTO of DevNet, makin' it happen just the beginning, scratching the surface of the explosion of API-based economies, around the network, the network value, and certainly cloud and IoT. Of course, we're bringing you the edge of the network here with theCUBE, in Barcelona, we'll be back with more live coverage day two, after this short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE covering Cisco Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live Europe 2019. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, with Stu Miniman and Dave Alonte also here doing interviews. Our next guests, two guests from the DNA center platform, Cisco, the agent platform team, Prakash Rajamani, director of product management, Cisco and Ronnie Ray, vice president of product management, Cisco, the DNA center platform growing 70% of the use cases, software distractions, API automation. Congratulations. Great success. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks John. >> Big Fan of the DNA center. You guys have made great progress. Take a step through us. The positioning, how things are rolling, what's some of the feedback? Where's the DNA center platform at right now for Cisco? >> Yup. >> So DNA center was launched about 80 months back and it's probably one of the products in Cisco that has completely started to transform how we do the selling motions. So this is one of the key drivers of Cisco moving into light sensing mode switch, more software like. Now as part of how we do management Typically and traditionally it has been very much a manual driven process there's some reporting but it is a lot of expert light capabilities that you need to have to do management of the infrastructure then it's kind of moving that access to where you can now do machine-lift management. Of course it doesn't solve all the use cases absolutely as you mentioned, more than 70% but there's a whole host of new capabilities that you have to put on top and that's where developers come in because this is a platform that's built for developers to be able to extend it's capabilities to really look at solving problems for our customers. >> I think you know, after listening to all the announcements in temp based networking, ACI anywhere, hyperflex anywhere, data at the center of the value, data centered as you guys say, it's clever but I think it highlights what you guys are doing because you're talking about programmability of the network as two worlds collide actually three worlds collide, Cloud, On Premises and Edge into one network, you have a network, the network is key it's getting bigger, to cross domains is a big theme here, these are hard problems that are being solved by Cisco more complex cause there's more moving parts but it still has to operate as one network. This is essentially highlights the success of the DNA platform, am I kind of getting it right or is that kind of in line with how you guys see it? >> Sure, I mean I think Cisco DNA centered I mean if you look at the evolution we started in the network domain. You're absolutely right we have kind of extended to the brand change, there's nine integrations that are happening with the data center integrations, happening with the cloud, so yeah absolutely looking at the fabric that we launched about 18 months back now extending and stretching to all of those domains and wherever users connect and wherever users go to and that's of Cisco data center but think about that as we kind of do that, yes there is a change that also required not just in the product but also in the IT process because earlier companies had silos of things and now those silos will be forced to work together and CI was one that our network folks that support us because really they want to see cross domain bring power to the organizations but we are the enabler of making that happen. >> No brainer. >> Prakash, I'd love for you to take us inside ya know, we love looking at the product management piece here because you've had a lot of constituencies. You've got the internal product teams that all I'm sure want to get in and mature and expand their used cases. You've got all your partners that are building the platform. You've got the customers asking for feedback You've got a - ya know, a lot of options to choose from which is a good thing but you've obviously got limited resources. So take us inside that, what you've learned over the last year and how you helped prioritize and move this product forward so fast over the last 18 months. >> So one of the main things we did when we started with Data Center is to start thinking and having the vision to get a data center platform. With that in mind, every feature, every capability that we built in the product was built API first before we built a UI around it. Right? That has helped us immensely in the last couple releases we've started delivering features as APIs even before it had a face to it, and I think that has helped us prioritize and make sure that we are able to meet the demands going demands of customer or partner we had a customer who was like "I need this feature now" and we were hands strapped, we had a big back log, we couldn't get things done but the fact that we were able to get the APIs we were able to work with the customer and say "Hey here you can wire these three APIs and you can get what you're looking for" and he was like "Wow, that's so simple and I'm on my own" he was happy, we are happy we are able to manage our back log better. So I think the main strategy for us that's working is going API first on a pragmatic basis. This is us moving completely software driven as Ronnie was highlighting earlier in that relevant process that is helping us get there and that's part of it >> Well, it's customers a lot I mean they get to roll their own if you will without having be customized, it's still standardized with the APIs >> That's right, right? I mean the benefit is as you start getting into the 30% used case where "Hey, what's coming out of the box is not meeting exactly what I do today" we provide very grander APIs to very business driven, simplified interned APIs. The grander APIs allows the customer who wants to say I want A, B and then D and E to move forward compared to intern based API who is using the pride in the simplicity in driving that formula. >> Yeah, Ronnie I'm wondering if we can up level for a second here cause feedback I've gotten over the last year. Ya know, a year ago we heard Cisco is moving heavily towards software. When I talked to a lot of the partners both technology partners and channel partners they said this had a ripple effect inside Cisco it's not so much okay here's the skews and here's the new boards and here's the products but I need to sell a solution and therefore that's platforms that I have to have and therefore everything needs to work together and I have to think API first and like it does significant changes to how Cisco is, the joke I used to have is Cisco is like 100 companies and some people were like "Well, maybe it's 100, maybe it's 200." But today it's now something like platform is a unifying place, is that what is your solution set part of that drive and is that something you're seeing more broadly inside Cisco? >> Certainly, I think you're absolutely right that is does have a unifying effect if I might put it that way. >> Yeah Right? Because there's so many different capabilities that existed in different tools that are coalescing on Cisco data central and which is becoming part of the platform which is now customizable by our entire development community but think how fast that happens in a now within the sales force, within Cisco as a company there is no more cross domain knowledge that'll be required because now it operates different parts it can tune different things, that also means that is supposed to change the business model because going into software and kind of bringing it together and is increasing Cisco is obviously ya know foyering into softer subscriptions, this is a key product that's kind of supporting that, so in many ways it's not just the technology, it's not just APIs but also as a business process that's changing Cisco just like it'll change customers. >> One of the things we're seeing is a lot of design thinking principles this year. Love the new positioning bridged to the future bridged to tomorrow, wherever it goes but it's clean. Connecting the worlds are connecting together through the network get that. What has been some of the challenges and opportunities you guys are seeing around simplicity? Love this API, exposing API allows for customization, I love the broader intent based templates are great but it's hard to make things simple. Can you just elaborate on how you guys are thinking about the product short, medium, long term in terms of continuing to work the back log, I'm sure the feature list is growing like crazy but you got a challenge to make it simpler. >> Absolutely >> How hard is it? What does it entail? Share some insight there. >> So lets take the question in two parts and Prakash can talk to the product simplicity because that is a certainly something that we've got to manage very very carefully but think about also when simple doesn't just mean usable product, it also means a product that can fit into the ecosystem and make the process simpler. So there's a lot of deeper understanding that we are developing through the learning as we work with customers and how do we embed how do we make customers life easier how do we make the process easier and then after goal is how do we make their operational expenses lower? Because we want them to go faster, we want them to go faster at a lower cost and so there's a certainly both learning and investment that's happening there and the product side Prakash. >> On the product side it's about how we used to build to how we are building right now the way we used to do was a new feature comes in it goes to the device layer first the device team builds it puts CLI around it ships it off, sends it to the management team and the management team says "Oh, I got to support this feature" They go, they wrap a UI around it to support the feature, ships. Now we have flipped it turn completely around we start with like what is a customer's work field? What do they need to do and how can we do it in the minimal steps? Once we identify that we push that down to saying "Here is what the user interface looks like here are the three steps that they need to do. That trickles down to saying what we need as an APA on the device layer to develop the feature so we've gone down from going a bottom up way to build a product to a top down, customer driven, used case driven way to build a product. That means we are addressing the customer head on from a simplicity perspective and that's basically what has made us successful in moving the ball forward on this one. >> What has been some of the customer feedback? Can you share some anecdotes around some of the early customers you started rolling this out and what are the ones receiving on the receiving end today saying? >> So when you see from a simplicity feedback perspective I have a large retail store rolling out like maybe 60 APs in a single store over night and they've gone from having that be done over three nights to one person spending 20 minutes putting all the APs up going to the tool and the tool recognizing everything that's come up and deployed. So it's a night and day transformation on how it used to be to how it is right now. So the simplicity >> Sounds like the old way was >> Sounds like you saved a night in a day >> Manually configure, go put a wireless ping to it >> Yep, the old way was yeah you go you plugged the AP, you come back you look at the tool, the AP is there >> Check the channel, stuff is there. >> Map it to the right controller, do all the mappings Now you don't have to do anything just plug the APs and upload preloaded to say these APs are going to the store. The tool takes care of the rest of the stuff that's how simple it is become >> It's almost like old way new way What why are we doing that? And it's good when they have consistent environments with policies there's definitely more expansion. I get that, what about other used cases? Wireless is one hot one, I could see that branch off it's deployments what are some of the popular used cases that you're seeing in the customer base I know you got a broad base but what are the ones what are the patterns that are emerging out of this? >> So let me start another then have Ronnie chime in on the used cases he's seen. Some of the ones that are probably very transformational is that on the policy based used case, we have companies turning around and creating small subdivisions within their organizations. We have a large government in Yasha who is deploying that, they have 20 divisions. Earlier to do that it's extremely complex. They have to go in, they have to understand what division, who is using on which device, which ports mapped to them, just planning that it says it's so huge. For the new policy different approach that we have going, they don't have to know about anything they just need to know Prakash works for division A, Ronnie works for division B assign me to respective divisions, as I come in my policy gets right over to the network. I deploy the network as is, as I speak that is basically the level of simplicity that has changed and that all ties back to doing your network from a policy perspective not a networking from a feature perspective. >> Got it, Ronnie any comments on used case on your end? >> Yeah absolutely so think about we've talked about assurance we launched segmentation that's doing very very well of course even with when all of the public acknowledgement that goes with it but an interesting used case that's come up which is in fact in the keynote this week at Cisco live is about IUT extensions. So Data seto owa is extending to the factory floor, the production equipment and transportation and these are tremendous neo opportunities that are both for companies to kind of look at IT and OT and how this comes together, again going back to the unification simplification theme that do many more things at the same time they try to make it in a rationally much more operable. >> Okay so lot of progress in 18 months give us the road map going forward. We're at the beginning of 2019 what you'll be looking for, can a high level show show us what we should expect to see down the road >> K so from a road map perspective it's in a think about that we've been very focused on getting the customer value. Now the lens is kind of shifting to how do we deal with large enterprise capabilities? So both the hardening of the system itself, how do we look at, for example multiple clusters opening up in diverse locations will give us geo diversity and support there from that perspective and high availability. So these are enterprise class features every large customer requires it and as they move from smaller deployments to full scale deployments that is something that the labs look to need >> Yeah, Prakash when I heard you talking about things I need to think a little bit differently. It's like okay I'm used to going into the deploy and it's going to take me three days wait how do I learn about the fact that I can do it now in a couple of hours? What kind of training or retraining or education is that part of what you're doing in your team or where does that happen? >> It's part of the education, part of the videos we double up and publish to customers so that they don't think about this as I'm going to approach my same 20 steps and think that I'm going do that through data center except that I'm going to do that through a user interface. The first thing that we tell them is like "You're going to do 20" You're going to do two. Right? So the immediate feedback is oh does it address everything I want to do? And so that's the 70% used case more would rather say yes it addresses only thing is we have simplified it, we have compressed it so you don't have to go and go through all these 20 steps but instead get it done in two, so the watts have helped some of the trainings that you have done has helped even talking to from a sales process the customer to know "Hey this is what I'm embracing" so when they come in they don't come in with I'm going to run my network the same way but no no I'm going to run it differently has helped us immensely to make the transition >> Well guys, congratulations on a great successful product, big fan I love that thing, I think it's going to be the future there's a lot more head room there that's cause we're looking at automations the devnet zone we're in is showing massive growth. The appetite for automation the appetite for configuration and scale and managing the complexity is a sweet spot I think that you guys had a nice formally hear looking forward to it. Final question for these guys Ronnie and Prakash are going to both answer it. Say something about DNA center platform that people should pay attention to that they might not hear in the mainstream chatter that's important that they should maybe want to kick the tires or understand it further, an area that they should know about that they might not hear about or they should know about what's the most important feature. Share some, share some insight. >> So again just looking at a little bit into the future of Cisco data center platform, right now we're kind of talking of APIs, there's capability that's coming in the future that will also deal with work flows and the work flows will be built on something which is machine built so there will be a lot of analytics in fact in a data center not only does automation but also extends data analytics so a lot of cool stuff that'll come there and again we'll talk about it more as we get to the next Cisco live. >> Prakash anything? >> I'm going to go a little more ground level people tend to talk about simplicity, talk about how we can do things way differently with data center and people tend to forget that we have not forgotten the network engineer who has been managing the network. We have APIs for you to do the same things you've done all along, create articles create re-lance, do some of the basic networking stuff so that it's not about this just as simple we also have the more detailed breakdown of the API so that you can still continue to know the nuts and the bolts and other things as well as much as the simple stuff so it's the >> It's an empowering all personas in the network from network engineer low level getting down and dirty to large scale automations, whatever the use case is you got the empowerment. >> Yep that's basically what I would like to >> That's awesome, well congratulations Again big fan, DNA center takeover here in the Devnet zone I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman Cube coverage day two of three days stay with us for more after this short break. (electronic music plays)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're live here in Barcelona, Spain, for Cisco Live! Europe 2019 Cube coverage. Three days, we're in day two of three days of coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host, with Stu Miniman as well as Dave Vellante's been on interview. Our next guest, Saurav Prasad, Principal Engineer and Technical Marketing at Cisco as part of the Cisco DNA Center Platform. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> So you guys are having a DNA take, and we're in the DevNet zone all week. This has been a real revitalization within Cisco DevNet, Cloud Native, Cisco coming together. The DNA center has been a part of this from day one. >> Yes. >> What is the DNA center these days, what's happening? >> Okay, so, let me take you a bit back in time, right. So, back in October 2017 is when we first launched the Cisco DNA center. Since then we have added a lot more application, work flows in the DNA center. And last year in May or June of last year, 2018, is when we launched the DNA Center Platform. And this protocol, FCS, some time during October of 2018. So, we now have the DNA Center Platform, which essentially is an open platform which lets our developers, our partners, our ISVs build applications on top of DNA Center which will let them talk to the network. And the way they do it is using our APIs, our SDKs, and then we have a lot of other modules, which help them interact with the network via the DNA Center. Now the benefit of this is not really with respect to APIs or SDKs, it's more about we give them a very easy way to talk to the network. Instead of talking to 10,000 network devices, they talk to one DNA Center. So, that's the, you know, idea behind the DNA Center Platform. >> Well why not expand a little bit when we've been talking about platforms in general for many years now, and it's one thing to say you're a platform, but the proof is, who's actually building on it. What can they do on it? So, you've got the platform, FCS, first customer ship, it's available, it's launching. What can you tell us about, you know, real customers, what they're doing, give us a little bit of the spectrum as to what we see out there. >> That's right. So before we FCS'ed our platform in October, we actually relied on early field trials for almost three to four months. And in then in that time we were actually working with our 15 top partners. And this was across the world, right. So they were actually using the platform to build some integrations from their side which was beneficial for them, right, so these are partners like Dimension Data, Accenture, WWT, and I'm just naming a few of them. These are all listed on our DNA center portal, on DevNet. But, then, we were working them and we were actually looking for feedback on whether it was useful and we found that it was really, really useful for them to build some good applications, good work flows, good integrations, and that helps them drive their own business with their customers. >> So, what's the mission of the DNA center? What is the purpose? Why do you guys exist? >> So, the DNA center is built to provide you intent based networking. So instead of you having to go to each and every network device and provision things on the network devices, you now go to the DNA center and say "Here is my intent!" An example for an intent would be, "I want to prioritize Cisco job or traffic". It should be high priority. Now that means there is a lot of network devices that I need to provision quality of service. I need to make sure I have the right cue instructors in place. And guess what, we have so many devices, each one of them might have some different CLIs, different architectures, we now give them one single place where you provide the intent and not worry about the device level details. And I am just giving you one example. There could be a lot more where, for example I'm getting the telemetry back from a network. Each and every device is saying I am having some issues but they might all be the same issue here. What DNA center does is takes all of those issue provides you an insight into what really is happening in the network, so that's our idea of DNA Center. >> Saurav, come on, who doesn't want to use this? Everyone who's gone out and provisioned a device knows how much a hassle it is. I mean think about the manual labor involved. Just going out and doing all of this stuff so it's an action center, basically. You take action, one spot, window into the network policy, whatever it takes. It's driven by, and now applications can come in as well. Am I getting that right. >> That's right. So the greatest work says, again this is what we do with platform is, different partners, different customers, might have some different workflows. So within the DNA center we have decided, here is how the workflow should look like. So if I want to do an upgrade of a network device, here are the steps I might follow. But when you use the API's, you can almost define your own workflows. So this allows you the flexibility of building your own workflows. That's one example. Other is, say for example, I need some feedback from a different system, not the network maybe some other IT system. I need to get some information from them and based on that, I need to configure something on the network. You cannot do that automatically. There has to be an application in between which talks to both of these systems, one of them being the Cisco DNA Center. Now this allows you to do that. If I have the API's, if I have the event framework, I can do all of that. That's the benefit of using these. >> What's the alternative if someone doesn't use the DNA Center 'cause this is a no brainer. You've got, I get the device piece, that's just a nice window. Now the platform allows applications to integrate and be programmable with the network. Why wouldn't someone use this, it's a no brainer. >> If you don't use this, what you do is you go to each of your thousand network devices talk to each one of them and take care of all of the device level details and do it. It's doable, people have been doing it for years now but now we are making it slightly more easier to make it faster. >> Well, it comes to, we have been talking for years the need for scale and if you don't have good automation if you don't have tools to be able to help you there, you're not going to be able to reach the scale that you need for your business, explain why this is important. >> For example, what we are seeing is and we have been talking about digital networks for some time now. What really is a digital network, that's a key point to understand here. What we are seeing is there was a time 10 years back when you had to roll out a new service network admins, network architects had six months to provision that. Nowadays they don't have that. >> Six hours >> They probably have six hours, that's right. In order for you to do all of that so fast, you really cannot go into each device and talk about it. You have to abstract some of that and that's what the DNA Center provides and using our API's we are now adding a new level on top of it, which really makes it much more easier for you to scale. Again, not just scale, also integrate with other IDSM systems, other IBM systems, other reporting systems. So this is all happening automatically, instead of you having to manually touch each of these systems. >> Talk about the plug and play process. How does that fit in with DNA Center, compatible, not compatible? >> So plug and play is an application or workflow within DNA Cneter. When I look at plug and play, every network device in Cisco has a plug and play agent running. I'm going to get into a bit of a technical detail here, but they have a plug and play agent running and so when this device comes up, say for day zero onboarding, you open up the box, take out the device power it up, the agent fires up. What it looks for is the plug and play server. The Cisco DNA center is the Plug and Play server. So now I am allowing you to onboard new devices. You could roll out a new site with 25 network devices, 100 network devices in a matter of minutes. >> So all of the configuration gets pushed down from the DNA Center? >> Exactly! So you build your own profile in DNA Center and attach the templates or the configurations. You say here is a serial number and when this device comes in, I push in all the configuration, I provision a new software image on it, so your device or your site is up and running. >> Great for campus, great for remote sites. >> Exactly, so you really don't have to send a network admin on every remote site to do that. >> Will it take policy so if I set policy up in the DNA Center, will it automatically take that down through? >> Yes, yes, yeah. Once a device is onboarded, it gets added to the Cisco DNA Center and once I do that, now I can throw in policies any kind of provisions. >> I don't mean to get in the weeds, sorry Stu, go ahead. >> What's great about a platform, you've talked about some of the partners. My understanding, not just some of the integrated partners like WWT that you mentioned but even some of the technology partners like IBM have services that plug into this environment. We've seen in platforms, where you can, one of the other dimensions is the customers and what are they asking for and how are there feedback there. Is there anything in the DNA Center platform that if one customer is asking for something that more customers are going to get value of that. I think back to the day of Salesforce. When Salesforce gets something, we add a new feature and that's something that can roll out, we can learn from all the customers, you get that fly wheel of development in a platform. >> What we are doing here is we are actually working very closely with Cisco DevNet on that. They have a partner ecosystem exchange. What's happening is a lot of this channeled partners technology partners, ISV's, when they build something they go into the ecosystem exchange and they can post it there. So its not just useful for them, there are other partners, other customers that can use it. They have a data repository of all the core, sample core and again, not everybody shares it to the extent what we would like because there's a lot of intellectual property which they have built and they might want to monetize on it but that is the whole idea behind the ecosystem exchange where I am allowing partners to share what they have built and this could be used by others. >> Saurav, talk about the success, what's the uptake? It must be well received, obviously we see a lot of action her in the DevNet zone. Give us some color commentary on what the momentum has been, who's using it, how? >> From our side, I'm from the business unit which is actually building this product. The way we judge whether this product is getting traction is what is the amount of feature requests I am getting? So, we are getting a ton of feature requests with respect to new API's that we want to expose. With respect to new documentation that we have to build. I mean, what we don't want is we release a product and we got no feedback. >> So what's the fee for requests? Backlog big or what's going on? >> Oh yeah, so for example when we launched we had a limited set of API's available. Now since then, with every release, now we have a release almost every month, where we are adding newer API's and newer functionality, we are actually adding more and more API's and again there is much more to add but that's the process and-- >> Just keep jamming and taking it in, backlog it, get it out there, iterating quickly? >> Exactly, and again, the one point to add here is we are not really just exposing an API, we are exposing an intent API so it's got slightly different. So instead of, say for example, I want to provision a wireless network, that is probably a 10 step process even within the DNA Center. What we want to give you is a single API which will do all of that and all of that heavy lifting will be done by the Cisco DNA Center platform. So, we will internally call the 10 separate API's. So for a developer who is building this, he or she may not be a network expert, they might not be an expert into how the network works so all they have to do is call one single API and all of the details or all the heavy lifting will be done by the platform, so they don't really have to worry about some of those details. >> So this is where the automation will get done on behalf of the customer. They'll come in, deploy DNA Center understand what's going on and that's where they do all of their work. Figure out what to do, get it done there. What's been the biggest use case so far? >> So, a lot of use cases. Like, we have a partner who is actually building a mobile app so we have a DNA Center which is sitting on prem in their own data center, they can go and look at the browser, open up the Cisco DNA Center console and look at the various workflows or see what's happening in the network. They might see there is a router which has crashed. Or an application which is having some application performance issue but what we want to see, is also, send us even send remotely and now their network admins could be walking in a grocery store, for example and the mobile, that alert shows up. Guess what, that is application is having an issue lets do the debugging so we will provide you all of that details within our API's, which can then show up in the application externally. >> So DNA Center platform has a takeover going on in the DevNet zone. We see classrooms, we've seen labs, give us a little bit of the flavor of the solutions for the next hour as well as at the show in general. >> In general here at the Cisco DevNet zone, we have a Cisco DNA Center takeover going on right now. We have workshops, we have sandbox labs, we have learning labs. You can go to any one of them and try it out. That is not only for this hour, that is there for throughout the show, but for this hour, we have a tech talk going on from one of our distinguished sales engineers Adam Rattford, he is talking all about DNA Center Platform in deep dive, showing live examples. We have some demo systems up and running here where you can actually see how we are able to generate events, how we are able to send events to external systems, so all of that is going on. Plus, we have all of our experts. A lot of our experts from the engineering team are here on the show right now on the show floor so if there are any questions around DNA Center Platform they will be more than willing to help. >> The brain trust is here. >> My understanding, I mean, when I have talked to people the DevNet group has labs running all the time. And that's what's great, I have talked to customers that say, I need to be able to play with this and here's something that's online, it's in the cloud I just do with it whenever so. >> Just to add to that, of course for our customers, our partners, our developers who want to try this out, they are more than welcome to come and join us in the Cisco DevNet zone here. Even if you are not at Cisco live, these sandbox lives are live online and we have I think around five or six of them and we are adding more to it. You can go anytime, try our API's on that sandbox. You don't really need to have your own environment. Now of course when you go production with it you will but just for trying out or building some applications, you can do it on the sandbox. >> Saurav, thanks so much for taking the time sharing some technical insight, went a little bit deep on the plug and play but appreciate your time coming on theCUBE, thanks for coming on and congratulations. DNA Center, the Cisco DNA Center Platform, the official name, really an oasis, a place to go in and configure the networks no brainer as far as I am concerned, check it out. theCUBE's bringing you the DNA of the show here, which is all the action, coverage, I'm John Furrier, Stu Minimin. Stay with us more here live in Barcelona and we will be back after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live! Europe brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, live here, in Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE's coverage of Cisco Live! Europe 2019, I'm John Furrier my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest is Liz Centoni, Senior Vice President, General Manager of the IoT group at Cisco, formerly as part of the engineering team, Cube alumni, great to see you again, thanks for coming on! >> Great to be here, always good to see you guys. >> So you're in the center of a lot of news, IOT, edge of the network, redefining networking on stage, we heard that, talk about your role in the organization of Cisco and the products that you now have and what's goin' on here. >> So I run our IoT Business group. Similar to what we do with EN, data center, all of that, it has the engineering team, product management team, we build products, solutions, that includes hardware, software, silicon, take 'em out to market, really in IoT it's about you know, the technology conversation comes second. It's like, what can you deliver in terms of use case, and business outcomes that comes first. And it's more about what technology can enable that, so the conversations we have with customers are around, how can you really solve my kind of real problems. Everything from, I want to grow my top line, I want to get closer to my customers, because the closer I get to my customers, I know them better, so obviously, I can turn around and grow my top line. And I want to optimize everything from internal process to external process, because just improves my bottom line at the end of the day. >> So a lot of news happening here around your team, but first, talk about redefining networking in context to your part because, edge of the network has always been, what is, you know, edge of the network, now it's extending further, IoT is one of those things that people are looking at from a digitization standpoint, turning on more intelligence, with a factory floor or other areas, how is IoT changing and what is it today? >> So you gave an example of you know, digitizing something like a factory floor. Right, so let's talk about that. So what do customers on the factory floor want to do? They've already automated a number of this factory floors, but what they want to do is get more efficient. They want better EL, they want better quality. They want to bring security all the way down to the plant floor, 'cause the more and more you connect things, the more you've just expanded your threat surface out pretty significantly. So they want to bring security down to the plant floor because these are environments that are not brand new they had brown field equipment they had green field equipment. They want to be able to have control over what device gets on the network with things like device profiling. They want to be able to do things like, create zones so that they can do that with things like network segmentation so when and if an attack does happen, they can contain the attack as much as possible alright? Now, what you need in terms of a factory floor, automation, security, to be able to scale, to have that flexibility, that's no different than what you have in the enterprise already. I mean we've been working with our IT and enterprise customers for years, and you know, they, it's about automation and security, it's about simplicity. Why not extend that out, the talent that IT has, the capability that it has, it really is a connective tissue that you're extending your network from that carpeted space, or your clean space into outside of the office, or into the non-carpeted space so it's perfect in terms of saying, it's about extending the network into the non-traditional space that probably IT doesn't go into today. >> Well right and it's a new constituency, right? So, how are you sort of forging new relationships, new partnerships, what is, describe what that's like, with the operations technology folks. >> I mean at Cisco, we have great partnerships with the IT organization, right? I mean we've got more than 840,000 customers and our sales teams, our product teams do a good job in terms of listening to customers. We're talking more and more to the line of business, we're talking more and more to the operational teams. Because at the end of the day, I want to be candid. You know, going to a manufacturing floor, I've never run a plant floor, right? There are not very many people in the team who can say, I've been a plant manager before. They know their processes, they're concerned about 24/7 operation, hey I want to be in compliance with the fire marshal. Physical safety of my workers. We come in with that IP knowledge, that security knowledge that they need. It's a partnership, I mean people talk about IT and OT convergence, usually, convergence means that, mm, somebody's going to lose their job, this is more and IT and OT partnership. And most of these digitization efforts, usually come in for the CIO level or a chief digitization officer, we've got good relationships there already. The second part is, Cisco's been in this for quite some time our teams already have relationships at the plant level at the grid level, operator level, you know, in the oil and gas area, but we need to build more and more of that. Because building more and more of that is really understanding what business problems are they looking to solve? Then we can bring the technology to it. >> Liz, what's that in the enablement, you mentioned partnership, 'cause that's a good point, 'cause people think, oh, someone wins, someone loses, the partnership is you're enabling, you're bringing new capability into the physical world, you know, from wind farms to whatever. What does the enablement look like, what are some of the things that happen when you guys come into these environments that are being redefined and re-imagined or for the first time? >> Yeah I would say, you know, I'd use what our customer said this morning. And what he said was, IT has the skills that I need alright? They have the IP skills, they have the security skills. These are all the things that I need. I want my guys to focus on kind of business processes. Around things that they know best. And so, we're working with IT as part of what we're putting this extended enterprise, extending Intent-Based Networking to the IoT edge means, IT already knows our tools, our capabilities, we're now saying, we can extend that, let's go out, figure out what those use cases are together, this is why we're working with, not just the IT, we're working with our channel partners as well, who can enable these implementations on IoT implementations work well. Part of this is also a constant, you know, learning from each other. We learned from the operational teams is that, hey you can start a proof of concept really well, but you can't really take it to deployment unless you address things around the complexity, the scale and the security, that's where we can come in and help. >> And you can't just come in and throw your switches and routers over the fence and say, okay, here you go. You have to develop specific solutions for this world right? And can you talk about that a little bit? And tell us what you're doing here? >> Absolutely, so, if you look at the networking, industrial networking portfolio that we have, it's built on the same catalyst, ISR, wireless APs or firewall, but they're more customized for this non-carpeted space, right? You've got to take into consideration that these are not sitting in a controlled environment. So, we test them for temperature, for shock, for vibration, but it's also built on the same software, so we're talking about the same software platform, you get the same automation features, you get the same analytics features, it's managed by DNA center, so, even though we're customizing the hardware for this environment, the software platform that you get, is pretty much the same, so IT can come in and manage both those environments, but IT also needs an understanding of what's the operational team looking to solve for? >> Liz, I want to ask you about the psychology of the buyer in this market. Because OT, they're running stuff that's just turnin' on, put in the lightbulb, make it work, what I got to deploy something? So their kind of expectations might be different, can you share what the expectations are, for the kind of experience that they want to have with that? >> I use utility as a great example. And our customer from Ennogie, I think explained this really well. This is thing that we learned from our customers right? I haven't been in a sub station, I've been in a data center multiple times, but I haven't been in a sub station, so when they're talking about automating sub station, we work with customers, we've been doing this over the last 10 years, we've been working with that Ennogie team for the last two years, they taught us really, how they secure and manage in these environments. You're not going to find a CCIE in this environment. So when you want to send somebody out to like 60,000 sub stations, and you want to check on, hey do I still have VPN connectivity? They're not going to be able to troubleshoot it. What we did is based on the customer's ask, put a green light on their LED that shines green, all the technician does is look at it and says, it's okay. If not, they call back in terms of troubleshooting it. It was just a simple example of where, it's different in terms of how they secure and manage and the talent that they have is different than what's in the IT space, so you've got to make sure that your products also cover what the operational teams need, because you're not dealing with the CCIE or the IP expert. >> So it's the classic market fit, product market fit for what they're expecting. >> Correct. >> LEDs, you can't go wrong with a green light, I mean. (laughter) >> You know, everybody goes, that's such an easy thing, it's like well, it was not that perceptive to us. >> What's the biggest thing you've learned as you've moved from Cisco engineering out to the new frontier on the edge here, what are the learnings that you've seen, obviously growing mark early, it's only going to get large and more complicated, more automation, more AI, more things, what's your learnings, what have you seen so far that's a takeaway? >> So I'll say, I'm still in Cisco engineering. The reason we're in IoT is that, a secure and reliable network, that's the foundation of any IoT deployment alright? You can go out and buy the best sensor, buy the best application buy the best middleware, but if you don't have that foundation, that's secure and reliable, those IoT projects are not going to take off, so it's pretty simple, everyone's network is the enabler of their business outcome, and that's why we're in it. So this is really about extending that network out, but at the same time, understanding what are we looking to solve for, right? So in many cases, we work with third party partners, 'cause some of them know these domains much better than we do, but we know the IP, we are the IP and the security experts, and we bring that to the table better than anybody else. >> And over the top, DevNet showing here for the second year that we've covered it, here in DevNet zone, that when you have that secure network that's programmable, really cool things can develop on top of it, that's a great opportunity. >> Yeah, this is, I'm super excited that we now have an IoT DevNet. You know, as part of our entire Cisco DevNet. Half a million dev-opers you know, Susie Wee and team done a fabulous job. There's more and more dev-opers going to be starting to develop at the IoT edge, at the edge of the network, right? So when you look at that as, our platforms today with IRX on top of it, make this a software platform that dev-opers can actually build applications to, it's really about, you know, we're ready, ISVs and dev-opers unleashing those applications at the IoT edge. And with Susie making that, you know, available in terms of the tools, the resources, the sandbox that you can get, it's like, we expect to see more and more dev-opers building those applications at the edge. >> We got to talk about your announcements, right, so. >> Oh yeah, exciting set of announcements. >> What's the hard news? >> So we launched four things today as part of extending IBN, or Intent-Based Networking to the IoT edge, the first one is, we've got three new Cisco-validated designs. So think of a validated design as enabling our customers to actually accelerate their deployments, so our engineering teams try to mimic, as much as possible, a customer's environment. And they do this pre-integration, pre-testing of our products, third party products. And we actually put 'em out by industry. So we have three new ones out there for manufacturing, for utilities, and for remote and mobile assets, that's one. The second one is we're launching two new hardware platforms, a next-generation catalyst industrial ethernet switch, it's for modularity of interfaces, and it's got nine expansion packs. The idea is, make it as flexible as possible for a customer's deployment. Because these boxes might sit in an environment not just for three years like in a campus, they could sit there for five, for seven, for 10 years. So as you know, they, adding on, giving them that flexibility, they can be a base system and just change the expansion modules, we also launched our next-generation industrial router. It actually is the industry's probably first and only full IPV Six-capable industrial router. And it's got, again flexibility of interfaces, we have LTE, we have fiber, we have copper, you want dual LTE you can actually slap an expansion pack right on top of it. When 5G comes in, you just take the LTE module out, you put 5G, so it's 5G ready. >> Expansions on there. >> And it's based on IOSXC, it's managed by DNA Center, and it's edge-enabled, so they run IOX, you can build your applications, and load 'em on. So we can build 'em, third parties can build 'em. >> And the DevNet piece here as well. >> And the DevNet piece is the third one where we now have, you know, an IoT dev-oper center in the DevNet zone, so with all the tools that are available, it enables dev-opers and ISVs to actually build on top of IOX today. In fact, we actually have more than a couple of three examples that are already doing that. And the fourth thing is, we depend on a large ecosystem of channel partners, so we've launched an IoT specialization training program to enable them to actually help our customers' implementation go faster. >> Mhm. >> So those are the four things that we brought together. The key thing for us was, designing these for scale, flexibility, and security. >> And are these capabilities available today is that right? >> Absolutely, in fact, if you go in, we're shipping in two weeks! And you can see them at the innovation showcase, it's actually very cool. >> I was going to mention, you brought up the ecosystem, glad you brought that up, I was going to ask about how that's developing, I could only imagine new sets of names coming out of the industry in terms of building on these IOTs since this demand for IOT, it's an emerging market in terms of newness, with a lot of head room, so what's the ecosystem look like, is there a pattern, is it ISVs, VARs, does it take the shape of the classic ecosystem or is it a new set of characters or, what's the makeup of the ecosystem? >> Yeah, it's I would say it's, in many ways, if you've been in the IoT world for some time, you'll say, you know, it's not like there's a whole new set of characters. Yes, you have more cloud players in there, you probably have more SIs in there, but it's been like, the distributors are in there, the machine-builders, the OT platforms, these are folks who've been doing this for a long time. It's more around, how do you partner, and where do you monetize? We know where you know, the value we bring in, we rely on, we work very closely with those OT partners, machine-builders, SIs, the cloud partners, to go to market and deliver this. You're right, the market's going to evolve, because the whole new conversation is around data. What do I collect, what I compute at the edge? Where do I route it to, should I take it to my on-premise's data centers, should I take it to the cloud? Who gets control over that data, how do I make sure that I have control over the data as the customer, and I have control over who gets to see it. So I think this will be a evolving conversation. This is something we're enabling with one of our Kinetic platforms, which are not launched, it's already launched in terms of enabling customers to have control over the data and manage the data as well. >> And bringing all the portfolio of Cisco security analytics, management to the table, that puts anything in the world that has power and connectivity to be a device to connect into a system, this is the, I mean how obvious can it be? It's going to be huge! >> It's great that you think it's obvious, that's exactly what we're tryin' to tell our customers-- >> How to do it-- >> Well this is about extending this out. >> Yeah, how do we do it's the playbook right? So, each business has its own unique, there's no general purpose IoT is there? >> Correct. >> It's pretty much on a custom custom-- well thanks for coming on Liz, appreciate it. Want to ask you one final question. You know, I was really impressed with Karen had a great session, Karen Walker had a great session yesterday, impact with women, we interviewed you at Grave Hopper in 2015. Cisco's doing amazing work, can you take a minute to talk about some of the things that Cisco's doing around women in computing, women in STEM, just great momentum, great success story and great leadership. >> I would say look at our leadership at Chuck's level, and I think that's a great example in terms of, he brings people on depending on what they can, what they bring to the table, right? They just happen to be a lot of women out there, and the reality is, I work for a company that believes in inclusion, whether it's gender, race, different experiences, different thoughts, different perspectives because, that's where truly, in terms of, you can bring in the culture that drives that innovation. I've been sponsoring our Women in Science and Engineering for I can't remember, the last four or five years. It's a community that continues to grow. And, the reality is, we don't sit in there and talk about, you know, woe is me, and all the things that are happening, what we talk about is, hey what are the cool new technologies that are out there, how do I get my hands on 'em? And yeah, there are, we talk about some things where women are a little reticent and shy to do, so what we learn from other peoples' experiences, many time the guys are very interesting, so what do you sit down there and talk, and I said trust me it's not like, a whining and moaning session, it's more in terms of where we learn from each other. >> Peers talking and sharing ideas-- >> Absolutely. >> Of innovation and building things. >> Yep, and we've got, you know, we look around and we've got a great set of woman leaders throughout the company at every single level in every function. It's great to be there, we continue to sponsor our Grace Hopper, we have some of the biggest presence at Grace Hopper, we do so many other things like connected women within the company. It's just a, I would say, fabulous place to be. >> You guys do a lot of great things for society, great company, great leadership, thank you for doing all of that, it's phenomenal, we love covering it too, so, we'll be at the cloud now today in Silicon Valley, Women in Data Science at Stanford, and among other great things. >> It's definitely a passion of ours. >> Yeah. (talking over each other) >> Awesome, that's great to hear. >> Thanks for coming on, this is theCUBE, live coverage here in Barcelona for Cisco Live! 2018, back with more after this short break, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back I'm Stu Miniman. And this is theCUBE's coverage of Cisco Live 2018 Orlando. Getting to the end of two days of three days of wall to wall coverage, happy to welcome to the program Wayne Ogozaly who's a cloud architect with Cisco. From my neck of the woods up in New England. Thanks so much for joining us down here. >> Pleasure to be here. It's getting towards the end of the day which means thundershowers will probably hit for an hour or so. >> Exactly, exactly, it's sunny in the morning and I brought an umbrella, who knew. >> Absolutely, so Wayne you've been with Cisco for a few years Why don't you give us a little bit about your background before we get into it. >> Sure, I started out with Cisco as an engineer. Actually before Cisco, a rocket scientist at Raytheon Company, so I had all sorts of fun before I got hooked on the internet stuff. So I've been a data center architect, spent quite a few years in the media area providing mogul applications, as well as some of the content development side of the media part of Cisco And now I'm into service provider markets which is fantastic >> So before we get into service providers give us your impression of the show this year It'd been a few years since I've come and it's changed quite a bit you know. Big crowd here, we're in the DevNet zone definitely some of the buzz of the show here. What's your impression of the show so far? >> I feel a huge amount of energy. I deal with service providers and we've had so many service providers come by our booth. There's a huge amount of excitement about bringing new managed services to market. DNA Center launch was huge for us. We're showing live demonstrations of that at our booth as well, and I feel like it's almost at a tipping point, where we're going to be talking about software defined networking and NFV. It's been a long time coming but now we're actually kind of crossing the chasm hopefully where we'll be sharing with you some pretty big announcements very soon on large customers deploying those exact services at massive scale. >> Yeah, so we love talking about service providers, we're talking to service providers on theCUBE because when you talk about scale, when you talk about pace of change, when you talk about pressures of financials. Well there's very few places where they all come together for the service providers. Why don't tell us about the product solution set that you're working on and what the news is here. >> Sounds great So I'm part of the Managed Services Accelerator group that has developed a new cloud product. It's been around for a couple years. We've had some major deployments namely at Verizon and Vodafone and a couple other tier ones. A couple huge announcements coming out very shortly. But Managed Services Accelerator allows service providers to deploy many different services across a multi-tenant platform that runs exclusively in the cloud. So we'll talk about what cloud native means what some of the services are. But we're able to bring services to market much more quickly than you were ever able to do in the past. We're able to go from service creation to actual service deployment in literally weeks As some of our major SP's, and those services span a wide range of opportunities, like deploying Meraki or deploying Viptela SD-WAN, or deploying a managed routed service Or even deploying DNA center for a managed SD access. So it's a broad spectrum of services that we can help service providers bring to market very quickly. >> Yeah I love that 'cause if you look at the service providers the applications are so critically important. >> It all starts with the app. If you don't have a compelling app nobody wants to buy it. >> Look the public cloud players are adding new application and new services on practically a daily clip these days. And service providers, many of them partnering with the public cloud but there's still lots of things that they need to do themselves, locally or in certain verticals. So give us some insight, what are some of the things your customers are looking for. How do they keep up with that pace of change and how does this offering help them do that? >> So the cool thing about MSX, or Managed Services Accelerator is it provides a service provider platform for multi tenancy, many different customers in one platform many different services from both Cisco and third party vendors, and those services span both physical devices, traditional ISRs, ASRs, third-party Juniper boxes, whatever, as well as VNFs, virtual network functions. That run in a public cloud like AWS or in your private data center, as a service provider or, in a universal CPE, or a virtual branch or for our Cisco folks, ENCS, Enterprise Network Compute System. It's a virtual branch x86, where we can run service chains down there, we provide a wide range of services that provide the ability to configure and deploy multiple services toward a single customer all from one place. Some of the challenges that our service providers have, is that they have many different service offers but each of those service offers is in its own silo. And every time they want to bring a new service to market, they have to spend many millions of dollars trying to integrate whether they're northbound OSS or BSS system. Or integrate with a new set of vendors. We, from a singe cloud platform allow them a single platform to integrate many different services from one place in a beautiful sort of cloud managed way. >> There's a large portfolio that customers need to sort out. One of the areas we're hearing a lot of discussion about has been the SD-WAN, how does that fit into this whole discussion? >> The SD-WAN service is one of our most popular services. It's being deployed at scale at Vodafone and Verizon. The Viptela acquisition for Cisco Cisco SD-WAN, now that it's named, has been very popular in that it allows customers, enterprises to have a choice of NPLS, internet, or even 4G or soon to be 5G backbone networks that they can run the traffic of their choice across. Enterprises want SD-WAN not just for the ability to choose policies and map applications to certain overlays or tunnels. But they're also using it to lower their cost significantly. So they can, from the cloud, kind of like a Meraki cloud. Manage many different devices with a single click of a button, I can push a new policy down in a software defined way to a hundred different devices and maybe move Netflix that might have been running on an NPLS circuit, to a internet access circuit with the click of a button. That's the power that SD-WAN provides and it provides enterprises that capability natively. Service providers offer it as a managed service, enterprises can log into our MSX platform and be able to control the traffic that they want and steer it with clicks of buttons, not large amounts of configurations. >> Wayne you've mentioned a couple of very large customers that are using this, is this something that is geared for the top 20 large service providers or will it hit hundreds, thousands of services providers around the globe? >> It's really both, it's targeted, and I can say that because architecturally it's a cloud-native platform. It's built with Docker containers, Kubernetes microservice framework, when Google, it's built on a similar architecture of Google. So when Google's rolling out 1,500 services a year, the MSX platform's goal is to get more than 100 services a year rolled out in this platform. So the service creation portion of it allows large service providers, like Verizon or Vodafone or many others to be able to offer those services more efficiently from the cloud and manage them. But the smaller guys, are also able to tap into these services because we offer a kind of a pay as you grow model. We offer a one year of three year term license to purchase the product which is very small And then there's like a little three to five dollar a month management fee for every device you have under management. So there's a very low cost of entry that you're able to tap into this powerful cloud management platform and offer any sort of service that you want for both large service providers as well as small service providers. >> You touched on some of the pricing there. How does that work today, do you look and feel like you know most cloud models today, really more of a Opex and a Capex? >> It's a tremendous opex savings. This is really an opex play when we look at it from a service provider perspective. Service providers are challenged today because they're trying to offer many different services but each service is a unique silo. And they've got to integrate a wide range of different pieces of that silo for every new service. So in a multi-tenant environment I need to have billing, I need to have northbound OSS BSS integration, I need to have a consistent user interface, I need to have notifications, I need to have tenancy, user roles, single sign on. Do I really want to integrate that uniquely for every new service or do I want to have Managed Services Accelerator manage all of that for me and then the service provider can focus more on the service. So it's an opex play to allow them to not only bring new services to market more quickly, but once they're brought to market through both REST APIs and our Network Services Orchestrator configure them very rapidly. >> Wanna step back for a second. When we look at this whole kinda cloud discussion for a while, you know there was discussion of like oh well maybe, how much is really going to go to the public cloud or fighting the public cloud and the service providers were caught being pulled from the old world in the new world. I don't think we've really hit equilibrium yet but service providers really understand and the message that I've heard from Cisco this week and really for the last year or so has been that hybrid multi cloud world is where we live. It's not going to be an answer. We always know everything's an additive in IT and nothing really ever dies. What do you hear from your service provider partners you know, how are they feeling, what do they think about, the changing dynamic of this world? >> Like John Chambers used to say, "We need to deal with the world the way it is "and not the way we'd wish it to be." Service providers realize that it is a multi cloud environment. They need to be able to accommodate different services and different service models based on what their customers are looking for. They also need to be able to achieve operational efficiency when they're rolling out those services to be able to make it commercially viable. So what we're hearing from our service providers is that they want a multi service environment that MSX, or Managed Services Accelerator, provides them where they can manage maybe deploying a device in AWS, to front end and application space for a particular tenant and then connect that device. Whether it be a Meraki virtual managed device or a Viptela vEdge device, to an SD-WAN that's connected to rest of their enterprises And then when they walk out of one of their branch devices and they get on their mobile network we can enable through Cisco, the connection between 5G slicing and a SD-WAN service so that the service that they get on their phone and the policies that are applied on their phone are identical to those that they've worked so hard to deploy actually in their branches, in their headquarters, in their campuses, or in the cloud. It is a multi-cloud environment. Almost every single application domain spans all of those components. MSX, or Managed Services Accelerator, allows you to kind of centrally manage all of those functions from one place. >> Okay, so Wayne MSX, new branding, some new features some new customers, give us a little bit of what we can expect to see through the rest of this year with this solution. >> You're going to see some pretty big announcements of some new service providers doing some new services with MSX. Those new services include the deployment of new SD-WAN networks, very exciting on our virtual branch platform where our ENCS, or X86 based branch will be rolled out at large scale with a couple service providers. Where you can decide what VNFs you want to put on there. What service chains they represent and how you want to monetize them. Been talking about universal CPs for a long time, this is the year it's going to happen at scale using MSX and ENCS, and then you're going to see managed devices cloud connect to AWS and wide range of other services including Meraki and others that build out the portfolio. But bottom line with MSX is, we know our service providers want a diversity of services. It's a service creation platform. We expect service providers to bring their service to the table, we can accommodate it, monetize it, bring it to market very rapidly. And I would expect to hear a wide range of wonderful announcements from Cisco and the MSX team in the next few months. >> Alright well Wayne really appreciate you bringing this service provider angle to us. We're at the end of two days of three days of live coverage covering all the angles from Cisco Live 2018 here in Orlando, be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all the replays as well as all the shows that we will be at in the future. For Stu Miniman and my co-host John Furrier, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018 brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's live coverage here in Orlando, Florida, for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Stu Miniman, my co-host, for the next two more days. We're in three days of coverage. Our next two guests here from Cisco Ronnie Ray, Vice President of Cisco, and Prakash Rajamani, Director of Project Management at Cisco. Guys, welcome to theCube. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. >> So all the buzz is about the DevNet developer aspect, the rise of the network engineer moving up to the stack while taking care of business in the software-defined data center, software-defined service provider. Everything is software-defined. You guys are involved in the DNA Center Platform. We talked about the DNA Center, the product. This is a real innovation environment for you guys, so take a minute to explain, what is the DNA Center Platform? And how does that compare from the DNA Center? How should customers think about this? What is it? what's the offering? >> Absolutely. So if we just walk back about a year. A year ago we launched DNA Center. DNA Center is the product, and that supported things, like SD-Access, which is absolutely a new innovation about Software-Defined campuses. Through the year, we've launched showrooms, through the year we've launched Enterprise Network Functions Virtualization, we have capabilities in automation, and these are all product capabilities that DNA Center has. What we're doing today and this week in Cisco live and in the DevNet area right now is that we have launched DNA Center platform, which is the ability to open up and expose all of the APIs and the STKs that now makes DNA Center a product that our customers, our partners and developers out there can now work on and create new value. It could be apps, it could be integrations, it could be new devices, third-party devices that Cisco's never supported before, but they can now make that supportable in DNA Center because we're giving them the tools to do that. >> So this is not so much a customer thing, it's more of a partner or app, is that kind of how this goes? So if I'm a partner, makes sense. is this kind of where it's different? I mean, where's the line here, or is it open for everybody? >> It is for everybody. If you are a networking expert and you've done CLI in the past, what we are doing is making API simpler, we are making them intent-based, which means that they can achieve a lot more and this is open to you as a networking expert, you as an application developer, you as a partner that is providing, creating your services for your end customer or client. All of you can now use DNA Center platform to create new value. >> This is great, it's for everyone. So this is where, if I get this right, we love this notion of DevOps on cloud, Susie and you guys have been talking about network programmability. Is this kind of where it is? We're talking about network programmability, is this where the APIs shine, and what's our vision? >> This is truly network programmability, in fact in the past what we've talked about is device programmability, but now what you're doing in DNA Center platform is really expressing intent and using APIs that apply across the whole network. Prakash can probably give you some examples of what these intent APIs look like. >> I think as Ronnie said, we like to call it Network DevOps, I think Susie calls it that too. And this is the way in which Network DevOps is conductible. There are two kinds of target market that we look at. One is the network engineer who understands everything network-centric, who knows all the nuances, and are very comfortable with those, but then being able to achieve those through a programmable API, that's one market. The way we want to go with the intent API is for the software engineers who want to be able to say, I want to prioritize YouTube traffic less than my network, and I want to prioritize my custom-built app as the most critical for my enterprise, as the most critical on my network. And I want to express that as an intent through an API, and then let the DNA Center platform take care of making that real on the network without having to worry about all the technologies and all the, >> How to provision it, what's going on under the hood, essentially to them it's a call. >> To them it's a call, and it's taken care of. >> That is actually seamless to the software developer, by the way, who doesn't want to get in the weeds of networking. The networking guys who are under the hood, what does it mean for them? They get to provide services to the developers, so it sounds like everyone's winning here. What's the benefit to the network engineers? They get scalability? I see the benefits to the software developer, that's awesome, but where's the network engineer, what are they getting out of it? >> They can achieve more things faster, they can get deeper, and this is absolutely making it simpler for them operationally to run their network. So they can basically free up time to do other tasks, like design and architecture that typically is, very hard to explain. >> Cooler tasks. (laughs) Not boring, mundane, cut and paste the scripts, CLI scripts, to another device. >> Absolutely and that's one part. The other part is about the cool new apps that they can create because there are use cases, even if you look at all the show floor, the companies that are here in Cisco Live and that they come every year, there are use cases out there that even collectively as an industry we cannot solve, that needs to be solved in the context of the company and the environment that you're in and so the network expert that's sitting in a customer environment can say, "Okay, I have this problem, let me solve it, "let me go build-" >> But they're gettable problems to solve now. Because now you're taking off more time, but also cloud and some of the software-defined things are now at the disposal to create that creativity. Is that what you're getting at, this is the new opportunity. Is that what Chuck was kind of referring to in his keynote around getting at these new use cases? >> Certainly, this opens up a new use case because this is a new way to program across the entire network in a much more simpler fashion than it's ever been done before. >> So when I hear a new way to program, I want to understand, what's the learning curve for this? If somebody understands the rocky APIs, is this a short learning curve, if they don't, is it a longer learning curve? >> So what we have done from a learning curve perspective, we have worked with a development team, we have learning labs where somebody who's not familiar with programming completely can start with the basics of, okay, how do I get started with DNA Center platform APIs and get started and go through a sequence of learning labs to get them completely familiarized with everything. Somebody like what you said, like a Meraki person, who's already using the Meraki API, for them, anybody who understands REST XML APIs can just turn around and there's a bunch of new APIs available that they can understand, program, try within the product, and then get sample codes and then build on top of that. So it's that easy as that. >> It was interesting, I was walking through the show floor, talking to some of the customers here, and for some of them, what's off the shelf is good, but I hear them griping about, not about Cisco, some of the partners, like "I can't customize what I need." One of the challenges we've always had in IT is, it's great if you can take the off the shelf, but everybody needs to tweak and adjust what they have. How's that addressed with this solution? >> From a customer's perspective, because we provide in our product we provide a specific set of capabilities, but when it comes to API, we make it much, much, much richer and granular so that people can create any workflow that they want. The workflows that we create in the API context is in three formats. We have what we call as tasks, which are individual operations that we perform, and then we group the tasks and offer them as workflows. And we group the workflows and offer them as an intent. So as a user, based on what level of granular they need, you can go to the lowest level task, or you can go all the way up to the intent based on your skillset and then use them and customize them as it fits your needs. >> So they can get up and running pretty quickly, sounds like, and if you know APIs then it's just JSON, it's all the same XML, all the great stuff, but I gotta ask where this goes from here because one of the things we were talking about before we came on camera is, we've been covering all the Linux Foundation, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, CNCF, you've got Docker Containers, and containers now have been a great thing. Pretty much check, standard, everyone's using containers. And it's great, put a container around it, a lot of great things could happen. Kubernetes and then microservices around Service Meshes, Diane Greene mentioned in her keynote with Chuck Robbins, Istio was a big hot, one of the hottest projects in the Linux foundation, so that's kind of microservices, this sounds like it's got a lot of levels of granularity. I love that word because now when you get to that point, you can really make the software targeted and strong and bullet-proof. How is that on the road map, where does someone who's actually looking at microservices as a North Star, what does your offering mean for them? Is it right in line? What's the progression, what's the road map? >> So, from a microservice perspective, DNA Center as a product itself is completely microservice-based architecture. There's 110 microservices today that make up what is DNA Center. This gives us a flexibility to really update every single service, every single capability, and make it almost like giving customers ability to do this every two weeks or every four weeks, new changes, new announcements, in a very simple fashion. That's kind of how the part is being built. What we eventually want to do is extend the platform as an ability for partners and others to build microservices that can be built and deployed within DNA Center over time. That's further down the road, but given that solution and given the strategy where we are as a product architecture that lends us to extend that to them. >> It's natural extension, so basically you're cloudified. You've got all the APIs, so if a customer wants to sling APIs, customers want to integrate in, like you mentioned, ServiceNow, they can do that easily today, and then you've got some extensibility in the road map to be kind of Cloud Native when things start growing. Timing's everything, it's kind of evolving right now heavily at the Cloud Native. >> I mean that's the benefit of this architecture, that you can really pick and choose where you want to run over time. We are right now on a box, an appliance that helps us solve the solution, but there's nothing that stops us from going anywhere. >> So Ronnie, I want you to talk about the significance, this is an open platform. I've watched Cisco my entire career, and always Cisco's been heavily involved in standards, but takes arrows from people as to how they do this. This is open, what does that mean? And what's that mean to your customers? >> Absolutely, this is basically opening up Cisco to industry-wide innovation. So until now, if you look at everything that we've done on DNA Center and on some of the other Cisco platforms that Cisco developed, but we are now getting to a point where with DevNet, now with 500,000 developers registered, we have the critical mass to basically say the industry can come and develop on top of Cisco platforms. And so this is completely new kinds of innovation that we will see, use cases that we've never thought of, and this will happen. And of course we will continue to contribute to all whether it's IETF or whether it's OpenConfig, all of these in with the YANG models that we are doing across the industry, those will continue, the open source confirmations that we do, but this is really saying, okay, let's provide our best customers and our partners and of course the individual developer that's out there a way to today build new creations and maybe tomorrow there's a part to monetize that. >> It's interesting you bring that up, I love the open. We love open, we're open content. You guys are now open networking, for lack of a better description. Chuck Robbins talked about in his keynote, one of the things I was really impressed on, he highlighted something that we've been talking about, is that the geo-political, the geo-technical world, is a huge factor, you look at just cloud computing, you've got Regis, you've got GDPR, I mean all these things going on, you mentioned assurances off camera, this is like a huge deal, right. You've got a global tech landscape, you've got global tech compliance issues, so you got this now open source and it's whatever fourth generation where it's part of the entrepreneurial fabric. So Ronnie, I've got to ask you, you've been an entrepreneur before. With bringing entrepreneurship into networking, what's the guiding principles, what's your inspirational view on this because this is really, not only save time for engineers, it makes them part of an open collaborative culture, like open source which you're used to, bringing an entrepreneurial vibe to it. >> Absolutely. >> This is a big dynamic, what's your view on this? >> It's a huge dynamic and I can talk from personal experience, you know when I've done start-ups and I've raised money or put my own money into it, 70% of your calories go in building a platform. So you're just looking at how do I store data, how do I process data, how to I look at availability of systems, and 30% of it really goes into building a use case. What we are doing with DNA Center platform is basically saying forget about the 70%. We will give you normalized data, whether it's for Cisco equipment or whether it's for third-party equipment. So the STK will allow you to bring in Juniper or Huawei or Aruba or whoever that's out there and you can bring that into DNA Center, so now you have a view of the entire network, Cisco and Non-Cisco. You have normalized data for all of those and you can configure all of those, you can image update all of those. It's very very powerful. Just from an ISV standpoint, individual available standpoint now you are kind of unlocking, making this almost democratic. >> You've done the heavy-lifting. >> Yep, absolutely. >> That's what Cloud is all about, but talk about the creativity because you mentioned that entrepreneurial, a lot of the energy goes into trying to find the fatal flaw, is the product gonna be product-market fit, you do all that heavy-lifting and bootstrap it, right now it's simply, okay, I can sling some APIs together, get a prototype, then the creativity starts. Talk about the creativity impact. How do you see that impacting some of these new use cases, these hard problems. This is gonna come from, not some guy coming out of business school saying, "Hey, I'm gonna go hire "some engineers and solve that big, hard problem." It's gonna come organically, this is a huge deal. >> This is a huge deal, and because we're making it simpler it can come from any quarters, it doesn't have to be an established company, it can be an individual person that can't solve any use case, and then we ask Cisco, not only do we have, and of course the majority share in the market, but will also we have the platforms, like DevNet, and DevNet now has an equal system exchange, so if something that's cool can float up in the exchange can be voted on, can become something that becomes an absolutely easy part to monetization for somebody, that basically saying, "Okay, how do I marry business "and how do I take network and bring them together." >> This is awesome and it's also external to Cisco, but talk about the global impact. Just outside North America, massive growth, you're seeing things going on in Europe, but really in the Asia and China, huge growth markets going on. When you go to China, talk about mobility, they have mobility nailed down. India is absolutely on fire, growing like crazy. The talent, this is a melting pot of tech talent. How do you make all that work from a Cisco standpoint because what you want to do is bring the goods to everybody, that's open source. >> Absolutely, so think about any of the logical place that people go to with, given the way that the platform is already built, which is, it is Cloud Native. We've not in the cloud yet, but at some point the platform will go to cloud. And we are looking at harnessing the creative talent worldwide, whether it be in Asia or whether it be in Europe, or whether it be in the Americas, really doing that new value creation and taking that to the masses. And Cisco has the right to claim this market, we are absolutely in support of folks that want to do that. That's why DevNet has all of the learning labs and the sandboxes and everything else that's there in support, these are free to use. We want people to come and learn and co-create on the platform. >> And making it open and collaborative, the community aspect of it. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, final question while you guys are here, obviously you're at the Cisco perspective, but put your industry landscape hat on, people who couldn't make Cisco Live this year here in Orlando, they might be watching this video either live or on demand when it goes up to YouTube. What's the big story, I mean obviously what you guys are doing, across the whole show, what's the most important stories that are developing here this week that people should pay attention to deeply? >> So in terms of looking at the openness of the platform, Cisco is an open platform, API is really the new CLI because that's the way that you'll talk to the network. And think about what Chuck said at the opening keynote, this starts from the user, the things that you want to do to the applications, wherever they live, whether it be in a cloud, in a multi-cloud environment, Cisco is bringing all of that together. >> Prakash, what's your thoughts? >> Adding on to Ronnie's point, the openness and something that new that we are doing, not just from campus perspective, but campus, branch, data center, and making it open across everything, which is what Dave Goeckeler covered today in his keynote, I think that's something that Cisco is not just looking at one infrastructure, but across all of his portfolio and making it unique is really something that people should take away from this one. >> That's awesome. Great stuff, well guys, thanks for sharing. Thanks for co-sharing, co-developing content with us. I gotta say just from the hallway conversations, people are impressed that you guys are taking a very practical approach, not trying to boil over the ocean here with all these capabilities and announcements, focusing on the network value, where it fits in, and being Cloud Native from day one with microservices is a good start, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for sharing. Live coverage here in theCUBER. Day two of Cisco Live, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. More live coverage, stay with us here at day two as we start winding down day two here at Cisco Live in Orlando, Florida, be right back.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partnership. (upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back live here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live. Gonna go throughout the events, extract them. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Stu Miniman. Three days of live coverage, our next guest is Sachin Gupta, Senior Vice President and Product Management, Cisco, 20 plus year career, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> So we love the product execs, because you've got visibility into the customers but also into the engineering roadmap, which now, as Chuck the CEO laid out, is in a new modern era. >> Exactly. >> So you guys are busy (laughs), right? >> Yeah. >> What does that mean? I mean, what do you guys think about, what do you talk about in the product teams, to go modern with cloud, obviously a lot going on. You got cyber-ops go-- really heavily on with the routers right now, and all the core products. You gotta maintain that. >> Right. >> But yet build out a future path. >> Yeah. >> What are you guys working on? What's the core story? >> I mean this has been pretty significant, I mean we had to reinvent the entire network. And, the motivation behind this is, for many many years, our customers could go in, manually operate these networks, go box by box, they're putting command line in, they're deciding the configuration of each element, setting it up this way, and they provide connectivity, some basic security, some experience this way. And what's happening now is, it's just a sheer volume and scale of things that they're having to deal with. I mean everybody comes in with four mobile devices, there's all these things that are connecting. We talk about 26 billion things connected to the network in 2020. It's mind boggling. And then at the same time, the applications are moving to the cloud, which means your threats surface has expanded. We needed to do things fundamentally differently. And so we reinvented the entire stack, and we're serious about that. The ASICS, the platforms, that they're built on, the operating system, modular, programmable, API driven, the controller system on top. Everything had to be redone from scratch. >> One of the exciting things in following Cisco over the years, Stu and I have been following you guys from really the beginning, you go back, say 15 years ago. The big debate in Cisco is, should we move up the stack, and how should we move the stack? But now, the time, it's almost a perfect path, 'cause you got software defined data center, completely going full throttle, really relevant, lot of stuff going on at the root level of the networks, so networking's not going away anytime soon, and as the things I mentioned, security's obviously a big concern, and then now you got Kubernetes and Diane Greene from Google Cloud saying, "Hey this Kubernetes and containers and service meshes, feels a lot like some of the kind of coolness of networking." So the network engineers now have a kind of a path, if you will, to take their core competence, and drive more value around that. Talk about what that actually means. >> Yeah, so there's a couple of things, interesting things that you mentioned. First of all the data center moving to a software defined path. So we've applied a lot of learning from that. And so we've taken the fabric approach, the automation approach, and brought that to the campus with DNA Center, right. Basically Software-Defined Access and DNA Center. And DNA Center actually is built on a Kubernetes model, so in a cloud type of platform, to allow it to scale out with service offers. So we've actually taken both examples applied it. What does it mean from a network engineer point of view? Instead of repeating mundane tasks again and again, now they can automate network wide. The entire network operates as a single system. I can define a policy, and say "I need this user group, I need these doctors, to have access to these medical records. I want this telepresence application to get high priority." Specify intent, let that system automatically apply that everywhere. And then take data and analytics out of that infrastructure, to ensure that the intent was delivered as expected. It's a very powerful-- They can sort of instead of be boxed by box network engineers, now they're system wide looking at the entire network as a whole system. >> Yeah, Sachin, wondering if you can give us a little bit of insight here. You talked about customers not being box by box. Well, from the product side, you know, you spent a lot of your career helping define the catalyst boxes, and we watched the generations of catalyst switches over the years. Cisco transforming from being measured in boxes and ports, to being a software company. How do you, on the inside, measure that transformation? You talked about things like, the DNA Center and the like, but, what's that been like on the inside, and how do you measure internally that balance between software and kind of the hardware world? >> We measure it through customer success through that software. So how many customers were actually able to get a DNA Center - it's an appliance that has software embedded in it - and get value through the network. And I think one thing I'll tell you is, we found that while, reinvention of the network sounds scary, or "Hey, how do I even start reinventing my entire network, as a customer how do I start?" That you can take DNA Center, take the network that you have, and start sending data from DNA Center, as from your network, sorry, from your access points, from your switches, your routers, your identity product. Send it to DNA Center, and start getting immediate value. Immediate value. So what was the experience for this user at this time, how do I pinpoint where the issue is and go fix it? And so we find that, for these customers, yes the switches, the, all the new products we brought out are important because they're programmable, they have rich capabilities, rich data streaming. But, at the same time a lot of the products they have through a software model they can now get network wide assurance. They can troubleshoot, get automated remediation steps that Cisco recommends. And now the new announcement, if we go there is, how do we expose all of this through an API layer? >> Yeah, it's interesting, 'cause if you think back 10, 15 years ago, doing a network upgrade, oh my God, that was a scary thing for customers. You're thinking forklift, am I doing some major build out, I start up my core, I build out to the edge, it's generation shifting. What we hear from the DevNet team here is you gotta meet them where they are, add value, and then you can make change along the way, almost like we do with applications, slowly pulling things apart. >> Absolutely right, and one of the immediate values is assurance, analytics for assurance. Helping you troubleshoot better. But other piece of value that customers love and that we get great feedback, is you know, racking and stacking a switch sometimes, like in a branch site, they would pay more to get it stacked than the switch itself. Because imagine you know you've got a remote side, you don't have a highly trained person flying somebody out, getting them, installing it, spending a few days there, costs a lot of money. And now we're seeing we can automate onboarding your product, we can automate software upgrades for those products, using DNA Center with intent-based networking. So you start there. Then you start transforming it for policy based automation, some of the more advanced security capabilities that the system provides. >> Yeah, we hear day zero a lot, when some of those use cases, and then you see the shift happening with software as a holistic view. Wanna explore that with you for a second. Because if you think about the system, which I totally agree with by the way, it's awesome. Then you got the DNA Center. A lot of people like, understand it, and people are now moving to that, now trying to understand it. Share the mental model, on how people should think architecturally around DNA Center. Is it an abstraction layer, is it just a set of API's? What are you enabling with the API's? What's actually gonna be the result from that architecture? So, how should I think about it, architecturally, and then what are some of the enabling things that could come as a result? >> Let me explain this a little bit, maybe with two examples, right? On, an example of how it works, an example of where we think we can take this. So how it works is, before the API's on the switch would mean that, you can say, "Hey, how much memory do you have left," you know, "Let me copy an image to you," "Let me reboot the switch to upgrade it," "Let me check if it works." And that's the level you were operating at. When we say DNA Center is a platform and has API's, now you have an intent that you could express which says, "Take all the switches of this type, on this site, and upgrade all of them." Right, and now you have to go through all those steps behind the scenes and that's the abstraction that it provides. So those are intent-based API's. So what's exciting first of all is, look, with that, I can extend, integrate it with IT services, I can integrate it with ServiceNow for example, IP address management schemes, cross network domains. I can support third party, I could do all those things. What's exciting for me is, I'm gonna pull out my device, right? You think about it, this thing has a phone, it has a camera, accelerometer, all sorts of things. But the way it's exposed through the app developer, is through very simple API's and through an app store. We are-- >> So you're essentially enabling. >> We're unleashing innovation on that network. By taking away the need to understanding the depths of networking for the developer that sits on top. >> So it's really on top, a holistic view. So, you're taking away steps it takes to get something done. >> Right. >> And integrating other things. Is that-- on the app side. >> Yeah, from the app side now, I mean, you look at DevNet, and the capabilities that DevNet brings to the table, and now, of the app developer, our systems integrator can invoke powerful network technology without understanding the depths of networking. 'Cause what they're looking for is, you know what I'll give you an example, I'll talk about doctors and medical records. If you need to onboard a group of contractors to help out for six months and have secure access, you can now define that in an application layer, at an identity layer, and automate that completely through DNA Center, without understanding exactly what the network will need to do, in a highly sophisticated way, across all those boxes to make it happen. >> So is DNA Center a net new capability for your customers? >> It is. DNA Center's been around since last August. So less than a year. It is a new controller built for the enterprise. And so yes, many many customers are using it. But for a lot of customers, it's a net new powerful piece of technology. >> I gotta ask you a personal question. You've been in Cisco for a long time, you've seen waves come, and new waves emerging. Why has DevNet been so successful? And you got DevNet Create with the cloud native side kinda coming together, bringing those two worlds together. I mean timing's everything, right? In life, right? So is it timing, is it just-- What is the, I mean the success is pretty significant. 500 thousand developers, you know you guys have. And that's a great developer program. That's robust. >> Yeah. >> So it's on its way to continuing to rise. Why is it so successful? >> I'll give you my honest example. I think you know, networking, people have thought, is sort of big, you know, big boxes, is sort of what networking is. And we always tell people, that even when you think about switches, the majority of our engineering investment is in software. So my network engineers, yes they're plugging in a switch, but the majority of their life is operating the software on that infrastructure. And so by the very nature of networking and network engineers, they're actually very comfortable with software. They're very comfortable with scripting and those kinds of capabilities. Now you enter DevNet. DevNet says, "I am now going to give you a easy way, sandbox way, learning and enablement, for you to learn the API's not just on the network, on the collapse systems, on the security systems, in the data center, and be much more powerful at how quickly you can move. You're much more agile." So I think it was a pretty natural evolution for the network engineer. Now, the last piece of the puzzle was the network. And now with DNA Center, we provide the same sort of API abstraction for the network itself. And I mean, look, so far, network engineers are loving it. I was talking to Paul, who's at Presidio, who's a network engineer. He's actually one of the DevNet Creator award winners. And, loves it. He's a network practitioner, and now can solve problems for his business as a partner and his customers, could never do before. >> Great point. I mean we interviewed Paul, great guy. But you just said something I think is really interesting. The people in the community, the network engineers, they've been solving problems. That's what they do. >> That's what they do! And with software! >> And so now you add scripting to your point, this is not new things, it's not foreign, but the networks are core. >> Yes. >> They're not learning Python to get a career change. They're extending their capability. >> That's exactly right. They're not doing Python just to do Python. They're using Python, they're using the API's, they're using the DNA Center platform to become more powerful as a network engineer. For networking, to solve business problems. >> Yeah, I think the timing, combined with just where cloud is, where you guys are with the programmability, it really is, right, again, timing's everything. >> It's exciting. I think-- >> So, one of the things we've been looking at with Cisco is, Cisco's moving up the stack. And I think, we want you to help connect the dots for us. Intent-based networking really is one of the ways that networking people are building applications. I think in the key note, they walked through some specific examples. What kind of things are people building with intent-based networks that they couldn't do before? >> I think, you know, so some of the app examples that sit on top, right? So, I'll give you simple examples, and some other interesting things. Accenture, for example, is doing automated software updates, much more intelligent software updates, based on you know business information, like who, how many people will get impacted with the update, tying it to the service process with ServiceNow. That's an Accenture use case. World Wide Tech has taken DNA Center, made it mobile. So instead of consuming it on your laptop like this, you can now consume network status, client status, health, on your mobile device. You've got, Dimension Data, that's actually doing SSID leasing. So in your sites as a customer, if you need to create temporary network connectivity, for certain types of users, you can deliver that automatically. Right, so you've got examples of all kinds that are leveraging the power of the network, without actually have to understand all the nitty gritty details behind it. And as a developer or a systems integrator, providing tremendous more value to our customers. >> It's interesting too, one of things that World Wide Technology said here when we interviewed them on the first day yesterday, was, in the old model, there was dislocated capabilities. They'd go talk about business outcomes, essentially what the intent was on the business side, and then, "Great we're done. Now let's shake hands with Cisco." Cisco would come in, and the networking guys would come in, "Okay, here's what you can do." So now, those are coming together. >> Yes. >> Which shrinks the accela--, the time frame, on the execution. So, to actually put it together, that is really kind of DevOps-like. I mean, this is integration, this is kind of like-- >> Right. >> This is a big trend. >> It's a big trend, because now the network has an ability through DNA Center, to take that business outcome, you described it as an intent, translate that into what the network understands, activate it, and then provide the data analytics and assurance, back to the application. And so, you're absolutely right. Before, you'd have to go manually, take that business outcome, and figure out now, how do I, you know, make this happen, through a network that did not operate as a single system. >> Yeah. >> And now the worlds are coming together, and our partners and our customers can move much much more quickly. >> Well you guys are doing a great job, we really think that the clear path to the stack, where the stack is integrating with networking, is colliding - in a good way - you've still got the hard core, software defined, networking in the data center and the networks. So it's awesome. I wanna get your thoughts on, as an industry participant, also Cisco executive, for the folks that couldn't make Cisco live this year, what's the biggest story? I mean we heard a lot of things. If you had to boil it down, what's the most important development happening this year at Cisco live? >> I think the big announcement is DNA Center platform. Where, it is an open API system which supports third party infrastructure, and has that API layer, accelerating innovation through our partners. But what I will tell you, is, that the important message I'd like to deliver, is they can start on this network reinvention today. It is not about a rip and replace of the gear that they have. They can add the software capabilities of DNA Center on the infrastructure they have. And get immediate out the gate benefit, with things like network assurance, DNA assurance. And so I really encourage everybody to look at this and say, "Yes, you know what? Maybe I'll get to the last step later." Start now. You're gonna see immediate value. >> And there's not a lot of-- there's really no disruption. >> And there's no disruption in that. >> They can put their toe in the water, or jump all-- full throttle. >> Exactly. And once you like the controller approach, you can see how it integrates with API's, with everything else in your IT processes, you can then take more steps, like software defined access, policy based automation. Which are more intrusive, and but provide tremendous value. But there's a way to start that's not intrusive. >> Well we're super excited to see how DNA Center continues to accelerate, we love what's going on in DevNet, DevNet Create, you're seeing the cloud growth happen, you're seeing all kinds of new modern era things that we've never seen before. So congratulations. >> DNA Center platform, multiplied by DevNet, right? It's exponential growth. >> Yeah, so it's a great wave. People's jobs will become easier, again, automation for the right reasons, accelerating new value creation opportunities. This is theCUBE. Here in Orlando. Bringing you all the action at Cisco Live. Extracting the signal of noise. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Stay with us, we've got more. Here on day two of three days of coverage. Stay with us. (music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partnership. (upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back everyone to the live CUBE coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Stu Miniman. Three days days of wall-to-wall live coverage, we have Mandy Whaley, senior director of developer experience at Cisco DevNet and Par Merat, who is the senior director of community and ecosystem for DevNet. Mandy, great to see you, CUBE alumni. Every single time we had theCUBE with DevNet team, Par, great to see you. Congratulations, first of all. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, we're happy to be here. >> Congratulations, so, really kind of a proud moment for you guys, and I want to give you some mad props on the fact that you guys have built a successful developer program, DevNet and DevNet Create for Cloud Native, over a half a million registered, engaged users, of developers using it. Not just people who come to the site. >> Correct. >> Right. >> Real developers. For an infrastructure enterprise company, that's a big deal, congratulations. >> It is, thank you, thank you. We were just chatting this morning about the really early days of DevNet at Cisco Live, and the first year of DevNet Create. And it's been great to see that community grow. And see, early on we had this vision of bringing the application developers and the infrastructure engineers together, and cross-pollinating those teams, and having them learn about each other's fields, and then build these programmable infrastructure enabled apps, and that's really, that synergy is happening within the community, and it's great to see them exchanging ideas here at events like this. >> And so we love to talk about seminal moments, and obviously DevOps drove a lot of the Cloud, and Chuck Robbins, your CEO said, "Without networking, there'd be no Cloud." True statement, absolutely, but Stu and I have always talked about the role of a network engineer, and that the power that they used to have in the enterprise is still due. It used to be the top people running the networks, mission critical, obviously security, but it's not about a retraining. It's about a path, and I think what you guys have done in success is you've shown a path where it's not about pivoting and being relevant and retraining to get a new job, it's been an extension of what they already know, >> An incentive. and I think that's very refreshing, and I think that's the real discovery. >> And we've been able to grow, because I think in our foundational years, we really spent a lot of time providing the content and the skill training, and what Mandy likes to say is, "We met them where they are." So no question was too novice. Likewise, if they were a little more advanced, we could direct them and point them in that same direction. So those early years, where, Mandy, we were just reminiscing about the first DevNet-- >> Coding 101? >> Yes, exactly, she wrote it over the weekend, and we rolled that whole event out, literally, in three months. >> And what year was that, just to kind of, this is an important seminal moment. >> 2014. >> May of 2014. >> 2014. >> 2014, the seeds of we should do something, and you guys have had certifications. We're looking at CCIEs, you go back to 1993 all the way now to 2018, so it's not like you guys are new to certification and training. It's just taking the IQ of network people, and giving them some insight. So what happened in 2014? Take us through the, obviously you bootstrapped it. >> Yes. (laughs) >> What happened, what happened next? >> We did. >> Everyone's like, whoa, >> So-- >> we can't, we're not, we're staying below the stack here. >> Well, we knew there was a lot of buzz around SDN and programmability, and we both actually, I should even back up further. We were both on the DevNet team when the DevNet program was Powerpoints, so we weren't even there yet. >> Right, when we were just planning what it even could be, like the ideas of having a developer program, and like Par was saying, we knew SDN was coming. We knew Network Controllers were coming. We didn't know what they were gonna be called, we didn't know what those APIs looked like, but we said, "The network engineers are gonna need "to know how to make REST API calls. "They're gonna need to know how to operate in Python." And so we started this program building around that vision before the portfolio is where it is today. Like today, now, we have APIs across the whole portfolio, Data Center, service provider, enterprise, and then up and down from the devices, all the way to controllers, up to the analytics level. So the portfolio's really filled out, and we've been able to bring that community along with it, which has been great. >> I want to dig into the north/south, east/west and that whole, kind of the Cloud paradigm, but I got to ask you, on a personal question, although relevant to the DevNet success. Was there a moment where, actually the seminal moments of 2014, was there a moment where you were like, "Wow, this is working." and like the, you know, (laughs) pinch me moment, or was it more of, "We got to get more resources, this is not just, "this thing's flying." >> Well it's always that. That's always the challenge. >> When was the point where >> We are, >> you said, "This is actually >> We are very-- >> "the best path, it's working, double down." When was that happening? >> I mean, I think after we started teaching those very early coding coding classes, I got this, like, flood of email from people who had attended them that said, "I took this task, I automated it, "it saved my team months of work," and getting that flow of information back from the community was early signs to me, from the technical level of, there's value, this is gonna take off, and then I think we just saw that kind of grow and grow. >> Mushroom, just kept it going. >> The other thing that I heard from a network engineer, which really resonated with me, was, you were saying, the network guy or gal likes to be there and solve the problem, and they're sort of at this deep level of control. And what I heard them say about the programmability skills was that that was another tool that they added to their sort of toolbox that let them be that person in the moment, solving that problem. And they could just solve it in a new way, so hearing the network engineers say that they have adopted programmability in that fashion, that let me know that that was gonna work, I think. >> All right, so let's get into some of the meat and potatoes, because you guys have some really good announcements. We saw you have the code ecosystem that you announced at DevNet Create, which is your emerging Cloud Native worlds coming together. That's available now. >> Yes, it's fully released. >> So take a minute to, so give us the update. >> Yes, so DevNet Code Exchange is developer.cisco.com/codeexchange so you can go there, it's live, and the idea behind this was we wanted to make it easy for the community to contribute, and also to discover code written by the community. So it's on GitHub. You can go and search on GitHub, but you get back a ton of hits if you go search Cisco on GitHub, which is great, but what we wanted to have was a curated list that you can filter by product, by language. I sometimes joke that it's like Zappos for sample code cause you can go on and say, "I want black boots, "you know the two inch heel." You can say, "I want, I want code for DNA Center, "or ACI, and I want it in Python," and then see all of the repositories submitted by the community. And then the community can also share their codes. "Hey, I've been working on this project. "I'm gonna add it to Code Exchange, so that other people "can build off of it and find it." So it's really about this community contribution, which is a strategic initiative for DevNet for this year. >> Mandy, how does that tie into other networking initiatives happening in the industry? I think of OpenDaylight, a lot of stuff happening, Docker comes this week, Kubernetes, and networking's a critical piece of all of these environments. >> Yeah, so some of the projects that you'll find in Code Exchange are things that relate. So we have some really good open-source community projects around YANG models and the tooling to help you deal with YANG models. So those might be in Code Exchange, but those are also part of the OpenDaylight community, and being worked in that. So because it is all open-source, because it is freely shared, and it's really just a way to improve discoverability, we can share easily back and forth between those communities. >> The Code Exchange is designed to really help people peer-to-peer work together and reuse code, but in the classic >> Reuse code within >> open-source ethos. >> the community. Exactly. >> Okay, so Par, you have something going on with Ecosystem Exchange. >> We do. >> Okay, so it sounds like Code Exchange, ecosystem partners, matchmaking service. What is it, take a minute to explain. >> It's kinda the next level up, and what I think we have to understand is, when we've got Code Exchange and Ecosystem Exchange under the umbrella of exchange, because within our 500, half a million community of developers, where they work, what we've found is predominately at SIs, at our VARs, at our ISVs. So these are the builders, so Code Exchange will even help that persona because they can come and see what's already been built. "Is there something that can jumpstart my development?" And if there's not, then they can work with each other, right? So if I am looking for a partner, a VAR in Australia to help me roll out my application, my navigation application, which needs to know and get data from the network, I can partner through this exchange because I can go in, see everyone, and be able to make that connection digitally versus organically. And this really started, you asked earlier what was one of the pinnacle moments? Well at these DevNet Zones, what we found is that an ISV would partner and start talking to an SI or to a VAR, and they'd start doing business planning, because what this is all about is driving those business outcomes for our customer base. And we're finding more and more they're trying to work together. >> So you're enabling people to get, do some work together, but not try and be a marketplace where you're actually charging a transaction. It's really kind of a matchmaking-- >> This is all about discovery right now. >> Community-driven discovery around business. Yeah, it's interesting, a heard a story in the hallway about DevNet, cause I love to get the examples of, we love what we're doing by the way, but want to get the examples, overheard a guy saying, "We were basically "cratering a business, jumped into the DevNet program, "and turned it around," because there was deals happening. So the organic nature of the community allowed for him to get his hands dirty and leverage it, but actually build business value. >> That's exactly right. >> That's a huge, >> That's exactly right. >> at the end of the day, people love to play with code, but they're building something for business purposes or open-source projects. >> And that's what this is about. It's really transitioning from the, "I'm gonna build," to now there's business value associated with it, and that's spectacular. >> I think so much of my career you talk, the poor network administrators, like "Help, help, "I'm gonna lock myself for a month, "and I'm gonna do all this scripting," and then three months later their business comes and asks for something that, "I need to go it again," because it's not repeatable. It's what we say is that the challenge has been that undifferentiated heavy lifting that too many companies do. >> Exactly. >> Well, that's exactly it, and the interesting thing, especially around intent-based networking is that's opening up a whole new opportunity of innovation and services. And one of the things that isn't very much different with our Ecosystem Exchange is it's the whole portfolio, so we have SIs in there as well as ISVs. And most marketplaces or catalogs really look at it in a silo version. >> I have one example of kinda the two coming together that's really interesting. So, Meraki, which is the wireless network, has really great indoor location-based services you can get from the WiFi. And then there's been ISVs who have built indoor wave finding on top of it, they're really great applications. But those software companies don't necessarily know how to go install a Meraki network or sell a Meraki network to something like this. And so it's been a great way to see how some of those wave finding companies can get together with the people who actually go sell and install and admin Meraki networks, and, but come together, cause they would have a hard time finding each other otherwise. >> And the example is actually rolled out here at Cisco Live. We've, Cisco Live partnered with an ISV to embed a Cloud-based service in their app, which is navigation. So you can go into the Cisco Live app, tap on the session that you want to see. A map will come up that will navigate you from where you are here to get there, and this is, I think this is the second largest conference center in the United States, so having that map >> So you need it. >> is really important. >> I've gotten lost twice. >> We've all got the steps to prove that that is, but, yeah, and that actually brings, one of the questions I had was, is it typically some new thing, to do wireless rollouts and SD-WAN on discovery, or is it core networking, or is it kind of across the board as to when people get involved? >> It's definitely both. It's definitely both. I mean, from the Code Exchange piece, I've talked to a lot of customers this week who are saying, "We've got our core networking teams. "We want to move towards more automation. "We're trying to figure out how to get started." And so we give them all the resources to get started, like our video series and then now Code Exchange. And then I heard from some people here, they actually coded up some things and submitted it to Code Exchange while they were here because they had an idea for just a simple, quick automation piece that they needed. And they were like, "I bet somebody else "needs it too," so it was definitely in that. >> I noticed you guys also have your Cisco team I was talking to, some of the folks here have patents are being filed. So internally at Cisco, it's kind of a wind of change happening, where, >> It is exciting times. >> IoT cameras, I just saw a solution behind us here where you plug a Rasberry Pi hardware prototype to an AP, makes the camera a video. Now it looks like facial recognition, saves the metadata, never stores video, so this is kind of the new model. >> Pretty remarkable. So final question I want to ask you is, as you guys continue to build community, you're looking for feedback, the role of integrating is critical. You mentioned this Cisco example about going to market together. It used to be, "Hey, I'm an integrator of our solution, "business planning," okay, and then you gotta go to the Cisco rep, and then there's, they're dislocated. More and more it's coming together. >> It is. >> How are you guys bridging that, those two worlds? How are you tying it together? What's the plan? >> So we're, what we're finding is a lot of those partners are also sort of morphing. So they're not just one thing anymore, and so what we're doing is we're working with them, enabling them on our platforms, providing solid APIs that they can leverage, transitioning or expanding the code, the skillsets of their workers, and then we're partnering them up with our business partners and with our ISVs, and doing a lot of that matchmaking. And with Ecosystem Exchange, again, they'll now be able to take that to a digital format, so we're seeing the whole wave of the market taking them. >> So you guys see it coming. You're on that wave. >> Yes. >> All right, real quick, I know we're short on time, but I would, Mandy, if you could just talk about what Susie Wee, you're leader talked about on stage on the keynote, she mentioned DNA Center. Can you just take a quick second, describe what that is, why it's important, and impact to the community. >> Yes, so we're really excited about DNA Center platform. DNA Center is the controller, kind of at the heart of all of our new enterprise networking software. So it sits on top of the devices, and it exposes a whole library of APIs. It'll let you do Assurance, policy, get device information. It would allow you to build a kind of self-service ops models, so you could give more power to your power users to get access to network resources, on-board new devices, things like that. >> So it sets the services. >> So it's APIs, and then you can build the services on top. And part of that is also the Assurance, which Dave Geckeler showed in his keynote, which we're really excited about. So, in DevNet we've been working to build all the resources around those APIs, and we have many code samples in Code Exchange. We actually have a community contribution sprint going on right now, and that's called Code Intent with DevNet, and it's all around DNA Center. It's asking developers to take a business intent and turn it into code, and close the loop with Assurance, and submit that back to DevNet. >> That's great. It's a real business process >> We're real excited about >> improvement with code, >> that, yeah, so you're enabling that, and slinging APIs around, having fun, are you having fun? >> Definitely having fun. >> Par? >> We always have fun >> Absolutely >> on this team. >> We always have fun, yeah. >> It's a great team. >> I can say working with you guys up close has been fun to work, and congratulations. You guys have worked really hard and built a very successful, growing ecosystem of developers and partners, congratulations. >> Thank you. You guys have helped. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for supporting >> We appreciate it. theCUBE, really appreciate, this is crew of the DevNet team talking about, back in the early days, 2014, when it started, now it's booming. One of the successful developer programs in the enterprise here. Cisco's really showing the path. It's all about the community and the ecosystems, theCUBE, of course, doing our share. Broadcasting here live in Orlando at Cisco Live 2018. Stay with us for more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's The Cube, covering Cisco Live 2018 brought to you by Cisco, NetApp and The Cube's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone, we're here live at Cisco 2018, Cisco Live 2018. It's The Cube live coverage here in Orlando, Florida. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman my co-host for the next three days of live coverage. Our next guest is Brooks Borcherding, president and CEO of LiveAction and Darren Kimura, chief strategist and vice chair from LiveAction, fresh off the heels of a great acquisition. Next generation monitoring, networking. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for joining us. It's good to see you again. >> Thank you, we're so glad to be here. >> So, love the action going on, literally, LiveAction with MNA activity. You guys got some good news happening around the company but also Cisco's event here really is perfectly poised for what you guys are doing. The CEO on stage literally saying to his army of customers, "This old way is now old. This is the new modern era." And really talking about what is multicloud, basically. So his entire army of customers are moving to next generation. So it intersects with what you guys are doing, so take a minute to talk about LiveAction and the news. >> Okay, so I think first of all, LiveAction, you know, we've always been known to be a leader in network management. We've worked very, very closely with Cisco for a dozen years and what we help companies do is take the complexity out of the management of their large networks. So that's been the core, fundamental, you know, value proposition that we've always delivered is how we simplified the network in these increasingly complex environments, right? So what's interesting now with this period of time is networks continue to become more and more complex. You have things like digital transformation, you have things like cloud and multicloud and hybrid cloud. You have things like software-defined networks. Each of them in their own right just makes the wide area that much more complex. >> And more endpoints every day. I think he threw a stat out, another couple hundred million endpoints are coming now. >> Right. >> So it's not ending. >> That's true and in that market transition it gives us a great opportunity because our core value proposition has always been simplifying the networks. Now that's even more essential than ever before. >> One of the critical problems that come out of that, obviously, is the tsunami of endpoints is one, we heard the security threats with encryption is another one. So, the need to instrument seems obvious but also it's almost overbearing, like, what do you do? How do you guys see the core problems that you're attacking? >> Why don't you take that? >> Well I think the big, what we're trying to do at Live Action is simplify the network. That's really at the core of everything we trying to do. And when we talk to our customers we understand from them that most times they might have four or ten different tools. So the first thing we're trying to do is figure out what are the biggest use cases and combine them all into one singular tool. And that's what we're producing at LiveAction, is the ability for you to see your entire network from end to end. East-west and north-south. So, as we take a look at things like the cloud environment, you know, what exactly is that, right? You know, is it north-south, is it east-west? It's all of the above. And what we're trying to do at LiveAction is have a Full Stack application that can basically provide visibility and analytics so you can understand all of it in one place. >> So any vector, no matter what it is. I mean, surely that makes sense with the perimeter gone. >> Yes. >> Security certainly has to have that baseline. >> Right. >> We'll give you a good example of that, is now with the whole software-defined network in what we're doing with SD Access, for example, but now we're going back into the data center and there's these complex terms around the overlay network and underlay network and logical and physical and it's becoming incredibly complex. We give the ability to actually see the flows, like, through those complex fabrics and that's an essential toolkit now because you need to be able to find out when there's an issue, where's that coming from, right? That is the, what is the source of that issue? How quickly can you identify that and how quickly can you then remediate it? >> Before you get there I want to follow up on that because one of the focus was here in DevOps side, is automation. If you can't see it, how do you know to automate it? >> Right. >> Does that come into the dialogue or is that? >> That is the dialogue for us here, so, we provide situational awareness. We hope for our end users to understand what's happening across their networks realtime. And then, you know, we work with Cisco, for example, hand in hand on the intent based network. So, being able to provide insights for, you know, the next generation of the products to be able to actually take action. >> Yeah, one of the things we've been watching in the networking space for many years is the use of analytics. And you recently made an acquisition that really ties into that space. Why don't you give us, what led to the acquisition? >> We did, so we had news on Friday and to be fair, I mean, Darren's been leading this charge for us for quite some time because we've been a NetFlow based solution for a long period of time, meaning that we can provide visualization for the devices that we have integrations with, essentially. There's a lot of devices that don't have NetFlow. So we couldn't actually capture them into our visualization engine. So what we did on Friday is we announced the acquisition of Savius, and Savvius is a packet capture and inspection technology company. Been around a long time, some very famous products with Omnipeek and Omnipliance, for example, that are consumed by thousands of customers. And now we're able to, with that appliance, actually tap into all sorts of devices, and suddenly propagate all of that into our visualization engine. So it opens up a dramatically larger and restful opportunity for us and we're kind of defining this to be the next generation of networks and ports management because no one else is doing this visualization across that scope of devices like we are. >> Your observation space is massive now. >> It is. >> Yeah, Darren, I wonder if you'd follow up that 'cause one of the big questions I had coming in to this is, if I'm a networking person, what about all that networking that I don't control anymore that I'm on the hook for it. So, you know, we actually, the network here went down even for a few minutes and we're like, we're here at Cisco Live with, you know, probably the largest single concentration of network people and wireless experts and the like, so, yeah. >> Yeah, so one of the things that we're trying to do now is we're trying to capture all data from basically all endpoints. Whether it be a client to a server, a VM container, doesn't matter what it is. We wanna see it all, we wanna get it from the granular, most granular packet level all the way up, but take all of that data and make it simple for people to understand. You put it on a simple UI, understand a very simple workflow so that they can automatically associate problem or good network behaviors right there on screen without having to, you know, go through the 5,000 page Cisco manual and really understand what exactly is going on. >> Okay. >> I think what's important about that is how quickly can you identify the source of the issue? That's really where we come into play. We talk a lot, even these days, about MTTR, meantime to resolution, that continues to be an essential, kind of, metric that people measure. But what's more important to that even is the initial diagnostic. So, is it the network? Is it, you know, something at the edge of the network? Is it the service provider? You know, where in the network does this happen? And by being able to provide that essential information to the first point of contact it really does help extradite and accelerate the entire process. >> Huge acceleration. Darren, I wanna ask you a point about, sorry Stu, to interrupt but on the acquisition, help the customers that you had on one side understand the benefits of the NetFlow integrations and the NetFlow customers understand the new benefits. What is the customer's orientation? What should they do, I mean, how should they understand the new Live Action? >> Yeah, so what we've added on is the ability to diagnose at a significantly deeper level. So, one of the things LiveAction has always been really good at is voice and video, but we do it at a NetFlow level. So, the problem is, when we try to get down to the very granular level, you know, what exactly is going on? Where is it happening? We were blind to that, frankly. Now, with the packet capture technology we can actually go all the way down and capture down to the millisecond and be able to look back over time and understand exactly where the problem occurred. And that allows our users to actually go in and fix it once and for all. >> And what are they solving with that problem? More point problems, solution resolution? Routing, policy, where does the value live? >> It's all of it, it's all of it. Understand where the packets are dropped. Understand we get down to deep packet inspection, so understanding applications and users and who really is having the problem and why. >> Fake news, maybe? Gonna help us identify fake news out there? >> (laughs) Um, I hadn't thought about that yet. >> And the Russian packet. (laughs) (laughing) >> We've been talking in the network the surface area has continued to grow as we push out to the edge, we push out to SAS, push out to public clouds. How's that impacting you and your customers? >> It's, so, we're definitely trying to stay ahead of that with a few things that we've done recently. So, one of them is, for example, we now have an agent that we can deploy onto servers and workstations in mass quantities so you can now get those, kind of, those elements to be fed into your visualization network as well. We also have the ability to deploy that type of concept into the cloud and into SAS applications so we can then get a pulse coming from them. And so we're starting to correlate all of that together into the same type of workflow. >> Yep. >> Guys, take a minute to talk about your relationship with Cisco. Obviously we're here at Cisco Live, their show, they've got their priorities pretty laid out, they've got a lot of work to do and we heard the CEO talk about some of the pressure they're under with the security alone. I mean, they're running huge networks, networks are changing, what are you guys doing next now that you've got your acquisition papered up and you gotta do some, you know, quick integrations and roll out the integrations. How are you taking that to the next level with Cisco? What are some of the things on your radar, on your horizon, that you can share? >> Well, I think we work so closely with Cisco and the Cisco Enterprise networking team that we're often, you know, looking ahead of the curb as far as where we want to develop and invest in next. For example, you see that with the way we're prototyping the SD Access and Cat9k management. So, we did that in Barcelona, actually, about six months ago. So we were the first out with that. We're doing the exact same thing now with DNA Center and with integration with DNA Center. So, they're able to, like, talk about how LiveAction as a third party is integrating into their framework and extending that framework out for a lot of new innovation. >> Your strategy is to go deep with Cisco. You go down as deep as you can, get everyone geared out on the engineering side. You're nodding your head, yeah. >> Absolutely, that's been our strategy since day one. It's been an awesome partnership for us. I think we've been able to bring, you know, a different point of view and also provide validation, you know, a third party perspective for the end user to understand and have confidence on what exactly the network is doing. >> You know, I get this all the time, entrepreneurs in Silicone Valley always ask me about Cisco and Cisco's had a sustained track record of letting partners take big white spaces. To them it's a white space, to a company it's a, you know, it's an IPO potential, so this is a Cisco thing, talk about that dynamic, 'cause you guys seem to be really solving a big problem and they're happy with it. >> Oh, I think what we've, to your point about white space, I think what LiveAction has been able to really effectively do is be a strong partner to complement the solution that Cisco is already putting out there. So as Brooks had mentioned, you know, in our past we worked very closely with the Cisco Prime team and we brought in things like visualization, for example, quality of service configuration, and as the infrastructure began to, I guess, change over time, you know, through ILAN and now into Viptela, you know, we bring the same kind of ideas. We bring the same posture to the party, if you will, meaning that we try to make it, we try to understand what Cisco Product Management is doing and bring what we do best, the situation awareness, visibility, action ability to that. >> Alright, one of my final questions is, bumper sticker the bottom line for your customers. With the acquisition on Friday, with what you guys going on at Cisco, what's the bottom line for your customers? What are they gonna see? What's the immediate headline for the customer? >> So we've, you know, we've adopted this tagline of defining the next generation of network management, and we think we have a very unique position in defining where that market is going now with the acquisition of Savvius and what we're doing with the ability to visualize all of these different elements. There really isn't anybody out there that's doing anything close to that as far as how we're making it easy to manage increasingly complex networks. It's as simple as that, you know, we've had great conversations here already with many of some of the largest companies in the world and what they're looking for is, I need help, you know, I need help to simplify, right? >> And run at a high level. >> That's right, to kind of deliver the service levels that I'm expected to hold to my, you know, to my Fortune 500 type of enterprise, I need better tools to help me cope with this increasing complexity. >> Alright, Brooks and Darren, I'll put you on the spot with the last question. We're at day one of Cisco Live, what's they big story you see emerging? I know it's day one, we've got two more days, but you can almost see the smoke screen going, the signal's there, what is the top story coming out of Cisco Live 2018, in your opinion? >> I still see software-defined WAN as being massive. I think that, I think I stole his answer. (laughs) But, you know, it's been a topic for such a long time but now we're seeing the implementations happen and it's so exciting because, you know, it's actually bringing real change to networking, something we haven't seen in 10 plus years. >> What's different about SD WAN than the promises were, say, five years ago? That's happening now? >> Well I think now people are actually monetizing them. So now it's enterprise ready, I think Cisco led the whole industry a step forward with the acquisition of Viptela and increased, kind of, the pace of that, of the maturity of those offerings. And now that it's six months in they're being adopted at scale, you have a lot of reference cases now that people are using it, they're getting, deriving the monetary benefit from it, you know, they're taking a step into software-defined and we're kind of in that mainstream adoption phase, is what I would say right now. >> Thanks so much for sharing, great commentary. Congratulations on the success, the new acquisition and the continued integration deep with Cisco. >> Thank you. >> You know, good stuff pays off. Of course, we're here with all the live action coverage. Both LiveAction company and also the live Cube action here at Cisco Live 2018 here. Stay with us, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back after this short break. >> Thank you, gentlemen.