>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting accelerating automation with definite brought to you by Cisco. Hey, welcome back. You're ready, Jeff Freak here with the Cube coming to you from our Palo Alto studios with ongoing coverage of Cisco Definite create. We've been going to definite create, I think, since the very beginning. This year, of course. Like everything else, it's it's virtual. So we're excited to cover it virtually and digitally like we have a lot of other shows here in 2020 and we're excited to have our next guest. We've got Kun Jacobs. He's the director of systems engineering. Francisco, Good to see you. Coun. Thank >>you for having me. >>And joining him is Eric Nippy is the VP of system systems Engineering. Francisco. Good to see Eric. >>Good to be here. Thank you. >>Pleasure. So before we jump into kind of what's going on now, in this new great world of program ability and control, I want to kind of go back to the future for a minute. Because when I was doing some research for this interview, it was kun. I saw an old presentation that you were giving from 2006 about the changing evolution of the changing evolution of networking and moving from. I think the theme was a human centered, human centered network, and you were just starting to touch a little bit on video and online video. Oh my goodness, how far we have come. But but I would love to get kind of historical perspective because we've been talking a lot. And I know Eric Son plays football about the football analogy of the network is kind of like an offensive lineman where if they're doing a good job, you don't hear much about them. But they're really important to everything, and the only time you hear about him was when the flag is thrown. So if you look back with the historical perspective load and the numbers and the evolution of the network as we've moved to this modern time and you know thank goodness, because if Cove it hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know all of us in the information space would not have been able to make this transition, so I just I just love to get some historical perspective because you've been kind of charting this and mapping this for a very long time. >>Yeah, we absolutely have. I think you know what you're referring to was back in the day the human network campaign and to your point that the load, the number of hosts, the traffic just overall, the intelligence of the network has just evolved tremendously over the last decade and a half, 15 years or so. And you look at where we are now in terms of the programmable nature of the network and what that enables in terms of new degrees of relevance that we can create for the customers on how you know the role of I t. Has changed entirely again, especially during this pandemic. You know, the fact that it's now as a service and elastic eyes is absolutely fundamental to being able to ensure, on an ongoing basis a great customer experience. And so it's been It's been a very interesting right, indeed. Yeah, >>And then and then just to close the loop, the one of your more later interviews talking to Sylvia. You're the question is, are you developer an engineer? So And your whole advice to all these network engineers is just Just don't jump in and start doing some coding and learning. So you know, the focus and really the emphasis and where the opportunity to differentiate is a complete is completely 15 years over to the, you know, really software to find side. >>Oh, absolutely. So, I mean, you look at how the software world and the network has come together and how we're applying now, you know, basically the same construct of C I C D pipeline to network infrastructure. Look at network really as code and get all of the benefits from that in the familiarity of it, the way that our engineers have had to evolve in that is just, you know, quite quite significant in like the skill set. And the best thing is jump in, you know, dip your toe in the water, but continue to evolve that skill set. And, you know, don't don't be shy. It's It's a leap of faith for some of us who've been in the industry a bit longer. You know, we like to look at ourselves as the craftsman of the network, but now it's definitely software Centris City and the, um, program ability. >>Right? So, Eric, you've got some digital exhaust out there, too, that I was able to dig up Going back to 2000 and 2 752 page book in the very back corner of a dark, dirty, dusty Amazon warehouse is managing Cisco Network Security 752 pages. Wow. How has security changed? From a time where before I could just read a book, a big book, you know, throw some protocols in and probably block a bunch of ports to the world that we live in today, where everything is connected, everything is a p. I driven. Everything is software defined. You've got pieces of workload spread out all over the place. And, Oh, by the way, you need to bake security in at every single level of the application stack. >>Yeah, No eso Wow. Kudos that you you found that book. I'm really impressed there, so thank you. Little street credit. So I want to get on something that you you talked about because I think it's very important to to this overall conversation if we think about the scale of the network and coun hit on it briefly. You talked about it as well. We're seeing a massive explosion of devices by the you know it's estimated By the end of this year, there's gonna be about 27 billion devices on the global Internet. That's about 3.7 devices for every man, woman and child life. And if we extrapolate that out over the course of the next decade on the growth trajectory, we're on. And if you look at some of the published research on this, it's estimated there could be upwards of 500 billion devices accessing the global Internet on a on a daily basis in the primarily that that that is I o T devices. That's digitally connected devices. Anything that can be connected will be connect, but then introduces a really interesting security challenge because every one of those devices that is accessing the global Internet is within a company's infrastructure. Accessing pieces of corporate data is a potential attack factor, so we really need Thio and I think the right expression for this is we need to reimagine security because security is, as you said, not about perimeters. You know, I wrote that book back in 2002. I was talking about firewalls and a cutting edge technology was intrusion, prevention and intrusion detection. Now we need to look at security. Really? In the in the guise of under the under the under the realm of really two aspects the identity. Who is accessing the data in the context, What data is being access and that is going to require a level of intelligence, a level of automation and technologies like machine learning, an automated intelligence. They're going to be our artificial intelligence. Rather are gonna be table stakes because the sheer scale of what we're trying to secure is going to be untenable under current. You know, just current security practices mean the network is gonna have to be incredibly intelligent and leverage again, a lot of that AI type of data to match patterns of potential attacks and ideally, shut them down before they ever cause any type of damage. >>Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, one thing That cove it has done a bunk many things is kind of re taught us all about the power of exponential curves and how extremely large those things are and how fast they grow. We had Dave Rennes in on it Google Cloud a couple years ago, and I remember him talking about early days of Google when they were starting to map out kind of, as you describe kind of map out their growth curves, and they just figured out they could not hire if they hired everybody, they couldn't hire enough people to deal with it, right? So really kind of rethinking automation and re thinking about the way that you manage these things and and the level right, the old Is it a pet or is it or is it, um, part of the herd? And I think it's interesting what you talked about coun really human powered Internet and being driven by a lot of this video. But to what you just said, Erik, the next big wave right is I, O. T and five G. And I think you know, you talk about 3.7 of devices per person. That's nothing compared toa right, all these sensors and all these devices and all these factories because five G is really targeted to machine to machines, which there's ah lot of them, and they trade a lot of information really, really quickly. So, you know, I want to go back to Yukun thinking about this next great wave in a five G i o t kind of driven world where it's kind of like one voice kind of fell off compared to I p traffic on the network, I think you're going to see the same thing. Kind of human generated data relative to machine generated data is also gonna fall off dramatically. Is the machine generated data just skyrockets through the roof? >>Yeah. No, absolutely. And I think thio also what Eric touched on the visibility on that and they'll be able to process that data at the edge that's going to catalyze cloud adoption even further. And it's gonna, you know, make the role of the network the connectivity of it all, and the security within that crucially important. And then you look at the role of program ability. Within that, we're see the evolution going so fast. You look at the element of the software defined network in an I. O. T. Speed space. We see that we have hosts there that are not necessarily, you know, behaving like other hosts would on a network, for example, manufacturing floor production, robot or security camera. And what we're seeing is we're seeing you know, partners and customers employing program ability to make sure that we overcome some of the shortcomings, uh, in terms of where the network is at. But then how do you customize it in terms of the relevance that it can provide, bringing on board those those hosts in a very transparent way on then, you know, keep keep the agility of it and keep the speed of innovation going right, >>right. So, Eric, I want to come back to you and shift gears kind of back to the people will leave the A. D and the machines along along for middle minute. But I'm curious about what does beat the boss. I mean, I I go to your LinkedIn profile and it's just filled with congratulatory statements, but everyone's talking about beating the boss. You know, it's it's a really, you know, kind of interesting and different way toe to motivate people to build this new skill set in terms of getting software certifications within the Cisco world. And I just thought it was really cute the way that you clearly got people motivated because there's posts all over the place and they've all got their their nice big badge of their certification. But, you know, at a higher level, it is a different motivation to be a developer versus and engineering a technician. And it's a, you know, kind of a different point of view. And I just wonder if you could share, you know, some of the ways that you're kind of encouraging, you know, kind of this transformation within your own workforce as well as the partners, etcetera and really adopting kind of almost a software first in this program kind of point of view versus, you know, I'm just wiring stuff up. >>Apparently, a lot of people like to beat me. So I mean, that in of itself was was a was a great success. But, you know, if we think we take a step back, you know, what is Cisco about as an organization? I mean, obviously, he looked back to the very early days of our vision, right? It was. It was to change the way the world, you know, worked, played, live and learn. And if you think about and you hit on this when we were you know, your discussion with with With Kun in the early days of Cove it. We really saw that play out as so much shifted from, you know, in person type of interactions to virtual interactions in the network that that our customers, our partners, our employees built over the course of the last several last three decades really help the world continue Thio to to do business for students to continue to go thio school or, you know, clinicians to connect with patients. If I think about that mission to meet program ability is just the next generation of that mission, uh, continuing to enable the world to communicate, continuing to enable customers, employees, partners to, uh, essentially leverage the network for more than just connectivity. Now the leverage it for critical insight again, If we look at some of the some of the use cases that we're seeing for social distancing and contact tracing, the network has a really important place to play there because we can pull insight from the but it isn't necessarily and out of the box type of integration. So I look at program ability and and what we're doing with debt net to give relevance to the network for those types of really critical conversations that every organization is having right now. It's a way to extrapolate its away thio full critical data so that I can make a decision and I if that decisions automated or if that decision requires some type of a manual intervention, regardless, we're still about connecting, or in this case, we're connecting insight with the people who need it most. The definite pounds we ran is really in respect for how critical this new skills that's going to be. It's not enough. Like I said, just to connect the world anymore. We need to leverage that network, the network for that critical insight. And when we dropped were created to beat the boss challenge, it was really simple. Hey, guys, I think this is important and I am going to go out, and I'm gonna achieve the certification myself because I want to continue to be very relevant. I'm gonna continue to be able to provide that insight for my customers and partners. So therefore I'm going for it. Anybody can get there before me. Maybe there's a little incentive tied to and the incentive, although it's funny, we interviewed a lot of ah, a lot of our team who achieved it Incentive with secondary. They just wanted have bragging rights like, Yeah, I beat Eric, Right, Right. >>Absolutely. No, that Z you know, put your money where your mouth is, right? If it's important than what you know, you should do it too. And you know, the whole not asking people to do what you wouldn't do yourself. So I think there's a lot of good leadership, uh, leadership lessons there as well. But I wanna extend kind of the conversation on the Koven impact. Right? Because I'm sure you've seen all the social media means you know who's driving your digital transformation, the CEO of the CMO or cove it. And we all know the answer to the question. But you know, you guys have already been dealing with kind of increased complexity around enterprise infrastructure, world in terms of cloud and public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi cloud, and people are trying to move stuff all the way around. Now suddenly had this co vid moment right in March, which is really a light switch moment. People didn't have time to plan or prepare for suddenly everybody working from home and it's not only you but your spouse and your kids and everybody else. So but now we're six months plus into this thing, and I would just love to get your perspective, you know, and kind of the change from Oh, my goodness, we have to react to the light switch moment. What do we do to make sure people can can get get what they need when they need it from where they are? But but then really moving from this is an emergency situation. Stopgap situation toe. This is going to extend for some period of time. And even when it's the acute crisis is over, you know this is going to drive. Ah, riel change in the way that people communicate in the way that people where they sit and do their job and kind of how customers are responding accordingly as the you know, kind of the narrative has changed from an emergency stop gap to this is the new normal that we really need thio to plan for. >>So I think I think you said it very well. I think anything that could be digitized any any interaction that could be driven virtually waas. And what's interesting is we, as you said. We went from that light switch moment where, and I believe the status this and I'll probably get the number wrong. But like in the United States here at the beginning, at the end of February, about 2% of the knowledge worker population was virtual, you know, working from home or in a remote work environment. And over the course of about 11 days, that number went from 2% to 70% in interesting that it worked. You know, there was a lot of hiccups along the way, and there was a lot of organizations making really quick decisions on How do I enable VPN scale of mass? How doe I, you know, leverage. You know, things like WebEx for virtual meetings in virtual connectivity much faster now that as you said that we've kind of gotten out of the fog of war or frog fog of battle organizations, we're looking at what they accomplished. And it was nothing short of Herculean and looking at this now from a transition. Thio Oh my gosh, we need to change, too. We have an opportunity to change and we're looking. We see a lot of organizations specifically around financial services, health care through the K through 20 educational environment, all looking at how can they doom or virtually for a couple of reasons? Obviously, there is a significant safety factor, and again, we're still in that we're still in the height of this pandemic. They want to make sure their employees, their customers, students patients remain safe. But second, we've found in discussions with a lot of senior I T executives and our customers that people are happier working from home. People are more productive working from home. And that again, the network that's been built over the course of the last few decades has been resilient enough to allow that to happen. And then, third, there is a potential cost savings here outside of people. The next most expensive resource that organizations are paying for is real estate. If they can shrink that real estate footprint while providing a better user experience at the locations that they're maintaining again leveraging things like location services, leveraging things like, uh, unified collaboration that's very personalized to the end users experience, they're going to do that and again they're going to save money. They're gonna have happier employees, and ultimately they're gonna make their their employees in their customers a lot safer. So we see, we believe that there is in some parts of the economy, a shift that is going to be more permanent. And some estimates put it as high as 15% of the current workforce is going to stay today in a virtual or a semi virtual working environment for the foreseeable future. >>Interesting. And I would say I'd say 15% is low, especially if you if you qualify it with, you know, part time, right? There was a great interview were doing and, you know, talk about working from home. He used to work from home as the exception, right? Because the cable person was coming or you get a new washing machine or something, where now that's probably get, you know, in many cases will shift to the other where I'm generally gonna work from home unless you know somebody's in town or have an important meeting or there's some special collaboration. Uh, that drives me to be in. But, you know, I wanna go back to Yukun and and really doubled down on. You know, I think most people spend too much time focusing, especially. We'll just say within the virtual events base where we play on the things you can't do virtually. We can't meet in the hall. We can't grab a quick coffee to drink instead of focusing on the positive things like we're accomplishing right here. You're in Belgium, right? Eric is in Ohio, were in California. Um, and you know, we didn't take three days to travel and and check into a hotel and and all that stuff to get together for this period of time. So there's a lot of stuff that digital enables. And I think, you know, people need to focus more on that versus continuing to focus on the two or three things that that it doesn't replace, and it doesn't replace those. So let's just get that off the table and move on with our lives because those are coming back anytime soon. >>No, totally. I think it's the balance of those things. It's guarding the fact that you're not necessarily working for home. I think the trick there is you could be sleeping at the office, but I think the positives airway way more out spoken. I you know, I look at myself I got much more exercise time in these last couple of months than I usually do because you don't travel. You don't have the jet lag and the connection. And then you talked about those face to face moments. I think a lot of people are, in a way, wanting to go back to the office part time, as Eric also explained. But a lot of it you could do virtually. We have virtual coffees with team or, you know, even here in Belgium are are local. General manager has, ah, virtual aperitif. Every Friday obviously skipped the one this week. But you know, there's there's ways to be very creative with the technology and the quality of the technology that the network enables, Um, you know, to to get the basketball world right, >>So I just we're gonna wrap the segment. I wanna give you guys both the last word. You both Francisco for a while and you know, Susie, we and the team on Definite has really grown this thing. I think we were there at the very beginning couple of 456 years ago. I can't keep track of time anymore, but you know, it's really really grown. And, you know, the timing is terrific to get into this more software defined world, which is where we are. I wonder if you could just, you know, kind of share a couple of thoughts is, you know, with a little bit of perspective. And you know what you're excited about today and kind of what you see coming down the road. Since you guys have been there for a while, you've been in the space. Uh, let's start with Yukun. >>Okay? I think the possibility it creates, I think, really program ability, software defined is really about the art of the possible. It's what you can dream up and then go code Eric talked about the relevance of it and how it maximizes that relevance. And a customer base is, um, you know, and then it is the evolution off the teams in terms of the creativity that they can bring to it. We're seeing really people dive into that in customers, um, co creating with us on. I think that's where we're going in terms of like the evolution off the value proposition there in terms of what technology can provide, but also how it impacts people as we discussed and and redefines process. >>I love that the art of the possible, which is a lot harder to execute in, uh, hardware than software certainly takes a lot longer. >>America, I >>love to get your thoughts. >>Absolutely. So I started my career in Cisco turning, putting I P phones onto the network. And back then, you know, it was, you know, 1 4002 when three idea of putting telephones onto the network was such a of just such an objectionable idea. And so many purists were telling us all the reasons it wouldn't work. Now, if we go forward again 19 years, the idea of not having them plugging into the network is a ridiculous idea. So we have a We're looking at an inflection point in this industry, and it's really it's not about programming is not necessarily about programming. It's about doing it smarter. It's about being more efficient. It's about driving automation. But again, it's about unlocking the value of what the network is. We've moved so far past what you know, just connectivity. The network touches everything and is more workload. Moves to the cloud is more workload moves to things like containers. The network is the really the only common element that ties all of these things together. The network needs to take its rightful place, uh, in the in the i t. Lexicon as being that critical for that critical insight provider for for how users are interacting with the network. How users air interacting with applications, how applications are interacting with one another. Program ability is a way to do that more efficiently with greater, greater degree of certainty, with much greater relevance into the overall delivery of I t services and digitization. So to me, I think we're gonna look back 20 years from now, probably even 10 and say, Man, we used to configure things manually. What was that like? I think I think really, this is This is the future, and I think we want to be aligned with where we're going versus where we've been. >>Well, coun Eric. Thank you for sharing your perspective. You know, it's it's really nice to have, you know, some historical reference on. It's also nice to be living in a new age where you can you can, you know, stay at the same company and and still refresh. You know, new challenges, new opportunities and grow this thing because a zoo said I remember those i p first i p phone days and I thought, Well, Ma Bell must be happy because the old Mother's Day problem is finally solved when we don't have to have a >>dedicated connection >>between every mother and every child in the middle of May. So good news. So thank you very much for sharing your, uh, your insights and really, really enjoyed the conversation. >>Thank you. >>Yeah. All >>right. He's kun. He was Eric. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube for continuing coverage of Cisco Definite Connect. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting accelerating automation with definite brought to you by Cisco. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with the que were in Palo Alto studio with ongoing coverage of Cisco definite create. We've been covering definite create for a number of years, I think since the very first show. And Susie, we and the team really built a practice, built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and getting Debs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software defined networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and developing solutions and using brain power that's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have our next guest. Ah, partner for someone is Brad Haas. He is the engineering director for Dev Ops at Presidio. Brad, great to see you. >>Hey, Jeff. Great to be here. >>Absolutely. And joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect, Francisco Definite partners. And he has been driving ah, whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, Great to see you. >>Thanks, Jeff. Great to be here. Looking forward to this conversation. >>Absolutely. So let's let's >>start >>with you, Chuck. Because I think, um, you know, you're leading this kind of partner effort and, you know, software defined networking has been talked about for a long time, and, you know, it's really seems to be maturing. And software to find everything right has been taking over, especially with with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the customer program ability, custom ability in software and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about, you know, the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is toe have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. >>Yeah, Jeff, Absolutely. So along this whole journey of definite, where we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of versus co platforms, most of Cisco's business is transacted through partners, and what we hear from our customers and our partners is they wanna our customers one away to be able to identify. Does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey. I'm trying to do do a new implementation. I wanna automate that. How can I find a partner? Thio, Get there. And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices going along this definite journey with us for the last six years. They really want to say, Hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and given edge to my customers to show them that, Yes, I have these capabilities. I built a business practice. I have technology. I have technologists that really understand this capability, and they have the definite certifications to prove it helped me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what are definite partner. Specialization is all about >>right, that's great. And, Brad, you're certainly one of those partners. And I want to get your perspective because partners are often times a little bit closer to the customer because you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions and just reflect on. We know what happened back in March 15th, when basically everybody was told to go home on You can't goto work, so you know there's all the memes and social media about who you know, who pushed forward your digital transformation. The CEO of the CMO or cove it. And we all know what the answer is. Whatever you can share some information. So what happened then? And really, for your business and your customers, and then reflect now we're six months into it. Six months plus and and you know, this new normal is going to continue for a while. How is the customer? Attitudes kind of change now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment. And really, we need to put in place, um foundation to carry forward for a very long time. Potentially. >>Yeah, it was really quite interesting, actually. You know, when code first hit, we got a lot of requests. Thio help with automation of provisioning our customers. And in the whole, you know, digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there, and I'd say it became or of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly, uh, you know, migrating customers. Thio. You know, new topology is where instead of the, you know, users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly and waited. Have a lot of success there in those beginning months with, you know, using automation and program ability building, you know, provisioning portals for our customers. Thio get up and running really fast on. But that is what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that the the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit, you know, Now they're asking, you know, how can I take advantage of the technology to, you know, look at my office is in a different way, You know, for example, you know how many people are coming in and out of those locations, you know, what's the usage of my e? My conference rooms are there, Uh, are there, um, situations where I can use that information like, how many people are in the building at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that? You know, like, do I even need this office anymore? So? So the conversations really changed in ways that you couldn't have imagined before march. >>Now, I wonder with you, Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view. I mean, the network is amazing. It had had co vid struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. You know, clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly. Entertainment, Um, restaurant, business, transportation, they, you know, hospitality. But for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. Um, you know, and and the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if you know, kind of from your perspective, as suddenly, you know, the importance of the network, the importance of security and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that, having, you know, definite with with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space is good spaces. You could be giving this new challenge thrown at you. >>Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. Uh, Cisco has always pushed the idea that the network is transformational. The network is the foundation. And as our customers have really adopted that message, it is enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. So for myself. I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years this is you know, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore. But my day to day functions are are still the same, and it's built because of the capabilities we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry as faras kind of moving to that application type of economy as we go to micro services as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud. Those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this to this covitz situation, and I think it's helped to to justify the investments that that our customers have made. A swell is what our partners have been being able to do to deliver on that multi cloud capability to take those applications, get him closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable. Thio users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional four walls, >>right, right, it's interesting. And Brad, you made a comment on another interview I was watching getting ready for this one in terms of applications. Now, being first class citizens was was what you said, and it's kind of interesting coming from an infrastructure point of view where before it was, you know, what do I have and what can I build on it now? Really, it's the infrastructure, that response back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that APS first is the way to go, because that gives people the competitive advantage that gives them the ability to react in the marketplace to innovate and move faster. So, you know, it's a It's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. >>Yeah, yeah, no doubt. And, you know, I think that the whole push the cloud was really interesting In the early days, it was like, Hey, we're going to you change our applications to be cloud first, you know, And then I think the terminology changed over time. I've, um, team or cloud native. So when we when we look at what Cloud has done over the past five years, with customers moving, you know, there their assets into the cloud in the early days that we were all looking at it just like another data center. But what it's really become is a place thio host your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're no longer talking about you know, the assets per se. We're talking about the applications and what what did those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially what with the whole move to cloud native and micro services in the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure. As code you're now able toe, bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application as infrastructure is code, the application in this the definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are all are wrapped together and you've got changed control, version control. Um, and it's all automated, you know, it's it's a beautiful thing, and I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. You know, when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking. I think everybody was trying to figure it out, and they didn't really fully understand what that meant. Now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like, as it's as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's terror, former answerable, whatever that might be. Whatever method or tool that you're using Thio to bring it all together. It Z you know, it's really interesting. You know, I think I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than you know, when those early days of S d. N, we're out, you know, it was a positive controller. Is it the new version of S and M. P? You know, now it makes sense. It's actually something tangible, >>right? Right. But still, Chuckas, you said, right? There's still a lot of AP ice, and there's still a lot of component pieces to these applications that are all run off. The network that all have to fit, uh, have to fit together. You know, we cover pager duty summit and you know, their whole thing is trying to find out where the problems are within a very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandoned the shopping cart or whatever the particular applications. So again, the network infrastructure and the program ability. Super important. But I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of. And they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. >>Yeah, absolutely, Jeff. So the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference? I mean, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the Internet, the amount of people necessary to to be able to facilitate that type of traffic. If we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not scale. It's automation that makes that possible. That allows us to look higher up the ability to do that. Automatic provisions provisioning. Now that we're in micro services, now that everything is cloud native, we have the ability to to better to better adjust to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we could very quickly spend something up to to take that load off where traditionally it was. Open up a ticket. Let me get someone in there. Let me fix it. Now it's instantaneously identify the solution. Go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team. They just simply need to get notified that this happened. And as long as there's traceability in a point that Brad Maeda's faras you being able to go through here doing the automation of the documentation side of it, I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the A p, i s from the infrastructure and then the ability to tie that into other systems like an I p address management or a change control or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made in infrastructure changed and now I can automatically do that. Documentation up Dayton record. I know who did it. I know when they did it, and I know what they did. And I know what the test results were even five years ago. That was fantasy land. Now, today, that's just the new normal. That's just how we all operates. >>Right? Right, Right. So I want to get your take on the other trend, which is cloud Multi Cloud, Public Cloud. You know, as I think you said, Brad, When Public Cloud first came out, there was kind of this this Russian to we're gonna throw everything in there than for for different reasons. People decided. Maybe that's not the best, the best solution. But really, it's horses for courses, right? And I think it's pretty interesting that that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're gonna put their workloads. And, oh, by the way, that might not be a static place, right? It might be moving around based on, you know, maybe I do my my initial Dev and an Amazon. And then when I go into production, maybe I wanna move it into my data center, and then maybe I'm having a big promotion or something. I wanna flex capability. So from from your perspective and helping customers work through this because still, there's a lot of opinions about what is multi cloud, what is hybrid cloud? And, you know, it's horses for courses. How are you helping people navigate that? And what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through? You know, everybody talks about their journey. I think they're still, you know, kind of bumbling down, bumbling down past, trying to find new things. What works, what doesn't work. And I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. >>Yeah, no doubt is still early days. And you know, I e go back Thio being applications centric because, you know, being able thio understand that application. When you move to the cloud, it may not look like what it used to look like. When you when you move it over there, you may be breaking parts off of it. Some of them might be running on a platform as a service, while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as a service, and some of it might still be in your data center. Those applications are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier. Those resource is wherever they are and be defined in that infrastructure is code and automation. But you know, decide from provisioning. I think we focus a lot about provisioning when we talk about automation. We also have these amazing capabilities on on the side of operations to like we've got streaming telemetry in the ability Thio gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before or at least in the, you know, in the early days of monitoring software, right? You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. It probably had a friendly name. Like, maybe it was something from the Hobbit. Right now you've got things coming up in spinning, spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place in that thing. You used to know what that waas Now you have toe quickly. Figure out where it went, so the observe ability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody, um, should be paying attention, attention to moving forward with. Regards, Thio when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers Or, you know, in your premise, um, breaking that in a micro services you really need to understand what's going on in the, you know, program ability in a p I s and, you know, yang models or tied into streaming telemetry. Now there's just so many break things coming out of this, you know? And it's all like a data structure that that people who are going down this path and the definite path they're learning these data structures and be able to rationalize and make sense of them. Once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or a switch. Um, Amazon. You know, it doesn't matter. You're you're all speaking a common language, which is that data structure. >>That's great, Chuck. I want to shift gears a little bit because there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about about, you know, definite really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco, um, as really more of a software software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you could put a little more color on that, Um, because clearly, as you said partners Air super important, it's your primary go to market and and Presidio's, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world. That's and you know, you said, there's some There's some, you know, nontraditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner, that suddenly you guys were playing with because of really the software lead. >>Yes, Jeff, that's exactly right. So as we've been talking to folks with Devon, it's whether it be at one of the Cisco Live events in the Definite zone or the prior definite create events will have. We'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views as a as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resale market. This what we're doing with the definite specialization gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem share them with are extremely large, definite community so they can get access to those to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner to partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they built a fantastic networking. They always have the fantastic networking business, but they built this fantastic automation business that's there. But they may come into into a scenario where it's working with their vertical or working with the technology piece that they may not have an automation practice for. We can leverage some of these software specific partners to come in there and do a joint goto markets where so they could go where that traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value. On top of that traditional stack that brings us to this business, outcomes of the customers are looking for a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion. >>That's terrific. Well, again, it zits unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the Cisco definite shows you know, they're still small, they're still intimate. There's still a lot of information sharing and, you know, great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the computers Museum, I think, the last couple of years. And in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together. Hope maybe, maybe for next year's event. But thank you very much for for stopping by and sharing the information. Really appreciate it. >>You have a happy to be here. All >>right, Thanks a lot. That's Brad and Chuck. I'm Jeff. You're watching Cisco. Definite live coverage on the Cube. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>>Around the globe presenting accelerating automation with Deb brought to you by Cisco >>We're back. This is Dave Vellante and TKK Anini is here. He's a distinguished engineer at Cisco TK, my friend. Good to see you again. >>How are you? >>Good. I mean, you and I were in Barcelona in January and, you know, we knew we saw this thing coming, but we didn't see it coming this way. Did we? >>No, that no one did, but yeah, it, uh, that was right before everything happened. >>Well, it's weird. Right? I mean, we were, you know, we, we, it was in the back of our minds in January, we sort of had Barcelona's hasn't really been hit yet. It looked like it was really isolated in China, but, uh, but wow, what a change and I guess, I guess I'd say I'd start with the, we're seeing really a secular change in, in your space and security identity, access management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden these things have exploded as the work from home pivot has occurred. Uh, and, and it feels like these changes are permanent or semi-permanent what are you seeing out there? >>Yeah, I don't, I don't think anybody thinks the world's going to go back the way it was. Um, to some degree it's, it's changed forever. Um, you know, I, I, I do a lot of my work remotely. Um, and, and so, you know, being a remote worker, isn't such a big deal for me, but for some, it was a huge impact. And like I said, you know, um, remote work, remote education, you know, everybody's on the opposite side of a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect. And the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. >>Yeah. And when you see that, you know, that work from home pivot, I mean, you know, our estimates are, are along with our partner DTR about 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to COVID and now it's, you know, North of 70% plus, and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next, next six months. We'll see what happens with the fall surge, but what people essentially accept, expect that to, you know, at least double that 16%, you know, going forward indefinitely. So what does that, what kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and how, how organizations are approaching security? >>Yeah, I just think, uh, from a mindset standpoint, you know, what was optional, uh, maybe, um, last year, uh, is no longer optional and I don't think it's going to go back. Um, I think, I think a lot of people, uh, have changed the way, you know, they live and the way they work. Um, and they're doing it in ways, hopefully that, you know, in some cases, uh, yield more productivity, um, again, um, you know, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is it frankly works just as well for the bad guys. And so that's, that's the balance we need to keep, which is we need to be extra diligent, uh, on how we go about securing infrastructure, uh, how we go about securing even our social channels, because remember all our social channels now are digital. So that's, that's become the new norm. >>No, you've helped me understand over the years. I remember a line you shared with me in the cube one time is that the adversary is highly capable, is sort of the phrase that you used. And, and essentially the way you describe it, as you know, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease their, the bad guy's return on investment, you know, increase their costs, increase the numerator. But as, as work shifts from home, I'm in my house, you know, my wifi in my, you know, router with my dog's name is the password. You know, it's much, much harder for me to, to increase that denominator at home. So can you help? >>Yeah. I mean, it's, it is, it is truly, um, when you think, when you get into the mind of the adversary and, and, uh, you know, the cyber crime out there, they're honestly just like any other business they're trying to, you know, operate with high margin. And so if you can get there, if you can get in there and erode their margin, they'll frankly go find something else to do. Um, and, and again, you know, you know, the shift we experience day to day is it's not just our kids are online in school and, uh, our work is online, but all the groceries we order, um, you know, this Thanksgiving and holiday season, uh, a lot more online shopping is going to take place. So, you know, everything's gone digital. And so the question is, you know, how, how do we up our game there so that, um, we can go about our business, uh, effectively and make it very expensive for the adversary to operate, uh, and take care of their business. Cause it's nasty stuff. >>I want to ask you about automation, you know, generally, and then specifically how it applies to security. So we, I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyperscalers and of course they really attacked the it labor problem. We learned a lot from that and an it organizations have applied much of that thinking. And the it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace, the technology scales today, how does that apply to security and specifically, how is automation affecting a security? >>Yeah, it's, it's, it's the topic these days. Um, you know, businesses, I think, realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like AI and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand, uh, and operate at machine scale. Now, I mean that for, for businesses, I mean that for, you know, education and everything else now, so are the adversaries, right? So it's expensive for them to operate at Cuban scale and they are going to machine scale, going to machine scale, uh, a necessity is that you're going to have to harness some level of automation, have the machines, uh, work on your behalf, have the machines carry your intent. Um, and when you do that, um, you can do it safely or you could do it dangerously. And that that's really kind of your choice. Um, you know, just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should, um, you, you wanna make sure that frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's, it's a tricky thing because, you know, if when you take the phrase, you know, uh, how do we, how do we automate security? Well, you actually have to take care of, of securing the automation first. >>Yeah. We talked about this in Barcelona, where you were explaining that, you know, the, the bad guys, the adversaries are essentially, you know, weaponizing using your own tooling, which makes them appear safe because it's, they're hiding in plain sight, right? >>Yeah. Well, there's, they're clever, uh, giving them that, um, you know, there's this phrase that they, they always talk about called living off the land. Um, there's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools and, uh, and being detective, you know, if they can use the tools that's already there, then they have, uh, a higher degree of, of evading, uh, your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob, who's already been credentialed and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not marked as the adversary. So again, you know, having the detection methods available to find their behavioral anomalies and things like that become a paramount, but it also you having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to, you know, minimize their effectiveness, um, without it, I mean, ideally without human interaction, cause you, you just, can you move faster, you move quicker. Um, and I see that with an asterisk because, um, if done wrong, frankly, um, you're just making their job more effective. >>I wonder if we could talk about the market a little bit, uh, it's I'm in the security space, cybersecurity 80 plus billion, which by the way, is just a little infant testable component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that, that massive, uh, GDP, but guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them, what's your, what's your biggest challenge? They'll say lack of talent. And, and so what this chart shows is from ETR, our, our, our survey partner and on the vertical axis is net score. And that's an indication of spending momentum on the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence, a pervasiveness, if you will, inside the data sets. And so there's a couple of key points here. I wanted to put forth to our audience and then get your reactions. >>So you can see Cisco, I highlighted in red Cisco's business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter. It's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the, on the conference call. And so you can see on the horizontal axis, you've got a big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere, but you're right there, uh, in that, in that dataset. And then you've got for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. But the other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here. And that just adds to the complexity. This is of course only a subset of what's in the security space. You know, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is how can Cisco help simplify this picture? Is it automation? Is it, you know, you guys have done some really interesting tuck in acquisitions and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left there it's, um, I had a customer tell me once that, you know, I, I came to this trade show looking for transportation and these people are trying to sell me car parts. Um, that's the frustration customers have, you know, and I think what Cisco has done really well is to really focus on outcomes. Um, what is the customer outcome? Cause ultimately that's, that is what the customer wants. You know, there might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closest you can closer, you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think, I think security in general has just year over year been just written with, um, you need to be an expert. Um, you need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself. And I think, I think those days are behind us, but particularly as, as security becomes more pervasive and we're, you know, we're selling to the business, we're not selling to the, you know, t-shirt wearing hacker anymore. >>Yeah. So, well, well, how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about cloud people that God put my data in the cloud I'm safe, but you know, of course we know it's a shared responsibility model. So I'm interested in your, your thoughts on that. Is it really, is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way, say, Oh, the state of security is great in the cloud. Whereas many of us out there saying, wow, it's, it's not so great. Uh, so what, what are your thoughts on that, that whole narrative and what Cisco's play in cloud? >>I think cloud, um, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern, which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible. Um, you know, no data center required, no distract required, you just get storage, you know, it's, it's, it's all of those things that are again, closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud two is it's really been, it's really punctuated the way we go about building systems. Um, again at machine scale. So, you know, before, when I write code and I think about, Oh, what computers are gonna run on or, you know, what servers are going to is you're going to run on those. Those thoughts never crossed my mind anymore. You know, I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do and the machines then figure it out. So, you know, for instance, on Tuesday, if the entire internet shows up, uh, the, the system works without fail. And if on Wednesday, if only North America shows up, you know, so, but, but, but there's no way you could staff that, right. There's just no human scale approach that gets you there. And that's, that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff is, um, it really is, uh, the next level of how we do computer science. >>So you're talking about infrastructure as code and that applies to security as code. That's what, you know, dev net is really all about. I've said many times, I think Cisco of the, the large established enterprise companies is one of the few, if not the only, that really has figured out, you know, that developer angle, because it's practical, you're not trying to force your way into developers, but, you know, I wonder if you could, you could talk a little bit about that trend and where you see it going. >>Yeah, no, that is, that is truly the trend. Every time I walk into dev net, um, the big halls at Cisco live, it is Cisco as code. Um, everything about Cisco is being presented through an API. It is automation ready. And, and frankly, that is, um, that is the, the love language of cloud. Um, it's, it's machines, it's the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So, uh, you know, it is the, the, uh, I think, I think necessary, maybe not sufficient but necessary for, um, you know, doing all the machine scale stuff. What what's also necessary, uh, is to, um, to secure if infrastructure is code therefore, um, what, what secure, uh, what security methodologies do we have today that we use to secure code? While we, we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, right? Those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So then when I, when I talk about how do you do, uh, automation securely, you do it the same way you secure your code, you test it, you, you threaten model, you, you, you say, you know, can my adversary, uh, exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intend it to go. Um, so all of those practices apply. It's just, everything is code these days. >>I've often said that security and privacy are sort of two sides of the same coin. And I want to ask you a question and it's really, you know, to me, it's not necessarily Cisco and company like companies like Cisco's responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you can help. And of course, there's this Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma. I don't know if you have a chance to see it, but basically dramatizes the way in which companies are appropriating our data to sell us ads and, you know, creating our own little set of facts, et cetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy and admin. It's good from the standpoint of awareness, you know, you may or may not care if you're a social media user. I love tick-tock, I don't care, but, but, but they, they sort of laid out. This is pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that and you'll consist go play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy. I mean, beyond GDPR and California, consumer privacy act, um, what do you think? >>Yeah. Um, uh, I'll give you my, you know, my humble opinion is you, you fix social problems with social tools, you fixed technology problems with technology tools. Um, I think there is a social problem, um, uh, that needs to be rectified the, you know, um, we, we, weren't built as human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. It's just pretty wrong. So yeah, that, that, that, um, that series that really kind of wake up a lot of people it is, is, you know, it's probably every day I hear somebody asked me if I saw it. Um, but I do think it also, you know, with that level of awareness, I think we, we overcome it or we compensate by what number one, just being aware that it's happening. Um, number two, you know, how you go about solving it, I think maybe come down to an individual or even a community's, um, solution and what might be right for one community might be, you know, not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >>Yeah. So it's, it's, it's almost, I think if I could, you know, play back, what I heard is, is yeah. Technology, you know, maybe got us into this problem, but technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic AI bot is going to solve this. It's got to be, you know, society has to really, really take this on as your, your premise. >>When I, when I first started, um, playing online games, I'm going back to the text based adventure stuff, like muds and moves. I did a talk at, at MIT one time and, um, this old curmudgeon in the back of the room, um, we were talking about democracy and we were talking about, you know, the social processes that we had modeled in our game and this and that. And this guy just gave us the SmackDown. He basically walked up to the front of the room and said, you know, all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes. He says, democracy is a completely the opposite, which is you need to sleep on it. In fact, you shouldn't be scared if somebody can decide in a minute, what is good for the community? It is two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community. So it almost has the opposite dynamic. And that was super interesting to me. >>That's really interesting, you know, you read the, like the, the Lincoln historians and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long, you know, to make certain decisions, but, you know, ultimately when he acted acted with, with confidence. Um, so to that point, but, um, so what, what else are you working on these days that, uh, that are, that is interesting that maybe you want to share with our audience? Anything that's really super exciting for you or you, >>Yeah. You know, generally speaking, I'm trying to try and make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's a general theme making it simpler for the common person to use, uh, tools. Um, again, you know, it, all of these security tools, no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity, it's that we're moving the complexity away from the user so that they can thrive at human scale. And we can do things at machine scale and kind of working those two together is, is sort of the, the magic recipe is, is not easy, but, um, but it is, it is fun. So that's, that's what keeps me engaged. I'm definitely >>Seeing, I wonder if you see it as just sort of a, obviously a heightened organization awareness, but I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. You know, the, you know, it used to be a sec ops team and an Island. Okay, it's your problem? You know, the, the, the CSO cannot report into the, to the CIO because that's like the Fox in the hen house, a lot of those structures are, are, are changing. It seems, and be becoming this responsibility is coming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there and what are you? >>Yeah, no, and it's so familiar to me because, you know, um, I started out as a musician. So, you know, bands bands are a great analogy. You know, you play bass, I big guitar. You know, somebody else plays drums, everybody knows their role and you create something that's larger than, you know, the sum of all parts. And so that, that analogy I think, is coming to, you know, we, we saw it sort of with dev ops where, you know, the developer, doesn't just throw their coat over the wall and it's somebody else's problem. They move together as a band. And, and that's what I think, um, organizations are seeing is that, you know, why, why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business? Not just here's the product and here's the rest of the business. That's, that's, that's pretty awesome. Um, I think, uh, we see a lot of those patterns, uh, particularly for the highly high performance businesses. >>You know, in fact, it's interesting you for great analogy, by the way. And you actually see in that within Cisco, you're seeing sort of a, and I know sometimes you guys don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you've got a leadership structure now. I I've talked to many of them. They seem to really be more focused on how they're connect, connecting, you know, across organizations. And it's increasingly critical in this world of, you know, of silo busters, isn't it? >>Yeah, no, I mean, you almost, as, as you move further and further away, you know, you can see how ridiculous it was before it would be like acquiring a band and say, okay, all your guitar players go over here. All your bass Blair is over there. I'm like what happened to the band? So that's, that's what I'm talking about is, you know, moving all of those disciplines, moving together, um, and servicing the same backlog and, and, and achieving the same successes together is just so awesome. >>Well, I always, I always feel better after talking to you. You know, I remember I remember art. Coviello used to put out his, his letter every year and I was reading. I'd get depressed. We spend all this money now we're less secure. But when I talked to you TK, I feel like much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on the cube. It's, it's awesome to have you as a guest. >>I love these, I love >>Things. Thanks for inviting me and I miss you. I, you know, hopefully, you know, next year we can get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird. Uh, like the sign says to get Kenny, thanks so much for coming to the queue. We, uh, we really appreciate it. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante. We break back with our next guest, this short break.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting accelerating automation with definite brought to you by Cisco. >>Hello and welcome to the Cube. I'm John for a year host. We've got a great conversation virtual event, accelerating automation with definite Cisco. Definite. And of course, we got the Cisco Brain Trust here. Cube alumni Suzy we Vice President, senior Vice President GM and also CTO of Cisco. Definite and ecosystem Success C X, All that great stuff. Many Wadley Who's the director? Senior director of definite certifications. Eric Field, director of developer advocacy. Susie Mandy. Eric, Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Great to see you down. So >>we're not in >>person. We >>don't Can't be at the definite zone. We can't be on site doing definite created All the great stuff we've been doing in the past three years were virtual the cube Virtual. Thanks for coming on. Uh, Susie, I gotta ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the succession had has been awesome. But definite create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the definite community. This is what this ties into the theme of accelerating automation with definite because you said to me, I think four years ago everything should be a service or X a s is it's called and automation plays a critical role. Um, could you please share your vision? Because this is really important. And still only 5 to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and program ability. What's your What's your vision? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that is, more and more businesses are coming online is I mean, they're all online, But is there growing into the cloud? Is their growing in new areas as we're dealing with security is everyone's dealing with the pandemic. There's so many things going on. But what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking. It has security. It has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure. How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be ableto really satisfy everything that businesses need. And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable, the infrastructure is programmable, and you don't need just acts writing on top. But now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation. You can rise to a higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the staff by leveraging automation. >>You remember a few years ago when definite create first started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we're talking about Muraki. You know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about, then this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was Cisco um Europe in Barcelona before all the cove it hit and you had the massive cloud surgeon scale happening going on right when the pandemic hit. And even now, more than ever, the cloud scale the modern APS. The momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing Mawr innovation at scale. Because the pressure to do that because >>the stay alive get >>your thoughts on, um, what's going on in your world? Because you were there in person. Now we're six months in scale is huge. >>We are, Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is as all of our customers as businesses around the world as we ourselves all dealt with, How do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because >>you >>have to go home and then figure out how from home can I make sure that my I t infrastructure is automated out from home? Can I make sure that every employee is out there in working safely and securely? You know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and being kind of, you know, just, you know, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. So we had to extend business applications to people's homes in countries like, you know, well around the world. But also in India, where it was actually not, you know, not they wouldn't let They didn't have rules toe let people work from home in these areas. So then what we had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer. You know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home, so that puts extra stress on automation. It puts extra stress on our customers digital transformation. And it just forced them toe, you know, automate digitally transform quicker. And they had to because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers. You have to figure out how to automate all of that. >>You know, one of them >>were still there, all in that environment today. >>You know, one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observe ability, uh, kubernetes serve micro services. So those things again. All Dev ups. And you know, if you guys got some acquisitions, you thought about 1000 eyes. Um, you got a new one you just bought recently Port shift to raise the game in security, Cuban, All these micro services, So observe, ability, superhot. But then people go work at home, as you mentioned. How do you think? Observe, What do you observing? The network is under huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on. People zooms and WebEx is and education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this in the upside? How are you guys looking at the what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this program? Ability, challenge and observe ability, challenges? It's a huge deal. >>Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right? You know, back when we talked to Todd before he had Muraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use, this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place. And now he has This goes entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that Bigger Attn. Bigger scale. Francisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observe ability and the dashboards and the automation of the A P. I s and all of it. But when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in, um, they had to build in. And what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people toe work from home and how well you could reach customers. All of that used to be a nightie conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually, you know, calling on the heads of I t and the CEO and saying, You know, how is our VPN connectivity? Is everybody working from home? How many people are, you know, connected and ableto work and watch their productivity? Eso All of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure I t stuff became a board level conversation and you know, once again, at first everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people working. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they're now building in automation, additional transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observe ability. You know, looking for those events. The dashboards, you know? So it really has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners air doing to really rise to that next level. >>Susan, I know you gotta go, but real quick, um, describe what? Accelerating automation with definite means. >>Well, you've been fault. You know, we've been working together on definite in the vision of the infrastructure program ability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that. And you need the right skill sets in the program ability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people. And it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people run. Things are definite. Community has risen to this challenge. People have jumped in. They've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. You know, we have you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals. We have partners, you know, They're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerate accelerating automation while it is about going digital. It's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications of cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people, Justus, much as it is about automation and technology. >>And we got definite create right around the corner virtual. Unfortunately, being personal will be virtual Susie. Thank you for your time. We're gonna dig into those people challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you got to go, but stay with us. We're gonna dig in with Mandy and Eric. Thanks. >>Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks, John. Okay. >>Mandy, you heard Susie is about people, and one of the things that's close to your heart you've been driving is a senior director of definite certifications. Um is getting people leveled up? I mean, the demand for skills cybersecurity, network program, ability, automation, network design solution, architect cloud multi cloud design thes are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >>Oh, yes, absolutely. The you know what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning those air. What's accelerating? A lot of the technology changes, and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing, uh, customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like Dev SEC ops engineer, network Automation engineer, network automation developer, which sues you mentioned and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current, um, scope and broaden out and take on new challenges? >>Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this, um uh, piece of getting the certifications. Um, first, before you get started, describe what your role is. Director of developer advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving what's the state of it now? Because with Cove and people are working at home, they have more time to contact, switch and get some certifications and that they can code more. What's your >>What's your role? Absolutely So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the definite creates the Cisco lives and helping the community connect and help share technical information with them, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into. How do you really start solving these problems? Eso that's had to pivot quite a bit. Obviously, Sisco live us. We pivoted very quickly to a virtual event when when conditions changed and we're able to actually connect, as we found out with a much larger audience. So you know, as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of you know how big the convention center is. We were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with are definite day that was kind of attached onto Sisco Live, and we got great feedback from the audience that now we're actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it. But to your broader question of you know what my team does. So that's one piece of it is is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out build new sandboxes, new learning labs, things like that that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the definite site. And then my team also looks after communities such as the Cisco Learning Network, where there's there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. We've seen a huge shift now in that group that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the definite certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with program ability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up community with, you know, helping answer questions, helping provide content. They move now into the definite spaces well and are helping people with that sort of certifications. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that >>I gotta ask you on the trends around automation. What skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Are Is there anything in particular? Obviously, network automation been around for a long time. Cisco's been leader in that. But as you move up, the staff has modern applications or building. Do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What people learning? >>Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned observe ability was big before Cove it and we actually really saw that amplified during co vid. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observe ability now that we needed? Well, we're virtual eso. That's actually been a huge uptick, and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that air. Now, figuring out how can I do this at scale? I think one good example that Susie was talking about the VPN example, and we actually had a number of SCS in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up and one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that I T departments might care about about their firewalls, things that you didn't normally look at. The old days you would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. And when that number went to 100% things like licenses started coming into play where they need to make sure they had the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the essays actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use them open source, tooling to monitor and alert on these things, and then published it so the whole community code could go out and get a copy of it. Try it out in their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that and trying to figure out Okay, now I could take that. I can adapt into what I need to see for my observe ability. >>That's great, Mandy, I want to get your thoughts on this, too, because as automation continues to scale. Um, it's gonna be a focus. People are at home. And you guys had a lot of content online for you. Recorded every session that in the definite zone learning is going on sometimes literally and non linearly. You've got the certifications, which is great. That's key. Great success there. People are interested. But what other learnings are you seeing? What are people, um, doing? What's the top top trends? >>Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time, they want toe advance, their skill set. And just like any kind of learning, people want choice. They wanna be able to choose which matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors leading them through a study plan. On we have two new expert lead study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do an immersive learning experience together with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kind of team experiences called Automation Boot Camp. And then we're also seeing individual who want to be able to, you know, dive into a topic, do a hands on lab, gets, um, skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. And so we have really modular, self driven hands on learning through the Definite Fundamentals course, which is available through DEV. Net. And then there's also people who are saying, I just want to use the technology. I like Thio experiment and then go, you know, read the instructions, read the manual, do the deeper learning. And so they're They're spending a lot of time in our definite sandbox, trying out different technologies. Cisco Technologies with open source technologies, getting hands on and building things, and three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD wan. There's a huge interest in people Skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about. Security is a focus area where people are dealing with new scale, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways and then automating their data center using infrastructure as code type principles. So those were three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing more about that at definite create. >>Awesome Eric and man, if you guys can wrap up the accelerated automated with definite package and virtual event here, um, and also t up definite create because definite create has been a very kind of grassroots, organically building momentum over the years. Again, it's super important because it's now the app world coming together with networking, you know, end to end program ability. And with everything is a service that you guys were doing everything with a piece. Um Onley can imagine the enablement that's gonna enable create Can >>you hear the >>memory real quick on accelerating automation with definite and TF definite create. Mandy will start with you. >>Yes, I'll go first, and then Eric can close this out. Um, so just like we've been talking about with you at every definite event over the past years, you know, Devon, it's bringing a p I s across our whole portfolio and up and down the stack and accelerating automation with definite. Suzy mentioned the people aspect of that the people Skilling up and how that transformed team transforms teams. And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so would I think about accelerating automation with definite. It's about the definite community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community with those new skills. >>Eric, take us home. He accelerate automation. Definite and definite create a lot of developer action going on cloud native right now, your thoughts? >>Absolutely. I I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for definite day this year for Cisco Live, and we're seeing we're able to leverage it even further with create this year. So whereas it used to be, you know, confined by the walls that we were within for the event. Now we're actually able to do things like we're adding a start now track for people that I want to be there. They want to be a developer. Network automation developer, for instance, We've now got a track just for them where they could get started and start learning some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. Eso. I love that we're able to bring that together with the experience community that we usually do from across the industry, bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. So I'm really excited to bring that whole mixed together as well as getting some of our business units together to and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new AP eyes into their platforms? What are the what problems are they hoping that customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together, seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So, like I said, Cisco Learning Network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. >>Awesome. Thanks so much. God, man, can >>I add one had >>one more thing. >>Yeah, I was just going to say the other really exciting thing about create this year with the virtual nature of it is that it's happening in three regions. And, you know, we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions. And, uh, content and speakers and the region stepping upto have things personalized to their area to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for definite create that's going to be fantastic this year. >>You know, that's what God is going to close out and just put the final bow on that by saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now, during with this virtual definite virtual definite create virtual the cube virtual, I think we're learning new things. People working in teams and groups on sharing content. We're gonna learn new things. We're gonna try new things, and ultimately people will rise up and will be resilient. I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And whoa, we'll ride the wave with you guys. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on. The Cuban talk about your awesome accelerate automation and definitely looking forward to it. Thank you. >>Thank you so much. >>Happy to be here. >>Okay, I'm John for the Cube. Virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content amendment Virtual until we're face to face. Thank you so much for watching. And we'll see you at definite create. Thanks for watching.

>>Hello everyone. This is Dave Vellante, and I want to welcome you to the cubes presentation of accelerating automation with dev net in this special program, we're going to explore how to accelerate digital transformation and how the global pandemic is changing the way we work and the kinds of work that we do, the cube has pulled together experts from Cisco dev net. Now dev net is essentially Cisco as code. I've said many times in the cube, but in my opinion, it's the most impressive initiative coming out of any established enterprise infrastructure company. What Cisco has done brilliantly with dev net is to create an API economy by leveraging its large infrastructure portfolio and its ecosystem. But the linchpin of dev net is the army of trained Cisco engineers, including those with the elite CC I E designation. Now dev net was conceived to train people on how to code infrastructure and develop applications in integrations. It's a platform to create new value and automation is a key to that. Creativity. Now let's kick things off with the architect of dev net senior vice president in general manager of Cisco's dev net and CX ecosystem success. Susie, we roam around the globe presenting accelerating automation with damnit brought to you by Cisco. >>Hello and welcome to the cube. I'm Sean for a year host. We've got a great conversation, a virtual event, accelerating automation with dev net, Cisco dev net. And of course we got the Cisco brain trust here, our cube alumni, Susie wee vice president, senior vice president GM, and also CTO of Cisco dev net and ecosystem success CX all that great stuff. Many Wade Lee, who's the director, senior director of dev net certifications, Eric field, director of developer advocacy, Susie Mandy, Eric. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you, John. So we're not in first. We don't, can't be at the dev net zone. We can't be on site doing dev net creative, all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years where virtual the cube virtual. Thanks for coming on. Uh, Susie, I gotta ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you've had has been awesome, but dev net create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the dev net community. This is what this ties into the theme of accelerating automation with dev net, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service or X AAS as it's called and automation plays a critical role. Um, could you please share your vision because this is really important and still only five to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and programmability. What's your, what's your vision? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are >>Coming online is, I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud is they're growing in new areas. As we're dealing with security is everyone's dealing with the pandemic. There's so many things going on. Uh, but what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking. It has security, it has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be able to, you know, really satisfy everything that businesses need. And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable. The infrastructure is programmable and you don't need just apps riding on top, but now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation. You can rise to higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the staff by leveraging automation. >>You know, I remember a few years ago when dev net created for start a, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we were talking about Meraki, you know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about, then this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was a Cisco, um, uh, Europe in Barcelona before all the COVID hit. And you had this massive cloud surgeon scale happening going on, right when the pandemic hit. And even now more than ever the cloud scale, the modern apps, the momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing more innovation at scale because the pressure to do that, um, cause the business stay alive. And to get your thoughts on, um, what's going on in your world because you were there in person now we're six months in scale is huge. >>We are. Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is as all of our customers, as businesses around the world, as we ourselves all dealt with, how do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because you have to go home and then figure out how from home, can I make sure that my it infrastructure is automated out from home? Can I make sure that every employee is out there and working safely and securely, you know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and be in kind of, you know, just, you know, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. >>So we had to extend business applications to people's homes, uh, in countries like, you know, well around the world, but also in India where it was actually not, you know, not, they wouldn't let, they didn't have rules to let people work from home in these areas. So then what had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer, you know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home. So that put extra stress on automation. It put extra stress on our customer's digital transformation and it just forced them to, you know, automate digitally, transform quicker. And they had to, because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers, you had to figure out how to automate all of that. And we're still all in that environment today. >>Now one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, uh, Coobernetti's serve, uh, microservices. So those things, again, all dev ops and, you know, have you guys got some acquisitions, you about thousand eyes? Um, um, you've got a new one you just bought, um, recently port shift to raise the game in security Cooper and all these microservices. So observability super hot, but then people go work at home. As you mentioned, how do you observe, what are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's zooms and WebExes and, uh, education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this and the app side? How are you guys looking at the what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this program? Ability, challenge and observability challenges. It's a huge deal. >>Yeah, absolutely. And, um, you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right. You know, back when we talked to Todd before he had Meraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place and now he has Cisco's entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that bigger, um, at that bigger scale for Cisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation and the API APIs into all of it. Um, but when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. Um, they have to build in and what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people to work from home and how well you could reach customers. >>All of that used to be an it conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually calling on the heads of it and the CIO and saying, you know, how's our VPN connectivity is everybody working from home? How many people are connected and able to work and what's their productivity. So all of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure, it stuff became a board level conversation. And, you know, once again, at first, everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people working. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they are now building in automation and digital transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observability, you know, looking for those events, the dashboards, you know, so it really has, has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. >>Cause you know, you got to go, but real quick, um, describe what accelerating automation with dev net means. Well, you've >>Been falling, you know, we've been working together on dev net and the vision of the infrastructure programmability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that and you need the right skill sets and the programmability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people and it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people rumblings are definite community has risen to this challenge. Um, people have jumped in, they've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. Uh, you know, we have, you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals, we have partners, you know, they're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerate, accelerating automation while it is about going digital. It's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications of, you know, cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people just as much as it is about automation and technology. >>We got dev net created right around the corner, virtual unfortunate won't be in person, but we'll be virtual. Susie. Thank you for your time. We're going to dig into those people, challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you've got to go, but stay with us. We're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric. >>Thanks. Thank you so much. Have fun. Thanks John. >>Okay. Mandy, you heard, uh, Susie is about people and one of the things that's close to your heart and you've been driving is, uh, as senior director of dev net certifications, um, is getting people leveled up. I mean the demand for skills, cybersecurity network, programmability automation, network design solution architect, cloud multicloud design. These are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >>Oh yes, absolutely. The, you know, what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning, those are, what's accelerating a lot of the technology changes and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like DevSecOps engineer, network, automation, engineer, network, automation, developer, which Susie mentioned and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current scope and broaden out and take on new challenges. >>Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this, um, um, piece of getting the certifications. Um, first, before you get started, describe what your role is as director developer advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving. What's the state of it now because with COVID people are working at home, they have more time to contact, switch and get some certifications and that they can code more. What's your >>Absolutely. So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the Devin that creates the Cisco lives and helping the community connect and to help share tech mountain technical information with them, um, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? Um, so that's had to pivot quite a bit. Um, obviously Cisco live us. We pivoted very quickly to a virtual event when, when conditions changed and we're able to actually connect as we found out with a much larger audience. So, you know, as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of, you know, how big the convention center is, uh, we were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with our, uh, our definite data that was kind of attached on to Cisco live. >>And we got great feedback from the audience that now we were actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it. Um, but to your broader question of, you know, what my team does. So that's one piece of it is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out build new sandboxes and your learning labs, things like that, that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on a dev net site. And then my team also looks after communities such as the Cisco learning network where this there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. We've seen a huge shift now in that group, that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the domain certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with programmability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up the community with, you know, helping you answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the dump space as well, and are helping people with that service or what it's great seeing the community come along and really see that. Okay. >>I ask you on the trends around automation, what skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Are, is there anything in particular, obviously network automation has been around for a long time. Cisco has been leader in that, but as you move up, the stack as modern applications are building, do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What are people learning? >>Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned a observability was big before COVID and we actually really saw that amplified during COVID. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observability, uh, now that we need it? Well, we're virtual. Um, so that's actually been a huge uptake and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that are now figuring out how can I do this at scale? I think one good example that, uh, Susie was talking about the VPN example, and we actually had a number SES in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up. And one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that it departments might care about, about their firewalls, things that you do normally look at me old days, you would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. >>And when that number went to a hundred percent things like licenses started coming into play, where they needed to make sure they have the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the STDs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use some open source tooling, to monitor and alert on these things and then published it. So the whole community code could go out and get a copy of it, try it out their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that in trying to figure out, okay, now I can take that and I can adapt it to what I need to see for my observability. >>That's great. Mandy. I want to get your thoughts on this too, because as automation continues to scale, um, it's going to be a focus and people are at home and you guys had a lot of content online for you recorded every session that didn't the dev Ned zone learnings going on, sometimes linearly. And nonlinearly you got the certifications, which is great. That's key, key, great success there. People are interested, but what are the learnings? Are you seeing? What are people doing? What's the top top trends. >>Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time. They want to advance their skillset. And just like any kind of learning people want choice because they want to be able to choose what's matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors, leading them through a study plan. And we have two new, uh, expert led study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do, uh, an immersive learning experience together, uh, with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new, um, offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kinds of team experiences called automation boot camp. And then we're also seeing individuals who want to be able to, you know, dive into a topic, do a hands on lab, get some skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. >>And so we have really modular self-driven hands on learning through the dev net fundamentals course, which is available through dev net. And then there's also people who are saying, I just want to use the technology. I like to experiment and then go, you know, read the instructions, read the manual, do the deeper learning. And so they're, they're spending a lot of time in our dev net sandbox, trying out different technologies, Cisco technologies with open source technologies, getting hands on and building things. And three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD wan. There's a huge interest in people skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about security is a focus area where people are dealing with new, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways and then automating their data center, using infrastructure as code type principles. So those are three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing some more about that at dev net create >>Eric and Mandy. If you guys can wrap up this accelerate automation with dev net package and a virtual event here, um, and also tee up dev net create because dev net create has been a very kind of grassroots, organically building momentum over the years. And again, it's super important cause it's now the app world coming together with networking, you know, end to end programmability and with everything as a service that you guys are doing everything with API APIs, I'm only can imagine the enablement that's gonna create. Can you share the summary real quick on accelerating automation with dev net and tee up dev net create Mandy, we'll start with you. >>Yes, I'll go first. And then Eric can close this out. Um, so just like we've been talking about with you at every Devin event over the past years, you know, damnit is bringing APIs across our whole portfolio and up and down the stack and accelerating, uh, automation with dev net. Susie mentioned the people aspect of that the people's skilling up and how that transformed teams, transforms teams. And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so what I think about accelerating automation with dev net, it's about the Duveneck community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community. With those new skills. >>Eric take us home. He accelerating automation, dev net and dev net create a lot of developer action going on in cloud native right now, your thoughts? >>Absolutely. I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for Devin that day, this year for Cisco live. And we're seeing, we're able to leverage it even further with create this year. So, whereas it used to be, you know, confined by the walls that we were within for the event. Now we're actually able to do things like we're adding the start now track for people that want to be there. They want to be a developer, a network automation developer, for instance, we've now got attract just for them where they can get started and start learning. Some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. Um, so I love that we're able to bring that together with the experienced community that we usually do from across the industry, bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud, to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. So I'm really excited to bring that whole mix together, as well as getting some of our business units together too, and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new APIs into their platforms? What are the, what problems are they hoping >>That customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So like I said, Cisco learning network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. >>Awesome. Thanks so much. >>Can I add one, add one more thing? Yeah. I was just gonna say the other really exciting thing about create this year with the virtual nature of it is that it's happening in three regions. And, um, you know, we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions and, uh, content and speakers and the region stepping up to have things personalized to their area, to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for them that create that's going to be fantastic this year. >>Yeah. That's what I was going to close out and just put the final bow on that. By saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now during what this virtual dev net virtual dev net create virtual, the cube virtual, I think we're learning new things. People working in teams and groups and sharing content, we're going to learn new things. We're going to try new things and ultimately people will rise up and we'll be resilient. I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And we'll, we'll, we'll ride the wave with you guys. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the cube and talk about your awesome accelerating automation and dev net. Great. Looking forward to it. Thank you. >>Thank you so much. Happy to be here. >>Okay. I'm Jennifer with the cube virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content amendment virtual tour face to face. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching. >>Welcome back. And Jeffrey, >>The cube coming to you from our Palo Alto studio with ongoing coverage of the Cisco dev data van, it's called accelerating automation with dev net and the new normal. And we certainly know the new normal is, is not going away. They've been doing this since the middle of March or all the way to October. And so we're excited to have our next guest is Thomas Shively. He's the vice president of product marketing and data center networking for the intent based networking group at Cisco Thomas. Great to see you. >>Hey, good to see you too. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody can see on our background. Exactly, >>Exactly. So, I mean, I'm curious, we've talked to a lot of people. We talked to a lot of leaders, you know, especially like back in March and April with this light switch moment, which was, you know, no time to prep and suddenly everybody has to work from home. Teachers got to teach from home. And so you got the kids home, you got the spouse home, everybody's home trying to get on the network and do their zoom calls in their classes. I'm curious from your perspective, you guys are right there on the, on the network you're right in the infrastructure. What did you hear and see kind of from your customers when suddenly, you know, March 16 hit and everybody had to go home. >>Wow, good point. Hey, I do think we all appreciate the network >>Much more than we used to do before. Uh, and then the only other difference is I'm really more on WebEx calls and zoom calls, but, you know, otherwise, uh, yes. Um, what, what I do see actually is that as I said, network becomes much more operative as a critical piece. And so before we really talked a lot about, uh, agility and flexibility these days, we talk much more about resiliency quite frankly. Uh, and what do I need to have in place with respect to network to get my things from left to right. And you know, it, 2000 East to West, as we say on the data center. Right. Uh, and that just is for most of my customers, a very, very important topic at this point. >>Right. You know, it's, it's amazing to think, you know, had this happened, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, you know, the ability for so many people in, in, in the information industry to be able to actually make that transition relatively seamlessly, uh, is, is actually pretty amazing. I'm sure there was some, some excitement and some kudos in terms of, you know, it, it is all based on the network and it is kind of this quiet thing in the background that nobody pays attention to. It's like a ref in the football game until they make a bad play. So, you know, it, it is pretty fascinating that you and your colleagues have put this infrastructure and that enabled us to really make that move with, with, with really no prep, no planning and actually have a whole lot of services delivered into our homes that we're used to getting at the office are used to getting at school. >>Yeah. And I mean, to your point, I mean, some of us did some planning, can we clearly talking about some of these, these trends and the way I look at this trans as being distributed data centers and, um, having the ability to move your workloads and access for users to wherever you want to be. And so I think that clearly went on for a while then. So in a sense, we, we, we prep was, or no, but we're prepping for it. Um, but as I said, resiliency just became so much more important than, you know, one of the things I actually do a little block, a little, little, uh, abrupt before a block I put out end of August around resiliency. Uh, you, you, if he didn't, if he didn't put this in place, you better put it in place. Because I think as we all know, we sold our match. This is like maybe two or three months, we're now in October. Um, and I sing, this is the new normal for some time being. Yeah, >>I think so. So let's stick on that theme in terms of, of trends, right? The other great, uh, trend as public cloud, um, and hybrid cloud and multi cloud, there's all types of variants on that theme you had in that blog post about, uh, resiliency in data center, cloud networking, data center cloud, you know, some people think, wait, it's, it's kind of an either, or I either got my data center or I've got my stuff in the cloud and I've got public cloud. And then as I said, hybrid cloud, you're talking really specifically about enabling, um, both inner inner data center resiliency within multi data centers within the same enterprise, as well as connecting to the cloud. That's probably counterintuitive for some people to think that that's something that Cisco is excited about and supporting. So I wonder if you can share, you know, kind of how the market is changing, how you guys are reacting and really putting the things in place to deliver customer choice. >>Yeah, no, it's actually, to me, it's really not a counterintuitive because in the end was what, uh, I'm focusing on. And the company is focused on is what our customers want to do and need to do. Uh, and that's really, um, would, you know, most people call hybrid cloud or multi-cloud, uh, in, in the end, what it is, what it is, is really the ability to have the flexibility to move your workloads where you want them to be. And there are different reasons why you want to place them, right? You might've placed them for security reasons. You might have played some compliance reasons, depending on which customer segment you after, if you're in the United States or in Europe or in Asia, there are a lot of different reasons where you're going to put your sinks. And so I sing in the end, what a, an enterprise looks for is that agility, flexibility, and resiliency. >>And so really what you want to put in place is what we call like the cloud on ramp, right? You need to have an ability to move sings as needed. But the logic context section, which we see in the last couple of months, accelerating is really this whole seam around digital transformation, uh, which goes hand in hand then was, uh, the requirement on the at T side really do. And I T operations transformation, right. How it operates. Uh, and I think that's really exciting to see, and this is where a lot of my discussions I was customers, uh, what does it actually mean with respect to the it organization and what are the operational changes? This a lot of our customers are going through quite frankly, accelerated right. Going through, >>Right. And, and automation is in the title of the event. So automation is, you know, is an increasingly important thing, you know, as the, as we know, and we hear all the time, you know, the flows of data, the complexity of the data, either on the security or the way the network's moving, or as you said, shifting workloads around, based on the dynamic situations, whether that's business security, et cetera, in a software defined networking has been around for a while. How are you seeing kind of this evolution in adding more automation, you know, to more and more processes to free up those, those, um, no kind of limited resources in terms of really skilled people to focus on the things that they should be focused on and not stuff that, that hopefully you can, you know, get a machine to run with some level of. >>Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. And I said the tech line, I have, you know, sometimes when my mind is really going from a cloud ready, which is in most of our infrastructure is today to cloud native. And so let me a little expand on those, right? There's like the cloud ready is basically what we have put in place over the last five to six years, all the infrastructure that all our customers have, network infrastructure, all the nexus 9,000, they're all cloud ready. Right. And what this really means, do you have API APIs everywhere, right? Whether this is on the box, whether it's on the controller, whether this is on the operations tools, all of these are API enabled and that's just the foundation for automation, right? You have to have that. Now, the next step really is what do you do with that capability? >>Right? And this is the integration with a lot of automation tools, uh, and that's a whole range, right? And this is where the it operation transformation kicks in different customers at different speeds, right? Some just, you know, I use these API APIs and use NoMo tools that they have on a network world just to pull information. Some customers go for further and saying, I want to integrate this with some CMDB tools. Some go even further and saying, this is like the cloud native pleasing, Oh, I want to use, let's say red hat Ansible. I want to use, uh, how she called Terraform and use those things to actually drive how I manage my infrastructure. And so that's really the combination of the automation capability. Plus the integration with relevant cloud native enabling tools that really is happening at this point. We're seeing customers accelerating that, that motion, which really then drives us how they run their it operations. Right? And so that's a pretty exciting, exciting area to see a given. I, we have the infrastructure in place. There's no need for customers to actually do change something. Most of them have already the infrastructures that can do this. It is just no doing the operational change. The process changes to actually get there. >>Right. And it's funny, we, we recently covered, you know, PagerDuty and, and they highlight what you just talked about. The cloud native, which is, you know, all of these applications now are so interdependent on all these different API APIs, you know, pulling data from all of these applications. So a, when they work great, it's terrific. But if there's a problem, you know, there's a whole lot of potential throat to choke out there and find, find those issues. And it's all being connected via the network. So, you know, it's even more critically important, not only for the application, but for all these little tiny components within the application to deliver, you know, ultimately a customer experience within a very small units of time, uh, so that you don't lose that customer. You, you complete that transaction. They, they check out of their shopping cart. You know, all these, these things that are now created with cloud native applications that just couldn't really do before. >>No, you're absolutely right. And that's, this is like, just sit. I'm actually very excited because it opens up a lot of abilities for our customers, how they want to actually structure the operation. Right? One of the nice things around this or automation plus, uh, tool integration, cloning to, and integration is you actually opened this up, not a soul automation train, not just to the network operations personnel, right. You also open it up and can use this for the second ops person or for the dev ops person or for the cloud ops engineering team. Right. Because the way it's structured, the way we built this, um, is literally as an API interface and you can now decide, what is your process do you want to have? And what traditional, you have a request network, operation teams executes the request using these tools and then hand it back over. >>Or do you say, Hey, maybe some of these security things I got to hand over the sec ups team, and they can directly call these these KPIs, right? Or even one step further, you can have the opportunity that the dev ops or the application team actually says, Hey, I got to write a whole infrastructure as code kind of a script or template, and I just execute. Right. And it's really just using what the infrastructure provides. And so that whole range of different user roles and our customer base, what they can do with the automation capability that's available. It's just very, very exciting way because it's literally unleashes a lot of flexibility, how they want to structure and how they want to rebuild the it operations processes. >>That's interesting, you know, cause the, you know, the DevOps culture has taken over a lot, right. Obviously change software programming for the last 20 years. And I think, you know, there's a, there's a lot of just kind of the concept of dev ops versus necessarily, you know, the actual things that you do to execute that technique. And I don't think most people would think of, you know, network ops or, you know, net ops, you know, whatever the equivalent is in the networking world to have, you know, kind of a fast changing dynamic, uh, kind of point of view versus a, you know, stick it in, you know, spec it, stick it in, lock it down. So I wonder if you can, you can share how, you know, kind of that dev ops, um, attitude point of view, workflow, whatever the right verb is, has impacted, you know, things at Cisco and the way you guys think about networking and flexibility within the networking world. >>Yeah, literally, absolutely. And again, it's all customer driven, right? There's none of those. None of those is really actually, you know, a little bit of credit, maybe some of us where we have a vision, but a lot of it is just customer driven feedback. Uh, and yeah, we, we do have network operations teams comes to saying, Hey, we use Ansible heavily on the compute side, we might use this for alpha seven. We want to use the same for networking. And so we made available all these integrations, uh, with sobriety as a state, whether these are the switches, whether these are ACI decent, a controller or our multicell orchestration capabilities, all of these has Ansible integration the way to the right. Uh, the other one, as I mentioned, that how she formed Turco Terraform, we have integrations available and they see the requests for these tools to use that. >>Uh, and so that is emotion where in for all the, you know, and, uh, another block actually does out there, we just posted saying, Neil, all set what you can do and then a Palo to this, right. Just making the integration available. We also have a very, very heavy focus on definite and enablement and training, uh, and you know, a little plugin. I know, uh, probably, uh, part of the segment, the whole definite community that Cisco has is very, very vibrant. Uh, and the beauty of this is right. If you look at us, whether you're a NetApps person or dev ops person or SecOps person, it doesn't really matter. It has a lot of like capability available to just help you get going or go from one level to the next level. Right. And it's simplest thing that like sent books and why moments where you can, we know what's out stress, try sinks out snippets of code Coda there, you can do all of these things. And so we do see it's a kind of a push and pull a tremendous amount of interest and a tremendous, uh, uh, time people spend to learn quite frankly. And that's another site product of, of, you know, the situation we're in and people said, Oh man, and say, okay, online learning, that's the thing. So these, these, these tools are used very, very heavily. Right, >>Right. That's awesome. Cause you know, we've, we've had Susie Lee on a number of times and I know he and Mandy and the team really built this dev net thing. And it really follows along this other theme that we see consistently across other pieces of tech, which is democratization, right. Democratization of the access tool, taking it out of, of just a mahogany row with, again, a really limited number of people that know how to make it work and can make the changes and then opening up to a software defined world where now that the, you know, the, it says application centric, point of view, where the people that are building the apps to go create competitive advantage. Now don't have to wait for, you know, the one network person to help them out out of these environments. Really interesting. And I wonder if, you know, when you look at what's happening with public cloud and how they kind of change the buying parameter, how they kind of changed the degree of difficulty to get projects started, you know, how you guys have kind of integrated that, that type of thought process to make it easier for app developers to get their job done. >>Yeah. I mean, again, it's, it's, uh, I typically look at this more from a, from a customer lands, right? It's the transformation process and it always starts as I want agility. I want flexibility. I want to resiliency, right. This is where we talk to a business owner, what they're looking for. And then that translates into, into an I operations process, right? Your strategy needs to map then how you actually do this. Uh, and that just drives then what tools do you want to have available to actually enable this? Right. And the enablement again is for different roles, right? There is you need to give sync services to the app developer and, uh, the, the platform team and the security team, right. To your point. So the network, uh, can act at the same speed, but you also give to us to the network operations teams because they need to, uh, adjust. >>Then they have the ability to react to, uh, to some of these requirements. Right. And it's not just automation. I say, we, we, we focused on that, but there's also to your point, the, the need, how do I extend between data centers? You know, just, just for backup and recovery and how do I extend into, into public clouds, right? Uh, and in the end, that's a, that's a network connectivity problem. Uh, and we have soft as, uh, we have made as available. We have integrations into, uh, AWS. We have integrations into a joy to actually make this very easy from a, from a network perspective to extend your private, private networks into which of private networks on these public clouds. So from an app development perspective, now it looks like he's on the same network. It's a protective enterprise network. Some of it might sit here. >>Some of it might sit here, but it's really looking the same. And that's really in the enticing, what a business looks at, right. They don't necessarily want to say, I need to have something separate for this deployment. What's a separate for that deployment. What they want is I need to deploy something. I need to do this resilient. And the resilient way in an agile way gives me the tools. And so that's really where we focused, um, and what we're driving, right? It's that combination of automation consistently, and then definite tools, uh, available that we support. Uh, but they're all open. Uh, they're all standard tools as the ones I mentioned, right. That everybody's using. So I'm not getting into this. Oh, this is specific to Cisco, right. It's really democratisation. I actually liked your term. Yeah. >>Yeah. It's, it's a great terminate. And it's, it's really interesting, especially with, with the API APIs and the way everything is so tied together that everyone kind of has to enable this because that's what the customer is demanding. Um, and it is all about the applications and the workloads and where those things are moving, but they don't really want to manage that. They just want to, you know, deliver business benefit to their customers and respond to, uh, you know, competitive threats in the marketplace, et cetera. So it's really an interesting time for the infrastructure, you know, to really support kind of this app first point of view, uh, versus the other way around is kind of what it used to be and, and enable this hyper fast development hyper fast, uh, change in, in, in the competitive landscape or else you will be left behind. Um, so super important stuff. >>Yeah, no, I totally agree. And as I said, I mean, it's, it's kind of interesting is we, we started on the Cisco data center side. We started this probably six or seven years ago. Uh, when we, when we named the application centric, uh, clearly a lot of these concepts evolve, uh, but in a sense it is that reversal of the role from the network provides something and you use to, uh, this is what I want to do. And I need a service, uh, thinking on a networking side to expose. So as that can be consumed. And so that clearly is playing out. Um, and as I said, automation is a key key foundation that we put in place, uh, and our customers, most of our customers at this point, uh, on these, on these products, uh, they have all the capabilities they are, they can literally take advantage. There's really nothing that stops them point. >>Well, it's good times for you because I'm sure you've seen all the memes and in social media, right. What what's driving your digital transformation is that the CEO, the CMO or COVID, and we all know the answer to the question. So I don't think the, the pace of change is going to slow down anytime soon. So keeping the network up and enabling us all to get done, what we have to get done and all the little magic that happens behind the scenes. >>Yeah. No thanks. Thanks for having me. And again, yeah. If you're listening and you're wondering, how do I get started Cisco? Definitely just the place to go. It's fantastic. Fantastic. I highly recommend everybody roll up his sleeves and you know, the best races you can have. >>And we know once the physical events come back, we've been to dev net create a bunch of times, and it's a super vibrant, super excited, but really engaged community sharing. Lots of information is kind of, it's still kind of that early vibe, you know, where everyone is still really enthusiastic and really about learning and sharing information. So, you know, like say Susie and the team are really built a great thing, and we're a, we're happy to continue to cover it. And eventually we'll be back, uh, face to face. I look forward to that as well. All right, thanks. Uh, he's Thomas I'm Jeff, you're watching continuing coverage of Cisco dev net accelerating with automation and programmability >>Kia. Nini is here. He's a distinguished engineer at Cisco TK, my friend. Good to see you again. How are you? Good. I mean, you and I were in Barcelona in January and, you know, we knew we saw this thing coming, but we didn't see it coming this way. Did we know that no one did, but yeah, that was right before everything happened. Well, it's weird. Right? I mean, we were, you know, we, we, it was in the back of our minds in January, we sort of had Barcelona's hasn't really been hit yet. It looked like it was really isolated in China, but, uh, but wow, what a change and I guess, I guess I'd say I'd start with the, we're seeing really a secular change in, in your space and security identity, access management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden these things explode as the work from home pivot has occurred, and it feels like these changes are permanent or semi-permanent, what are you seeing out there? >>I don't think anybody thinks the world's going to go back the way it was. Um, to some degree it's, it's changed forever. Um, you know, I, I, I do a lot of my work remotely. Um, and, and so, you know, being a remote worker, isn't such a big deal for me, but for some, it was a huge impact. And like I said, you know, um, remote education, you know, everybody's on the opposite side of a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. Yeah. And when you see that, you know, that work from home pivot, I mean, you know, our estimates are, or along with our partner, DTR about 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to COVID and now it's know, North of 70% >>Plus, and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next, next six months. We'll see what happens with the fall surge, but, but people essentially accept, expect that to at least double that 16%, you know, going forward indefinitely. So how, what does that, what kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and how, how organizations are approaching security? >>Yeah, I, I just think, uh, from a mindset standpoint, you know, what was optional, uh, maybe, um, last year, uh, is no longer optional and I don't think it's going to go back. Um, I think, I think a lot of people, uh, have changed the way, you know, they live and the way they work. Um, and they're doing it in ways, hopefully that, you know, in some cases, uh, yield more productivity, um, again, um, you know, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is it frankly works just as well for the bad guys. And so that's, that's the balance we need to keep, which is we need to be extra diligent, uh, on how we go about securing infrastructure, uh, how we go about securing even our, our social channels, because remember all our social channels now are digital. So that's, that's become the new norm. >>You know, you've helped me understand over the years. I remember a line you shared with me in the cube one time is that the adversary is highly capable as sort of the, of the phrase that you used. And, and essentially the way you describe it, as you know, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease the bad guy's return on investment, you know, increase their costs, increase the numerator, but as, as work shifts from home, yeah, I'm in my house, you know, my wifi in my, you know, router with my, you know, dog's name is the password, you know, it's much, much harder for me to, to increase that denominator at home. So can you help? >>Yeah. I mean, it's, it is, it is truly, um, when you think, when you get into the mind of the adversary and, and, uh, you know, the cyber crime out there, they're honestly just like any other business they're trying to operate with high margin. And so if you can get there, if you can get in there and erode their margin, frankly go find something else to do. Um, and, and again, you know, you know, the shift we experienced day to day is it's not just our kids are online in school and, uh, our work is online, but all of the groceries we order, um, you know, this Thanksgiving and holiday season, uh, a lot more online shopping is going to place. So everything's gone digital. And so the question is, you know, how, how do we up our game there so that we can go about our business, uh, effectively. And I make it very expensive for the adversary to operate, uh, and take care of their business. Cause it's nasty stuff. >>I want to ask you about automation generally, and then specifically how it applies to security. So we, I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyperscalers and of course they really attacked the it labor problem. We learned a lot from that and an it organizations have applied much of that thinking. And it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace, the technology scales today, how does that apply to security and specifically, how is automation affecting security? >>Yeah, it's, it's, it's the topic these days. Um, you know, businesses, I think, realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like AI and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand, uh, and operate at machine scale. Now, I mean that for, for businesses, I mean that for, you know, education and everything else now, so are the adversaries, right? So it's expensive for them to operate at Cuban scale and they are going to machine scale, going to machine scale, uh, a necessity is that you're going to have to harness some level of automation, have the machines, uh, work on your behalf, have the machines carry your intent. Um, and when you do that, um, you can do it safely or you could do it dangerously. And that that's really kind of your choice. Um, you know, just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should, um, you, you wanna make sure that frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's, it's a tricky thing because, you know, if, when you take the phrase, you know, uh, how do we, how do we automate security? Well, you actually have to, uh, take care of, of securing the automation first. >>Yeah. We talked about this in Barcelona, where you were explaining that, you know, the, the bad guys, the adversaries are essentially, you know, weaponizing using your own tooling, which makes them appear safe because it's, they're hiding in plain sight. >>Well, there's, they're clever, uh, give them that, um, you know, that there's this phrase that they, they always talk about called living off the land. Um, there's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools and, uh, and being detective, you know, if they can use the tools that's already there, then, uh, they have a higher degree of, of evading, uh, your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob, who's already been credentialed and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not marked as the adversary. So again, you know, having the detection methods available to find their behavior anomalies and things like that become a paramount, but also, you know, having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to, you know, minimize their effectiveness, um, without it, I mean, ideally without human interaction, cause you, you just, can you move faster, you move quicker. Um, and I, I see that with an asterisk because, um, if, if done wrong, frankly, um, you're just making their job more effective. >>I wonder if we could talk about the market a little bit, uh, it's I'm in the security space, cybersecurity 80 plus billion, which by the way, is just a little infant Tessa mill component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that massive, uh, GDP, but guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them, what's your, what's your biggest challenge? Let's say lack of talent. And, and so what this chart shows is from ETR, our, our, our survey partner and on the vertical axis is net score. And that's an indication of spending momentum on the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence, a pervasiveness, if you will, inside the data sets. And so there's a couple of key points here. I wanted to put forth to our audience and then get your reactions. >>So you can see Cisco, I highlighted in red, Cisco is business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter. It's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the, on the conference call. And so you can see on the horizontal axis, you've got, you know, big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere, but you're right there in that, in that data set. And then you've got for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. But the other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here. And that just adds to the complexity. This is of course only a subset of what's in the security space. You know, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is how can Cisco help simplify this picture? Is it automation? Is it, you know, you guys have done some really interesting tuck in acquisitions and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left there it's, um, I had a customer tell me once that, you know, I came to this trade show, looking for transportation, and these people are trying to sell me car parts. Um, that's the frustration customers have, you know, and I think what Cisco has done really well is to really focus on the outcomes. Um, what is the customer outcome? Cause ultimately that's, that is what the customer wants. You know, there might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closest you can closer, you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think, I think security in general has just year over year have been just written with, um, you need to be an expert. Um, you need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself. And, and I think, I think those days are behind us, but particularly as, as security becomes more pervasive and we're, you know, we're selling to the business, we're not selling to the, you know, t-shirt wearing hacker anymore. >>Yeah. So, well, well, how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about cloud people that God put my data in the cloud I'm safe, but you know, of course we know it's a shared responsibility model. So I'm interested in your, your thoughts on that. Is it really, is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way, say, Oh, the state of security is great in the cloud. Whereas many of us out there saying, wow, it's, it's not so great. Uh, so what are your thoughts on that, that whole narrative and what Cisco's play in, in cloud? >>I think cloud, um, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern, which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible. Um, you know, no, no data center required, no disk drive required, you just get storage, you know, it's, it's, it's all of those things that are again, closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud two is it's really been, it's really punctuated the way we go about building systems. Um, again, at machine scale. So, you know, before, when I write code and I think about what computers are gonna run on, or, you know, what servers are going to is you're going to run on those. Those thoughts never crossed my mind anymore. You know, I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do and the machines then figure it out. So, you know, for instance, on Tuesday, if the entire internet shows up, uh, the, the system works without fail. And if on Wednesday, if only North America shows up, you know, so what, but, but there's no way you could staff that, right? There's just no human scale approach that gets you there. And that's, that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff is, um, it really is, uh, the next level of how we computer science. >>So you're talking about infrastructure as code and that applies to, you know, security as code. That's what, you know, dev net is really all about. I've said many times, I think Cisco of the, the large established enterprise companies is one of the few, if not the only, that really has figured out, you know, that developer angle, because it's practical do, you're not trying to force your way into developers, but, you know, I wonder if you could, you could talk a little bit about that trend and where you see it going. >>Yeah, no, that is, that is truly the trend. Every time I walk into dev net, um, the big halls at Cisco live, it is Cisco as code. Um, everything about Cisco is being presented through an API. It is automation ready. And, and frankly, that is, um, that is the love language of the cloud. Um, it's it's machines, if the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So, you know, it is the, the, uh, I, I think, I think necessary, maybe not sufficient but necessary for, um, you know, doing all the machine scale stuff. What what's also necessary, uh, is to, um, to secure if, if infrastructure is code therefore, um, what, what secure, uh, what security methodologies do we have today that we use to secure code while we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, right? Those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So when I, when I talk about how do you do, uh, automation securely, you do it the same way you secure your code, you test it, you, you threaten model, you, you, you say, you know, Ken, my adversary, uh, exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intend it to go. Um, so all of those practices apply. It's just, everything is code these days. >>I've often said that security and privacy are sort of two sides of the same coin. And I want to ask you a question and it's really, to me, it's not necessarily Cisco and company likes companies like Cisco's responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you can help. And of course, there's this Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma. I don't know if you have a chance to see it, but basically dramatize is the way in which companies are appropriating our data to sell us ads and, you know, creating our own little set of facts, et cetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy and admin. It's good from the standpoint of awareness, you know, you may or may not care if you're a social media user. I love tick doc. I don't care, but they sort of laid out this pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that? And you'll consist go play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy mean beyond GDPR and California consumer privacy act. Um, what do you think? >>Yeah. Um, uh, I'll give you my, you know, my humble opinion is you, you fix social problems with social tools, you fixed technology problems with technology tools. Um, I think there is a social problem. Um, uh, that needs to be rectified the, you know, um, we, we, weren't built as human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. It's just pretty wrong. So yeah, that, that, that, um, that series that really kind of wake up a lot of people it is, is, you know, it's probably every day I hear somebody asked me if I, I saw, um, but I do think it also, you know, with that level of awareness, I think we, we overcome it or we compensate by what number one, just being aware that it's happening. Um, number two, you know, how you go about solving it, I think maybe come down to an individual or even a community's, um, solution and what might be right for one community might be, you know, not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >>Yeah. So it's, it's, it's almost, I think if I could, you know, play back, what I heard is, is yeah. Technology, you know, maybe got us into this problem, but technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic AI bot is going to solve this. It's got to be, you know, society has to really, really take this on as your premise. >>When I, when I first started playing online games, I'm going back to, you know, the text based adventure stuff like muds and Mose. I did a talk at, at MIT one time and, um, this old curmudgeon in the back of the room, um, we were talking about democracy and we were talking about, you know, the social processes that we had modeled in our game and this and that. And this guy just gave us the SmackDown. He needs to be walked up to the front of the room and said, you know, all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes. He says, democracy is a completely the opposite, which is you need to sleep on it. In fact, you shouldn't be scared if somebody can decide in a minute, what is good for the community? It, two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community. So it almost has the opposite dynamic. And that was super interesting to me, >>Really interesting, you know, you read the, like the, the Lincoln historians and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long, you know, to make certain decisions, but, you know, ultimately when he acted acted with, with confidence. Um, so to that point, but, um, so what, what else are you working on these days that, uh, that are, that is, is interesting that maybe you want to share with our audience? Anything that's really super exciting for you or are you >>Yeah. You know, generally speaking, um, try not try and make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's a general theme making it simpler for the common person to use, uh, tools. Um, again, you know, all of these security tools, no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity, it's that we're moving the complexity away from the user so that they can drive at human scale. And we can do things at machine scale and kind of working those two together is sort of the, the, the magic recipe. Um, it's, it's not easy, but, um, but it is, it is fun. So that's, that's what keeps me engaged. >>I'm definitely seeing, I wonder if you see it as just sort of a, obviously a heightened organization awareness, but I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. You know, the, you know, it used to be a sec ops team and an Island. Okay, it's your problem? You know, the, the, the CSO cannot report into the, to the CIO because that's like the Fox in the hen house, a lot of those structures are, are, are changing. It seems, and be becoming a, this responsibility is coming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there? And what are you? >>And it's so familiar to me because, you know, um, I, I started out as a musician. So, you know, bands bands are a great analogy. You know, you play bass, I big guitar. You know, somebody else plays drums, everybody knows their role and you create something that's larger than the sum of all parts. And so that, that analogy I think, is coming to, you know, we, we saw it sort of with dev ops where, you know, the developer, doesn't just throw their coat over the wall and it's somebody else's problem. They move together as a band. And, and that's what I think, um, organizations are seeing is that, you know, why, why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business? Not just here's the product and here's the rest of the business. That's, that's, that's pretty awesome. Um, I think, uh, we see a lot of those patterns, uh, particularly for the highly high performance businesses. >>You know, in fact, it's interesting, you have great analogy by the way. And you actually see in that within Cisco, you're seeing sort of a, and I know sometimes you guys don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you've got a leadership structure now. I I've talked to many of them. They seem to really be more focused on how their connect connecting, you know, across organizations. And it's increasingly critical in this world of, you know, of silo busters. Isn't it? >>Yeah, no, I mean, you almost, as, as you move further and further away, you know, you can see how ridiculous it was before it would be like acquiring the band and say, okay, all your guitar players go over here. All your bass players go over there. Like what happened to the band? That's what I'm talking about is, you know, moving all of those disciplines, moving together and servicing the same backlog and achieving the same successes together is just so awesome. Well, I, I always feel better after talking to you. You know, I remember I remember art. Coviello used to put out his letter every year and I was reading. I'd get depressed. We spend all this money now we're less secure. But when I talked to you TK, I feel like much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on the cube. It's, it's awesome to have you as a guest. I love these, I love these sessions. So things thanks for inviting me and I miss you, you know, hopefully, you know, next year we can get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird. Like the sign says kidney, thanks so much for coming to the Q. We, uh, we really appreciate it. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante. We've right back with our next guest. This short break, >>After the cubes coverage, just to keep virtuals coverage of dev net create virtual. We're not face to face the cubes been there with dev net and dev net create. Since the beginning, dev net create was really a part of the dev net community. Looking out at the external market outside of Cisco, which essentially is the cloud native world, which is going mainstream. We've got a great guest here. Who's, who's been the company's been on the cube. Many times. We've been talking to them recently acquired by Cisco thousand eyes. We have Joe Vaccaro is beast vice president of product. Uh, Joe, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Great. And thanks for having me. You have the keys to the kingdom, you, the vice president of product, which means you get to look inside and you get to look outside, figure it all out, uh, make everything run on thousand eyes. >>You guys have been finding common language, uh, across multiple layers of network intelligence, external services. This is the heart of what we're seeing in innovation with multi-cloud microservices, cloud native. This is really a hot area it's converged in multiple theaters and technology. Super important. I want to get into that with you, but first thousand eyes is recently acquired by Cisco, um, big acquisition, uh, super important, the new CEO of Cisco, very clear API, everything we're seeing that come out. That's a big theme at dev net create the ecosystem of Cisco's going outside their own, you know, their, their walls outside of the Cisco network operators, network engineers. We're talking to developers talking programmability. This is the big theme. What's it like at Cisco? Tell us, honestly, the COVID hits. You get acquired by Cisco, tell us what's happening. >>Yeah, it's really been an exciting six months for the entire team and customers, >>You know, as we all kind of shifted to the new normal of working from home. And I think, you know, that change alone really kind of amplified. Even some of the fundamental beliefs that we have as a company that you know, cloud is becoming the new data center or customers that Indra internet has become the new network and the new enterprise network backbone. And that SAS has really become the new application stack. And as you think about these last six months, those fundamental truths have never been more evident as we rely upon the cloud to be able to, to work as we rely upon our own home networks and the internet in order to be productive. And as we access more sized applications on a daily basis. And as you think about those fundamental truths, what's common across all of them is that you rely upon them now more than ever, not only to run your business, but to any of your employees would be productive, but you don't own them. And if you don't own them, then you lack the ability in a traditional way to be able to understand that digital experience. And I think that's ultimately what, what thousand eyes is trying to solve for. And I think it's really being amplified in really these last six months. >>Talk about the Cova dynamic because I think it highlighted and certainly accelerated digital transformation, but specifically exposes opportunities, challenges, weaknesses, I've talked to many CXOs CSOs. Uh, sec security is huge. Um, the home of the conference book talk track we'll get to in a second, but it exposes what's worth doubling down on what to abandoned from a project standpoint, as people start to look at their priorities, they're going, Hey, we got to have a connected experience. We got to have security. People are working at home. No one has VPNs at home. VPNs are passe. Maybe it's SD when maybe it's something else they're on a backbone. They're connecting to the internet, a lot of different diversity in connections. At the same time, you got a ton of modern apps running for these networks. This is a huge issue. COVID is exposed this at scale. What's your view on this? And what is thousand eyes thinking about this? >>You know, if you think about the kind of legacy application delivery, it went from largely users in an office connected over, say a dedicated corporate network, largely to traditional say internal hosted applications. And that was a early, simple, uh, connectivity bath. And as you mentioned, we've seen amplifications in terms of the diversity from the users. So users are not in the office. Now they're connected in distributed disparate locations that are dynamically changing. And you think that how they're getting to that application, they're going across a really complex service chain of different network services that are working together across as public internet backbone will totally to land them on an application. And then those applications themselves are becoming now, as you mentioned, distributed largely based upon a microservices architecture and increasing their own dependence upon third party sample size applications to fulfill say, functions of that application, those three things together. >>Ultimately you're creating that level level of complex service chain that really makes it difficult to understand the digital experience and ultimately the it organization newly chartered with not just delivering the infrastructure, but delivering the right experience. And you then have a way to be able to see, to gain that visibility, that experience, you know, to measure it and understand, and to provide that intelligence and then ultimately to act on it, to be able to ensure that your employees, as well as your customers are getting the right overall, um, approach to being able to leverage those assets. >>It's funny, you know, as you get into some of these high-scale environments, a lot of these concepts are converging. You know, we had terms like automation, self healing networks. Um, you mentioned microservices early, you mentioned data at the clouds, the new data center, uh, or when's the new land. However, we're going to look at it. It's a whole different architecture. So I want to get your thoughts on, on the automation piece of networking and internet outages, for instance, um, because when you, you know, there's so many outages going up and down, it is like, uh, catching, looking for a needle in a haystack, right. So, um, we've had this conversation with you guys on the cube before, how does automation occur when you guys look at those kinds of things? Uh, what's important to look at, can you comment on and react to, you know, the internet outages and how you find resolve those? >>Yeah. It's um, it was really great. And as you mentioned, automation really in a place that a key, when you think about the, just a broad problem that it is trying to drive and, you know, from our lens, we look at it in really three ways. First off is you have to be able to gain the level of visibility from where it matters and be able to, to test and be able to provide that level of active measurements across the, the type of ways you want to be able to inspect the network. But then also from the right vantage points, you want to inspect it. But what we talk about right inside, you know, data, um, alone, doesn't solve that problem. As you mentioned, that needle in the haystack, you know, data just provides the raw metrics that are screaming across the screen. You have to then enable that data to provide meeting. >>You need to enable that data become intelligent. And that intelligence comes through the automation of being able to process that data very quickly, allow you to be able to see the unseen, to allow you to be able to quickly understand the issues that are happening across this digital supply chain to identify issues that are even happening outside of your own control across the public internet. And then the last step of automation really comes in the form of the action, right? How do you enable that intelligence to be put, to use? How do you enable that intelligence to then drive across the rest of your it workflow as well as to be able to be used as a signaling engine, to be able to then make the fundamental changes back at the network fabric, whether that is a dressing or modifying your BGB pairing, that we see happen within our customers using thousand eyes data, to be able to route around major internet outages that we've seen over the past six months, or to be able to then that data, to be able to optimize the ultimate experience that they're delivering to both our customers, as well as our employees, >>Classic policy based activity, taking it to a whole nother level. I got to get your thoughts on the employees working at home. Okay. Because, um, you know, most it, people are like, Oh yeah, we're going to forecast in cases of disruption or a hurricane or a flood or hurricane Sandy, but now with COVID, everyone's working at home. So who would have forecasted a hundred percent, um, you know, work from home, which puts a lot of pressure on him, everything. So I got to ask you, now that employees are working at home, how do you tie network visibility to the actual user experience? >>Yeah, that's a great question. As you, you know, we saw it within our own customer base, you know, when COVID head and we saw this rise of work from home, it teams were really scrambling and said, okay, I have to light up this, say VPN infrastructure, or I need to now be able to support my users in a work from home situation where I don't control the corporate network. In essence, now you have essentially thousands. Every employee is acting across their own corporate network and people were then using thousand eyes in different ways to be able to monitor their CTPs infrastructure across, back into the corporate network, as well as in using our thousand eyes end point agents that runs on a local, a user's laptop or machine in their home to help you to be able to gain that visibility down to that last mile of connectivity. >>Because when a user calls up support and says, I'm having trouble say accessing my application, whether that's Salesforce or something else, what ultimately might be causing that issue might not necessarily be a Salesforce issue, right? It could be the device in the device performance in terms of CPU, memory utilization. It could be the wifi and the signal quality within your wifi network. It could be your access point. It could be your raw, local home router. It can be your local ISP. It could be the path that you're taking ultimately to your corporate network or that application. There's so many places that could go wrong that are now difficult to be able to see, unless you have the ability to see comprehensively from the user to the application, and to be able to understand that full end to end path, >>You know, it teams have also been disrupted. They've been on offsite prop off property as well, but you've got the cloud. How has your technology helped the it teams? Can you give some examples there? Um, >>Yeah, a great way is, you know, how people use thousand eyes as part of that data sharing ecosystem. Again, that notion of how do you go from visibility to intelligence action and where in the past you might be able as an it administrator to walk over to their network team and say, Hey, can you take a look at what I'm seeing now? That's no longer available. So how do you be able to work efficiently as the United organization? You know, we think a thousand eyes in how our customers are using us a thousand times becomes a common operating language that allows them to be able to analyze across from the application down into the underlying infrastructure, through those different layers of the network what's happening. And where do you need to focus your attention? And then furthermore, with 10,000 eyes in terms of a need, enabling that data sharing ecosystem, leveraging our share link capability really gives them the ability to say, you know, what, here's what I'm seeing and be able to send that to anybody within the it organization. But it goes even further and many times in recent times, as well as over the course of people using thousand eyes, they take those share links and actually send them to their external providers because they're not just looking to resolve issues within their own it organization. They're having to work collaboratively with a different ISP. If they're pairing with, with their cloud providers that they're appearing, uh, they're leveraging, or the SAS applications that are part of that core dependency of how they deliver their experience. >>I asked you the question, we think about levels of visibility and making the lives easier for it. Teams. Um, you see a lot of benefits with thousand eyes. You pointed out a few of them just got to ask you the question. So if I'm an it person I'm in the trenches, are you guys have, uh, an aspirin or a vitamin or both? Can you give an example because there's a lot of pain point out there. So yeah. Give me a cup, a couple Advils and aspirins, but also you're an enabler to the new things are evolving. You pointed out some use case. You talk about the difference between where you're helping people pain points and also enabling them be successful for it teams. >>Yeah, that's a great analogy. You're thinking it, like you said, it definitely sits on both sides of that spectrum, you know, thousand eyes is the trusted tool, the source of truth for it. Organizations when issues are happening as their alarm bells are ringing, as they are generating the, um, the different, uh, on call, uh, to be able to jump into a war situation thousand eyes is that trusted source of truth. Allow them to focus, to be able to resolve that issue in the heat of the moment. But that was a nice also when we think about baselining, your experience, what's important is not understanding that experience at that moment at time, but also how that's deviated over time. And so by leveraging thousand eyes on a continuous basis, it gives you that ability to see the history of that experience, to understand how your network is changing is as you mentioned, networks are constantly evolving, right? >>The internet itself is constantly changing. It's an organic system, and you need to be able to understand not only what are the metrics that are moving out of your bounds, but then what is potentially the cause of that as a network has evolved. And then furthermore, you can be begin to use that as you mentioned, in terms of your vitamin type of an analogy, to be able to understand the health of your system over time on a baseline basis so that you can begin to, uh, be able to ensure its success in a great way to really kind of bring that to light. As people using say, thousand eyes as part of the same se land-based rollout, where you're looking to say benchmark, and you can confidence as you look to scale out in either, you know, benchmarking different ESPs within that, I feel like connectivity for as you look to ensure a level of success with a single branch, give you that competence to then scale out to the rest of your organization. >>That's great insights. The classic financial model ROI got baseline and upside, right? You got handle the baseline as you pointed out, and the upside music experience connectivity, you know, application performance, which drives revenue, et cetera. So great point. Great insight, Joe. Thank you so much for that insight. It's got a final question for you. I want to just riff a little bit with you on the industry. A lot of us have been having debates about automation and who doesn't, who doesn't love automation. Automation is awesome, right? Automate things, but as the trend starts going on, as everything is a service or X, a S as it's called, certainly Cisco's going down that road. Talk about your view about the difference between automation and everything is a service because at the end of the day, everything will be a service, but without automation, you really can't have services, right? So, you know, automation, automation, automation, great, great drum to bang all day long, but then also you got the same business side saying as a service, as a service, pushing that into the products, it means not trivial. Talk about, talk about how you look at automation and everything as a service and the relationship and interplay between those two concepts. >>Yeah. Ultimately I think about in terms of what is the problem that the business is trying to solve in ultimately, what is the deal that they're trying to face? And in many ways, right, they're being exploded with increase of data that needs, they need to be able to not only process and gather, but then be able to then make use of, and then from that, as we mentioned, once you've processed that data and you've said, gather the insights from it. You need to be able to then act on that data. And automation plays a key role of allowing you to be able to then put that through your workflow. Because again, as that, it experience becomes even more complex as more and more services get put into that digital supply chain. As you adopt say increased complexity within your infrastructure, by moving to a multicloud architecture where you look to increase the number of say, network services that you're leveraging across that digital experience. >>Ultimately you need with the level of automation, you'll be able to see outside of your own vantage point. You need to be able to look at the problem from as broad of a, a broad of a way as possible. And, you know, data and automation allows you to be able to do what is fundamentally difficult to do from a very narrow point of view, in terms of the visibility you gather intelligence you generate, and then ultimately, how do you act on that data as quick as possible to be able to provide the value of what you're looking for. >>It's like a feature it's under the hood. The feature of everything comes to the surface is automation, data, machine learning, all the goodness in the software. I mean, that's really kind of what we're talking about here. Isn't it a final question for you as we wrap up, uh, dev net create really, again, is going beyond Cisco's dev net community going into the industry ecosystem where developers are there. Um, these are folks that want infrastructure as code. They want network as code. So network programmability, huge topic. We've been having that conversation, uh, with Cisco and others throughout the industry for the past three years. What's your message to developers out there that are watching this who say, Hey, I just want to develop code. Like I want, you know, you guys got that. That was nice. Thanks so much. You know, you take care of that. I just want to write code. What's your message to those folks out there who want to tap some of these new services, these new automation, these new capabilities, what's your message. >>And ultimately, I think, you know, when you're looking at thousand eyes, um, you know, from a fraud perspective, you know, we try to build our product in an API first model to allow you to be able to then shift left of how you think about that overall experience. And from a developer standpoint, you know, what I'd say is, is that while you're developing in your silo, you're going to be part of a larger ultimate system. In your experience you deliver within your application is now going to be dependent upon not only the infrastructure that's running upon, but the network it's connected to, and then ultimately the user in the sense of that user and by leveraging that thousand eyes and being able to then integrate thousand into how you think closely on that experience, that's going to help ensure that ultimately the application experience that the developer's looking to deliver meets that objective. And I think what I would say is, you know, while you need to focus on your, uh, your role as a developer, having the understanding of how you fit into the larger ecosystem and what the reality of the, of how your users access that application is critical. >>Awesome, Joe, thank you so much. Again, trust is everything letting people understand that what's going on underneath is going to be viable and capable. You guys got a great product and congratulations on the acquisition that Cisco made of your company. We've been following you guys for a long time and a great technology chops, great market traction, congratulations to everyone, 1,009. Thanks for coming on sharing. I appreciate it. Thanks Joe Vaccaro, vice president of product here, but thousand nine is now part of Cisco, John, for your host of the cube cube virtual for dev net, create virtual. Thanks for watching. >>Even prior to the pandemic, there was a mandate to automate the hyperscale cloud companies. They've shown us that to scale. You really have to automate you human labor. It just can't keep up with the pace of technology. Now, post COVID that automation mandate is even more pressing. Now what about the marketplace? What are S E seeing on the horizon? The cubes Jeff Frick speaks with Cisco engineers to gather their insights and explore the definite specialized partner program. We've got a Coon Jacobs. He's the director of systems engineering for Cisco. >>Good to see Kuhn. >>Thank you for having me >>Joining him as Eric nip. He is the VP of system systems engineering for Cisco. Good to see Eric. Good to be here. Thank you. Pleasure. So before we jump into kind of what's going on now in this new great world of programmability and, and control, I want to kind of go back to the future for a minute because when I was doing some research for this interview, it was cool. I saw an old presentation that you were giving from 2006 about the changing evolution of the, uh, the changing evolution of networking and moving from. I think that the theme was a human centered human centered network. And you were just starting to touch a little bit on video and online video. Oh my goodness, how far we have come, but I would love to get kind of a historical perspective because we've been talking a lot and I know Eric son plays football about the football analogy of the network is kind of like an offensive lineman where if they're doing a good job, you don't hear much about them, but they're really important to everything. >>And the only time you hear about them as the women, the flag gets thrown. So if you look back with the historical perspective, the load and the numbers and the evolution of the network, as we've moved to this modern time, and, you know, thank goodness cause of COVID hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, all of us in the information space would not have been able to make this transition. So I just, I just love to get some historical perspective cause you've been kind of charting this and mapping this for a very long time. >>Yeah. W we absolutely have. I think, you know, what you're referring to was back in the day, the human network campaign, and to your point, the load, the number of hosts that traffic that just overall, the intelligence of the network has just evolved tremendously over these last decade and a half, uh, 15 years or so. And you look at where we are now in terms of the programmable nature of the network and what that enables in terms of new degrees of relevance that we can create for the customers and how, you know, the role of it has changed entirely again, especially during this pandemic, you know, the fact that it's now as a serve as an elastic is absolutely fundamental to being able to ensure, uh, on an ongoing basis, a great customer experience. And so, uh, it's been, it's been, uh, a very interesting ride. >>And then just to close the loop, the, one of your more later interviews talking to Sylvia, your question is, are you a developer or an engineer? So it was, and, and your whole advice to all these network engineers is just, just don't jump in and start doing some coding and learning. So, you know, the focus and really the emphasis and where the opportunity to differentiate as a company is completely shifting gears over to the, you know, really software defined side. >>Oh, absolutely. So I mean, you look at how the software world and the network has come together and how we're applying now, you know, basically the same construct of CIC pipeline to network, uh, infrastructure, look at network really as, and get all of the benefits from that. And the familiarity of it, the way that our engineers have had to evolve. And that is just, you know, quite, quite significant in, in, in like the skill set. And the best thing is jump in, right. You know, dip your toe in the water, but continue to evolve that skill set. And, you know, don't, don't be shy. It's a leap of faith for some of us who've been in the industry a bit longer. We like to look at ourselves as the craftsman of the network, but now it's definitely a software centricity and programmability, right? >>So Eric, you've got some digital exhaust out there too, that I was able to dig up going back to 2002 752 page book and the very back corner of a dark dirty dusty Amazon warehouse is managing Cisco network security, 752 pages. Wow. How has security change from a time where before I could just read a book, a big book, you know, throw some protocols in and probably block a bunch of ports to the world that we live in today, where everything is connected. Everything is API driven, everything is software defined. You've got pieces of workloads spread out all over the place and Oh, by the way, you need to bake security in at every single level of the application stack. >>Yeah, no, I'm so, wow. The kudos that you, you found that book I'm really impressed. There was a thank you a little street, correct. So I want to hit on something that you, you talked about. Cause I think it's very important to, to this overall conversation. If we think about the scale of the network and Coon hit on it briefly, you talked about it as well. We're seeing a massive explosion of devices by the estimated by the end of this year, there's going to be about 27 billion devices on the global internet. That's about 3.7 devices for every man, woman and child life. And if we extrapolate that out over the course of the next decade on the growth trajectory we're on. And if you look at some of the published research on this, it's estimated there could be upwards of 500 billion devices accessing the global internet on a, on a daily basis in the primarily that, that, that is a IOT devices, that's digitally connected devices. >>Anything that can be connected will be connected, but then introduces a really interesting security challenge because every one of those devices that is accessing the global internet is within a company's infrastructure or accessing pieces of corporate data is a potential attack factor. So we really need to, and I think the right expression for this is we need to reimagine security because security is, as you said, not about parameters. You know, I wrote that book back in 2002, I was talking about firewalls and a cutting edge technology was intrusion prevention and intrusion detection. Now we need to look at security really in the, in the guys up or under the, under the, under the realm of really two aspects, the identity who is accessing the data and the context, what data is being accessed. And that is going to require a level of intelligence, a level of automation and the technologies like machine learning and automated intelligence are going to be our artificial intelligence rather are going to be table stakes because of the sheer scale of what we're trying to secure is going to be untenable under current, you know, just current security practices. I mean, the network is going to have to be incredibly intelligent and leverage again, a lot of that, uh, that AI type of data to match patterns of potential attacks and ideally shut them down before they ever cause any type of damage. >>Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, one thing that COVID has done a bunk many things is kind of retaught us all about the power of exponential curves and how extremely large those things are and how fast they grow. We at Dave runs it on a Google cloud a couple of years ago. And I remember him talking about early days at Google when they were starting to map out kind of, as you described kind of map out their growth curves, and they just figured out they could not hire if they hired everybody, they couldn't hire enough people to deal with it. Right. So really kind of rethinking automation and rethinking about the way that you manage these things and the level, right. The old, is it a pet or is it, or is it, um, uh, part of a herd and, and I think it's interesting what you talked about, uh, con really the human powered internet and being driven by a lot of this video, but to what you just said, Eric, the next big wave, right. >>Is IOT and five G. And I think, you know, you talk about 3.7 million devices per person. That's nothing compared to right. All these sensors and all these devices and all these factories, because five G is really targeted to machine the machines, which there's a lot of them and they trade a lot of information really, really quickly. So, you know, I want to go back to you Coon thinking about this next great wave in a five G IOT kind of driven world where it's kind of like when voice kind of fell off compared to IP traffic on the network. I think you're going to see the same thing, kind of human generated data relative to machine generated data is also going to fall off dramatically as a machine generated data just skyrocket through the roof. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think too, also what Eric touched on the visibility on that, and they've been able to process that data at the edge. That's going to catalyze cloud adoption even further, and it's going to, you know, make the role of the network, the connectivity of it all and the security within that crucially important. And then you look at the role of programmability within that. We're seeing the evolution going so fast. You look at the element of the software defined network in an IOT speed space. We see that we have a host Sarah that are not necessarily, um, you know, behaving like other hosts would, uh, on a network, for example, manufacturing floor, uh, production robot, or a security camera. And what we're seeing is we're seeing, you know, partners and customers employing programmability to make sure that we overcome some of the shortcomings, uh, in terms of where the network is at, but then how do you customize it in terms of the relevance that can provide, >>Um, bringing on board those, uh, those hosts in a very transparent way, and then, you know, keep, keep the agility of it and keep the speed of innovation going. >>So, Eric, I want to come back to you and shift gears kind of back to the people will leave the IOT in the machines along, along for a minute, but I'm curious about what does beat the boss. I mean, I go to your LinkedIn profile and it's just filled with congratulatory statements, but everyone's talking about beating the boss. You know, it's, it's a really, you know, kind of interesting and different way to, to motivate people, to build this new skillset in terms of getting software certifications, uh, within the Cisco world. And I just thought it was really cute the way that you, uh, clearly got people motivated, cause there's posts all over the place and they've all got their, their nice big badge or their certification, but, you know, at a higher level, it is a different motivation to be a developer versus an you're an a technician. And it's kind of a different point of view. And I just wonder if you could share, you know, some of the ways that you're, you're kind of encouraging, you know, kind of this transformation within your own workforce, as well as the partners, et cetera, and really adopting kind of almost a software first and this program kind of point of view versus, you know, I'm just wiring stuff up. >>Apparently a lot of people like to beat me. So I mean, not itself was a, was a, a, it was a great success, but you know, if we think we take a step back, you know, what is Cisco about as an organization? Um, I mean, obviously he looked back to the very early days of our vision, right? It was, it was to change the way the world worked, played, live and learn. And that you think about, and you hit on this when we were, you know, we were discussion with co with Kuhn in the early days of COVID. We really saw that play out as so much shifted from, you know, in-person type of interactions to virtual interactions in the network that, uh, that our, our customers, our partners, our employees built over the course of the last several years, the last three decades really helped the world continue to, um, to, to do business for students to continue to go to school or clinicians, to connect with patients. >>If I think about that mission to me, programmability is just the next iteration of that mission, continuing to enable the world to communicate, continuing, to enable customers, employees, uh, partners, uh, to essentially leverage the network for more than just connectivity now to leverage it for critical insight. Again, if we look at some of the, uh, some of the use cases that we're seeing for social distancing and contact tracing and network has a really important place to play there because we can pull insight from it, but it isn't necessarily an out of the box type of integration. So I look at programmability and in what we're doing with, with dev net to give relevance to the network for those types of really critical conversations that every organization is having right now, it's a way to extrapolate. It's a way to pull critical data so that I can make a decision. >>And if that is automated, or if that decision requires some type of manual intervention, regardless, we're still about connecting. And in this case, we're connecting insight with the people who need it most, right. The debit challenge we ran is really in respect for how critical this new skill set is going to be. It's not enough, like I said, just to connect the world anymore. We need to leverage that network, the network for that critical insight. And when we drove, we were, we created the beat, the boss challenge. It was really simple. Hey guys, I think this is important and I am going to go out and I'm going to achieve the certification myself, because I don't want to continue to be very relevant. I want to continue to be able to provide that insight for my customers and partners. So therefore I'm going for anybody that can get there before me. Maybe there's a little incentive tied to it and the incentive, although it's funny, we interviewed a lot of, a lot of our team who, who achieved it when incentive was secondary, they just wanted to have the bragging rights, like yeah, I beat Eric. Right? >>Right. Absolutely. No, it's a, it's it, you know, putting your money where your mouth is, right. If it's important, then why you should do it too. And, and you know, the whole, you're not asking people to do what you wouldn't do yourself. So I think there's a lot of good leadership, uh, leadership lessons there as well, but I want to extend kind of the conversation on the covert impact, right? Cause I'm sure you've seen all the social media means, you know, who's driving your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO or COVID. And we all know the answer to the question, but you know, you guys have already been dealing with kind of an increased complexity around enterprise infrastructure world in terms of cloud and public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi cloud. And people are trying to move stuff all the way around now suddenly had this COVID moment right in, in March, which is really a light switch moment. >>People didn't have time to plan or prepare for suddenly everybody working from home. And it's not only you, but your spouse and your kids and everybody else. So I, but now we're six months plus into this thing. And I would just love to get your perspective and kind of the change from, Oh my goodness, we have to react to the light switch moment. What do we do to make sure people can, can get, get what they need when they need it from where they are a bubble, but then really moving from this is a, an emergency situation, a stop gap situation to, Hmm, this is going to extend for some period of time. And even when it's the acute crisis is over, you know, this is going to drive a real change in the way that people communicate in the way that people, where they sit and do their jobs and, and kind of how customers are responding accordingly as the, you know, kind of the narrative has changed from an emergency stop gap to this is the new normal that we really need to plan for. >>So, uh, I think, I think you said it very well. I think anything that could be digitized, any, any interaction that could be driven virtually was, and what's interesting is we, as you said, we went from that light switch moment where I, and I believe the status, this, and I'll probably get number wrong, but like in the United States here at the beginning, at the end of February, about 2% of the knowledge worker population was virtual, you know, working from home or in a, in a remote work environment. And over the course of about 11 days, that number went from 2% to 70%. Wow. Interesting that it worked, you know, there was a lot of hiccups along the way, and there was a lot of organizations making really quick decisions on how do I enable VPN scale of mass? How do I leverage, uh, you know, things like WebEx for virtual meetings and virtual connectivity, uh, much faster now that as you said, that we kind of gotten out of the fog of, of, of war for our fog of battle organizations are looking at what they accomplished. >>And it was nothing short of Herculean and looking at this now from a transition to, Oh my gosh, we need to change too. We have an opportunity to change. And we're looking, we see a lot of organizations specifically around, uh, financial services, healthcare, uh, the, uh, the K through 20, uh, educational environment, all looking at how can they do more virtually for a couple of reasons. Obviously there is a significant safety factor. And again, we're still in that we're still on the height of this pandemic. They want to make sure their employees, their customers, students, patients remain safe. But second, um, we've found in, in discussions with a lot of senior it executives that our customers, that people are happier working from home, people are more productive working from home. And that, again, the network that's been built over the course of the last few decades has been resilient enough to allow that to happen. >>And then third, there is a potential cost savings here outside of people. The next most expensive resource that organizations are paying for is real estate. If they can shrink that real estate footprint while providing a better user experience at the locations that they're maintaining, again, leveraging things like location services, leveraging things like a unified collaboration. That's very personalized to the end user's experience. They're going to do that. And again, they're going to save money. They're going to have happier employees and ultimately they're going to make their, uh, their employees and their customers a lot safer. So we see, we believe that there is in some parts of the economy, a shift that is going to be more permanent and some estimates put it as high as 15% of the current workforce is going to stay in there in a virtual or a semi virtual working environment for the foreseeable future. >>And I, and I, and I would say, I'd say 15% is low, especially if you, if you qualify it with, you know, part time, right. I, there was a great interview we were doing and talking about working from home, we used to work from home as the exception, right? Cause the cable person was coming, are you getting a new washing machine or something where now that's probably getting, you know, in many cases we'll shift to the other where I'm generally gonna work from home unless, you know, somebody is in town or having an important meeting or there's some special collaboration that drives me to be in. But you know, I want to go back to you Kuhn and, and really doubled down on, you know, I think most people spent too much time focusing, especially, we'll just say within the virtual events base where we play on the things you can't do virtually, we can't meet in the hall. >>We can't grab a quick coffee and a drink instead of focusing on the positive things like we're accomplishing right here, you're in Belgium, right. Eric is in Ohio, we're in California. Um, and you know, we didn't take three days to, to travel and, and check into a hotel and all that stuff to get together, uh, for this period of time. So there's a lot of stuff that digital enables. And I think, you know, people need to focus more on that versus continuing to focus on the two or three things that, that it doesn't replace and it doesn't replace those. So let's just get that off the table and move on with our lives. Cause those aren't coming back anytime soon. >>No, totally. I think it's the balance of those things. It's guarding the fact that you're not necessarily working for home. I think the trick there is you could be sleeping at the office, but I think the positives are way, way more outspoken. Um, I, you know, I look at myself, I got much more exercise time in these last couple of months than I usually do because you don't travel. You don't have the jet lag and the connection. And then you talked about those face to face moments. I think a lot of people are in a way, um, wanting to go back to the office part time as, as Eric also explained. But a lot of it you can do virtually we have virtual coffees with team or, you know, even here in Belgium, our, our local general manager has a virtual effort. TIF every Friday obviously skipped the one this week. But, uh, you know, there's, there's ways to be very creative with the technology and the quality of the technology that the network enables, um, you know, to, to get the best of both worlds. Right? >>So I just, we're going to wrap the segment. I want to give you guys both the last word you both been at Cisco for a while and, you know, Susie, we, and the team on dev net has really grown this thing. I think we were there at the very beginning couple of four, five, six years ago. I can't keep track of time anymore, but you know, it's really, really grown and, you know, the timing is terrific to get into this more software defined world, which is where we are. I wonder if you could just, you know, kind of share a couple thoughts as you know, with a little bit of perspective and you know, what you're excited about today and kind of what you see coming down the road since you guys have been there for a while you've been in this space, uh, let's start with Yukon. >>I think the possibility it creates, I think really programmability software defined is really about the art of the possible it's what you can dream up and then go code. Um, uh, Eric talked about the relevance of it and how it maximizes that relevance on a customer basis. Um, you know, and then it is the evolution of, of the teams in terms of the creativity that they can bring to it. Uh, we're seeing really people dive into that and customers, um, co-creating with us. And I think that's where we're going in terms of like the evolution of the value proposition there in terms of what technology >>Can provide, but also how it impacts people. Has it been discussed and redefines process? >>I love that the art of the possible, which is a lot harder to execute in a, in hardware than software certainly takes a lot longer. I'd love to get your, uh, your thoughts. >>Absolutely. So I started my career at Cisco, uh, turning, uh, putting IP phones onto the network. And back then, you know, it was, you know, 2001, 2002, when, uh, the idea of putting telephones onto the network was such a, um, just such an objectionable idea. And so many purists were telling us all the reasons it wouldn't work. Now, if we go forward again, 19 years, the idea of not having them plugging into the network is a ridiculous idea. So we have a, we're looking at an inflection point in this industry, and it's really, it's not about programming. It's not necessarily about programming. It's about doing it smarter. It's about being more efficient. It's about driving automation, but again, it is, it's about unlocking the value of what the network is. We've moved so far past. What can, you know, just connectivity, the network touches everything and it's more workload moves to the cloud is more workload moves to things like containers. >>Um, the network is the really, the only common element that ties all of these things together. The network needs to take its rightful place, uh, in the end, the, it lexicon as being that critical or that poor critical insight provider, um, for, for how users are interacting with the network, how users are interacting with applications, how applications are interacting with them in another program, ability is a way to do that more efficiently, uh, with greater a greater degree of certainty with much greater relevance into the overall delivery of it services and digitization. So to me, I think we're going to look back 20 years from now, probably even 10 and say, man, we used to configure things manually. What was that like? And I think, I think really this is, this is the future. And I think we want to be aligned with where we're going versus where we've been. >>All right. Well, Coon, Eric, thank you for, for sharing your perspective. You know, it's, it's really nice to have, you know, some historical reference, uh, and it's also nice to be living in a new age where you can, you can, you know, stay at the same company and, and still refresh, you know, new challenges, new opportunities and grow this thing. Cause as you said, I remember those IP first IP phone days and I thought, well, mob bell must be happy because the old mother's day problem is finally solved when we don't have to have a dedicated connection between every mother and every child in the middle of may. So good news. So thank you very much for sharing your, uh, your insights and really, uh, really enjoyed the >>Thank you. >>We've been covering dev net create for a number of years. I think since the very first show and Susie, we and the team really built a practice, built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and in getting devs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software defined networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and, and developing solutions and, you know, using brain power, that's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have, uh, our next guest, uh, a partner for someone is Brad Hoss. He is the engineering director for dev ops at Presidio, Brad. Great to see you. >>Hey Jeff, great to be here. >>Absolutely. And joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect for Cisco dev net partners. And he has been driving a whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Great to be here and looking forward to this conversation. >>Absolutely. So let's, let's start with you Chuck, because I think, um, you know, you're leading this kind of partner effort and, and you know, software defined, networking has been talked about for a long time and you know, it's really seems to be maturing and, and software defined everything right. Has been taking over, especially with, with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the customer program ability customability in software and Mo and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about, you know, the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is to have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward, versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. >>Yeah, Jeff, absolutely. So along this whole journey of dev net where we're, we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of our Cisco platforms, most of Cisco's businesses transacted through partners. And what we hear from our customers and our partners is they want to, our customers want to way to be able to identify, does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey I'm trying to do, do a new implementation. I want to automate that. How can I find a partner to, to get there? And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices going along the step in that journey with us for the last six years, they really want to say, Hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and give an edge to my customers to show them that, yes, I have these capabilities. I've built a business practice. I have technology, I have technologists that really understand this capability and they have the net certifications to prove it, help me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what our Danette partner specialization is all about. >>Right. That's great. And Brad, you're certainly one of those partners and I want to get your perspective because partners are oftentimes a little bit closer to the customer cause you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions and just reflect on, we know what happened, uh, back in March 15th, when basically everybody was told to go home and you can't go to work. So, you know, there's all the memes and social media about who, you know, who pushed forward your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO or COVID. And we all know what the answer is, whatever you can share some information as to what happened then, and really for your business and your customers, and then reflect now we're six months into it months plus, and, and you know, this new normal is going to continue for a while. How's the customer attitudes kind of changed now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment and really we need to put in place some foundation to carry forward for a very long time potentially. >>Yeah, it's really quite interesting actually, you know, when code first hit, we got a lot of requests to help with automation of provisioning our customers and in the whole digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there and I'd say it became more of, of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly, uh, you know, migrating customers to, you know, new typologies where instead of the, the, you know, users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly in a, we have a lot of success there in those beginning months with, you know, using automation and programmability, um, building, you know, provisioning portals for our customers to get up and running really fast. Um, and that, that, that was what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that's the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit. >>You know, now they're asking, you know, how can I take advantage of the technology to, you know, look at my offices in a different way, you know, for example, you know, how many people are coming in and out of those locations, you know, what's the usage of my conference rooms. Um, are there, uh, are there, um, situations where I can use that information? Like how many people are in the building and at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that, you know, like, do I even need this office anymore? So, so the conversations have really changed in ways that you couldn't have imagined before March. Right. >>And I wonder with, with you Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view, I mean, the network is amazing. It had had, COVID struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly entertainment, um, restaurant, business, transportation, they, you know, hospitality, but for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. Um, you know, and, and the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if, you know, kind of from your perspective as, as suddenly, you know, the importance of the network, the importance of security and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that, having, you know, dev net with, with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space as good as space as you could be given this new challenge thrown at you. >>Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. A new Cisco has pushed the idea that the network is transformational. The network is the foundation, and as our customers have really adopted that message, it is enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. So for myself, I've, I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years, this is, you know, the, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore, but my day to day functions are still the same. And it's built because of the capabilities we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry, as far as kind of moving to that application type of economy, as we go to microservices, as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud, those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this, to this COVID situation. And I think it's helped to, to justify the investments that's that our customers have made as well as what our partners have been, being able to do to deliver on that multicloud capability, to take those applications, get them closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable to, to users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional form. >>Right. Right. It's interesting that Brad, you, you made a comment on another interview. I was watching getting ready for this one in terms of, uh, applications now being first class citizens was, was what you said. And it's kind of interesting coming from an infrastructure point of view, where before it was, you know, what do I have and what can I build on it now really it's the infrastructure that responds back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of, of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that apps first is the way to go, because that gives people the competitive advantage that it gives them the ability to react in the marketplace and to innovate and move faster. So, you know, it's, it's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first, by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. >>Yeah, no doubt. And, you know, I think that the whole push to cloud was really interesting in the early days, it was like, Hey, we're going to change our applications to be cloud first. You know? And then I think the terminology changed over time, um, to more cloud native. So when we, when we look at what cloud has done over the past five years with customers moving, you know, their, their assets into the cloud in the early days that we were all looking at it just like another data center, but what it's really become is a place to host your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're, we're no longer talking about, you know, the assets per se, we're talking about the applications and what did those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially with the whole move to cloud native and microservices in the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure as code. >>You're now able to bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application, as infrastructure, as code the application in this definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are, all are wrapped together and you've got change control, version control, um, and it's all automated, you know, it's, it's a beautiful thing. And I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. You know, in, when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking, I think everybody was trying to figure it out and they didn't really fully understand what that meant now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like as it's, as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's Terraform or Ansible, whatever that might be, whatever method or tool that you're using to bring it all together. It's, you know, it's really interesting now, I think, I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than, you know, those early days of SDN, uh we're out, you know, it was, was it a controller or is it a new version of SNMP? You know, now it makes sense it's actually something tangible. >>Right, right. But still check, as you said, right. There's still a lot of API APIs and there's still a lot of component pieces to these applications that are all run off the network that all have to fit, uh, that had to fit together. You know, we cover PagerDuty summit and you know, their whole thing is trying to find out where the, where the problems are within the very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandons their shopping cart or whatever the particular application. So again, the network infrastructure and the program ability super important. But I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of and they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. >>Yeah, absolutely. Jeff said the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference. I mean, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the internet. The amount of people necessary to, to be able to facilitate that type of traffic. If we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not scale it's automation. That makes that possible. That allows us to look higher up the ability to do that. Automatic provisional provisioning. Now that we're in microservices now, everything is cloud native. We have the ability to, to better, to better adjust, to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we can very quickly spend something ups to take that load off where traditionally it was open up a ticket. Let me get someone in there, let me fix it. >>Now it's instantaneously identify the solution, go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team, they just simply need to get notified that this happened. And as long as there's traceability and a point that Brad made, as far as you being able to go through here doing the automation of the documentation side of it. I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the API is from the infrastructure. And then the ability to tie that into other systems like an IP address management or a change control, or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made an infrastructure change. And now I can automatically do that documentation update and record. I know who did it. I know when they did it and I know what they did, and I know what the test results were even five years ago, that was fantasy land. Now, today that's just the new normal, that's just how we all operate. Right. >>Right, right. So I want to get your take on the other side, >>Cloud multicloud >>Public cloud, you know, as, as I think you said Brad, when public cloud first came out, there was kind of this, this rush into, we're going to throw everything in there then for, for, for different reasons. People decided maybe that's not the best, the best solution, but really it's horses for courses. Right. And, and I think it was pretty interesting that, that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're going to put their workloads. And Oh, by the way, that might not be a static place, right. It might be moving around based on, you know, maybe I do my initial dev and, and, and Amazon. And then when I go into production, maybe I want to move it into my data center and then maybe I'm having a big promotion or something I want to flex capability. So from, from your perspective in helping customers work through this, cause still there's a lot of opinions about what is multicloud, what is hybrid cloud and you know, it's horses for courses, how are you helping people navigate that? And what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through, you know, everybody talks about their journey. I think there's still, you know, kind of bumbling down, bumbling down paths, trying to find new things, what works, what doesn't work. And I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. Yeah, >>Yeah. No doubt. It is still early days. And you know, I, I, I go back to it being application centric because, you know, being able to understand that application, when you move to the cloud, it may not look like what it used to look like when you, when you move it over there, you may be breaking parts off of it. Some of them might be running on a platform as a service while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as service. And some of it might still be in your data center. Those applications are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier, those resources, wherever they are and be defined in that infrastructure as code and automation. >>But you know, aside from, I think we focus a lot about provisioning. When we talk about automation, we also have these amazing capabilities on, on the side of, uh, operations too. Like we've got streaming telemetry, and the ability to gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before, or at least in the, in, you know, in the early days of monitoring software, right? You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. It probably had a friendly name, like maybe it was, uh, something from the Hobbit right now. You've got things coming up and spinning and spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place. In that thing. You used to know what that was. Now you have to quickly figure out where it went. So the observability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody, um, should be paying attention to attention, to moving forward with regards to when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers or, you know, in your premise, I'm breaking that into microservices. >>You really need to understand what's going on. And the, you know, programmability and API APIs and, you know, yang models are tied into streaming telemetry. Now there's just so many great things coming out of this, you know, and it's all like a data structure that, that people who are going down this path and the dev net path there, they're learning these data structures and being able to rationalize and make sense of that. And once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or switch, um, Amazon, you know, it doesn't matter. You're on, you're all speaking a common language, which is that data structure. >>That's great. Chuck, I want to shift gears a little bit. Cause there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about, about in a dev net, really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco, um, as, as really more of a software, a software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you can put a little more color on that. Um, because clearly as you said, partners are super important. It's your primary go to market and, and Presidios, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world that's and you know, you said there's some, there's some, you know, non traditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner that suddenly you guys are playing with because of really the software lead. >>Yeah. Jeff that's exactly right. So as we've been talking to folks with dev nets and whether it'd be at one of the Cisco live events in the dev net zone or the prior dev net create events, we'll have, we'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views as a, as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resell market. This what we're doing with the doublet that gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem, share them with our extremely large dev net community so they can get access to those, to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner to partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they built a fantastic networking. They always have the fantastic networking business, but they've built this fantastic automation business that's there, but they may come into, into a scenario where it's working with a vertical or working with the technology case that they may not have an automation practice for. >>We can leverage some of these software specific partners to come in there and do a joint, go to markets where, so they can go where that traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value on top of that traditional stack, that brings us to this business outcomes that the customers are looking for and a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion. That's terrific. Well, again, it's a, it's, it's unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the, the Cisco dev net shows, you know, they're still small, they're still intimate. There's still a lot of, uh, information sharing and, you know, great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the computer museum, I think the last couple of years and in, in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together, uh, maybe, maybe for next year's event, but, uh, thank you very much for stopping by and sharing the information. Really appreciate it. Happy to be here from around the globe. It's the cube presenting, accelerating automation with Devin brought to you by Cisco. >>When I'm Sean for the cube, your host for accelerating automation with dev net, with Cisco, and we're here to close out the virtual event with Mindy Whaley, senior director, Mandy, take it away. >>Thank you, John. It's been great to be here at this virtual event and hearing all these different automation stories from our different technology groups, from customers and partners. And what I'd like to take a minute now is to let people know how they can continue this experience at DevNet create, which is our free virtual event happening globally. On October 13th, there's going to be some really fun stuff. We're going to have our annual demo jam, which is kind of like an open mic for demos, where the community gets to show what they've been building. We're also going to be, um, giving out and recognizing our dev net creator award winners for this year, which is a really great time where we recognize our community contributors who have been giving back to the community throughout the year. And then we find really interesting channels. We have our creators channels, which is full of technical talks, lightening talks. >>This is where our community, external Cisco people come in share what they've been working on, what they've been working learning during the year. We also have a channel called API action, which is where you can go deep into, you know, IOT or collaboration or data center automation and get demos talks from engineers on how to do certain use cases. And also a new segment called street from engineering, where you get to hear from the engineers, building those products as well. And we have a start now for those people just getting started, who may need to dive into some basics around coding, API APIs and get that's a whole channel dedicated to getting them started so that they can start to participate in some of the fun challenges that we're going to have during the event. And we're going to have a few fun things. Like we have some definite advocate team members who are awesome, musically talented. They're going to share some performances with us. So, um, we encourage everyone to join us there. Pick your favorite channel, uh, join us in whichever time zone you live in. Cause we'll be in three different time zones. And, um, we would love for you to be there and to hear from you during the event. Thanks so much. >>That's awesome. Very innovative, multiple time zones, accelerating automation with dev net. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching.

>>live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the Cube covering Cisco Live 2020 right to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back to the Cisco Live 2020 show in Barcelona, Spain. It's the Cube's live coverage. Four days of action. I'm John Furrier with my co host, Dave Vellante. Stew Minimum is in the house. We've been really interview all the thought. Leads all the action here in the DEV. Net zone of Cisco. We're here with Susie Wee, who's the senior vice president, chief technology officer and general manager of Cisco's DEV. Net and C X ecosystem success. Susie, great to see you again, Thanks to you. With our third year we've been we've been watching the growth of definite explode and definite create a separate event for developers. Great to see you. >>Great to see you. Great to be here. >>So how does it feel to be on a wave of success? You've had quite an impact in the industry, and I think the biggest story that's going on in the industry is the role of developers. You guys have embraced that four years ago, brought it all together and really just been marching to the cadence of just humble training, education and programming, all the Cisco products enabling what it looks like to be the future of Cisco. >>Yeah, I mean, it's it's humbling, t So you know what's been really great? It's really all about our community. And, you know, I mean, you guys have jumped in, been with us on this journey. You've seen it like all around us in terms of how it's progressed. But what's interesting is that, you know, networkers the software developers, the Dev Ops pros that people who are coming into definite really progressing, they're getting to the next level. And then we have more and more new people coming in. And what happens is the technology keeps advancing right. So networking, security going toe intent based networking, multi domain. How do you integrate these things? Cognitive collaboration. I o t an edge, you know, edge computing. As all of this comes together, you get to a really interesting place. But what happens is we have to think about I t department networking departments like how do people use this to their advantage? Right. So there's actually users of people who install and run these things and how do they make that available and actually get a business advantage out of that infrastructure? That's what this is all about. >>And the big scene. Wendy on the opening keynote, kicked off before David came on. She had a slide that I thought encapsulate what I think the future of all business and you guys have been on and on and on, a reference that it was people in communities, business model and business operations almost like a three legged stool. You've been on this because your team Michael was on the Cube just now said people have been in their careers on Cisco. But Cisco is betting the business on the people, that ecosystem, it's developers. CC III is the certifications. This dynamic of the role of the people is critical, >>and they're driving >>the change >>it is. And you know what was tremendous about Cisco's business model and how Cisco was founded. So this was pre me, you know, and it's just the brilliance of the early folks is like Cisco made this router, you know? It was a little start up. It was like five people, right? And then it started flying off the shelf in the mid eighties in late eighties when the Internet started taking off, and then the way they scale that out was by growing the community, they didn't say We're going to hire people around the world to install these networks. We're gonna create a community of professionals who can go around and install these networks. And then we're going to create a partner ecosystem of partners who are going to build businesses around this, installing networks for customers. And so really, Cisco very early on, learn that we had to be very customer focused and build with an ecosystem of partners. And then we created Cisco Certification Program, and that started to take the people who are getting trained to do networking and give them certifications. And then they were able to get jobs in customers and partners and build their careers. And so now we move that to today, and we're continuing with that philosophy and doubling down. It's about them, except there's a shift in technology. So the network has changed. It's not the same old network like now. There's new capabilities that require software. It requires dev ops. It requires applications to hit the infrastructure it requires. I T and Infrastructure to solve business problems. But we need to bring the people along and doing that, and that is absolutely what we've been about. >>I said in my breaking analysis there were there were many things that helped Cisco rise with the three things like pointed out where the bet on I p, the M and A and then I was too narrow. I liked how you describe it as the community, but really talking about the Army of trained engineers that were advocates. And you're extending that to the partner ecosystem. What's interesting about watching this rise over the faster uses? Not only transformation of Cisco from hardware to software and now even business transformation is you see, I t go from a cost center to a profit center, but you're sort of following that track. I don't know if you're leading it are following it sort of incompetent what's going on. And, >>you know, I would say >>that we're doing both because, uh, obviously we're listening to customers and partners all the time to see what do you need? So we're listening, and that would make us leading as we're sorry. Following is >>we're >>listening and yet we're creating technology to enable them to do these new things right? So there's a reason that you can think about the network to be solving business problems. It's because we made the networking programmable and based on software. If we didn't make it software, it would still be running the old way. And it wouldn't be able to play in a Dev ops loop or be automated or anything there. So I would say that it's very combined. But Cisco takes a holistic approach right back there. We have an I T managers forum where there are people who are trying to say, Hey, you know, I've been leading technology teams in I T. But I need to learn how to talk to the business, right? So there's a transformation that needs to happen, which is okay, The technologist networkers I t folks themselves need to learn about software. But then also, these folks and their managers need to be able to talk to the business and think differently. So take some design thinking. Think about what are the business stakeholders problems where customers problems, how can I make my technology work for them? So we really have a lot going on Teoh building the kind of success of our ecosystem. >>Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned technology shift, and that's causing a lot of change is actually how people are certified business models. And it's interesting. When we were chatting years ago, Dev. Ops was actually out there. The hyper scales around you saw it evolving was pretty clear to a lot of the insiders. That's Dev Ops. Infrastructure is code. Then you kicked on something where programmable networks I heard this week, and this is kind of again goes to the next level and kind of connect the dots. Biz Dev. Ops. So the AB dynamics guys, look at this as OK. So this agile attitude yes, has been on for a while. Could you comment? I think >>a lot of people that >>are looking at Cisco trying to understand its evolution where it's gonna go >>yeah, >>is rooted in years ago. A shift in thinking, yes, and it's an agile It's a dev ops mindset, >>yes, but >>the Dev ops notion from whether it's pure Dev ops, cloud native or Dev ops or Biz Dev ops >>for what's next? So this is a It's been around for a while. You just share your Yeah, Absolutely. So >>I have a slide and we don't show slides here, which is a good thing. But it was called it the hamburger slide. So the hamburger slide, where there would be infrastructure and the applications. And then there's this other layer appear business, you know. And basically, what happens is the infrastructure became programmable, so as opposed to the infrastructure and the applications being separate, the I T teams did the infrastructure of the app Dev did. The businesses did the APS. Then now that the infrastructure's family can get into a dev ops workflow. So for cloud applications, the APS and the infrastructure can really mix. And now the network is programmable. So there's Net Dev ops. And it's not just compute that can get into Dev ops. But you know, the network can too. But then, now that business layer can flow into this. And so what happens is once again, you could say that cloud enables business, right? And so, if you know, a business is trying to say, how do I compete like a retail store? How my completing with a cloud competitors. Well, you have to embrace it. Take your traditional infrastructure, your customer data your stores, but then mix that with cloud offerings. That's a huge transformation that needs to happen. But now there's even more capabilities. As you're saying, Hey, I'm like a coffee shop and I'm rolling out all of these stores. How do I make sure my business applications get there? How do I get customer intelligence and business intelligence together so my workers can serve my customers with the right knowledge and information they need so you can actually use the infrastructure and APS as an advantage in how you serve your business? And you wouldn't even be able to do those things if you didn't know about the technology. So I would say that there's like a workforce trend where technology is enabling business and it can grow your business in different ways. But we need to make sure that we can express that because the technologist doesn't usually talk in terms of the business. But that's where all the value >>on the application has always been. That point of business value in connection to the business when the APP is the infrastructure has been removed from that now that the infrastructure's becoming programmable. It's embedded into that application, and developers can now add value on top of it. I mean, the striking thing to me was just behind us, to seeing a number of your customers lining up to learn how to code in Python. And then I o t was off the charts. And I've always been saying that Look at the edge is going to be one by developers E. I think you really got that right. I'm curious as to why you think just really is the one company in a large, established player. That is, I think, figured it out that I've said that many have tried throwing money at the problem, reaching out to developers fallen flat. I mean, even very successful software companies were struggling. Why do you think Cisco has had successes? Is a culture is at the leverage of that certification and community that you talked about earlier? >>Yeah, it's while it's really hard to say, like one reason why, because these air tricky things, like so taking on a new business strategy, getting everybody aligned in a big company, even in a little company, is hard, but it takes like everybody pushing towards the direction and what happens is different. People get it at different times. So obviously with Dev net, we're trying to push something along. The CEO Chuck Robbins. He got it and he was pushing it. And then the businesses and product teams. Some of them had a P I first, and some of them did not. But now more and more on almost all of them do. Now. All the products have AP eyes and they're getting more AP I first and now what we're doing is aligning AP eyes across the portfolio. You need to get your sales teams to understand and to engage. Like the regions. We have people in Italy who are engaging with the Italian community. We have our seas around the world that are basically engaging the people in each of their countries to evangelize it in tow, work with customers and partners in their local language is using this material to get them on board. So, you know, when we started, Definite Way had different ways we could take it. No one defined a developer program for a company like Cisco before, like a networking company, but we actually didn't do it by saying, Oh, we're only gonna talk to application developers and ignore those old networkers We said we're going to make them core and bring them along and bring in the captives and bring them together. I wouldn't say we're gonna, like, forget about the old Cisco products We said we're gonna work with them as they add AP eyes and make that better. We're gonna ignore our sales guys and the ones that we're going to bring them along and make them our evangelists and advocates to work with the region. So we kind of use the whole fabric along with it and just I kind of gained. The community >>recognized the appetite for building, and some people are like, >>I'm going to jump in and give this a try because I think it's important and something like, I'm gonna wait and see and they're like, Oh, it's something now, Okay, now I'll jump in and we're like, >>That's right, >>you're totally We do a lot of Cuban. It is many different events here at Cisco over the years. It's interesting to see when people get in and you can see it when their eyes pop up. Oh, I get it. It is a progression of whether they're orientation, what their background is. But it seems to me the early people who click it on it is our systems thinkers. Most of the techies, they're systems systems, folks. Yeah, they see as a system not as one thing. Yes, As you said, it's not just absent infrastructure. So a lot of the system guys get it first. And then on the business side, they see it from more of the making money. So you see the impact of the application changing the business model. It's a retail app or whatever they get it. That that's gonna be the future. Yeah, it depends on where you're coming from. >>It does. It does. And what's interesting is to >>see how this community has evolved and actually, how we've evolved to be able to support people along the way. So as you remember, when you were first year, it was really some techies who realized they needed to learn something new. So is about learning about software and AP eyes. And then we evolved. It became about coding. So how do we use a definite automation exchange in code exchange to use a software based model to build community code around networking use cases because they wanted to use it and get it into use cases. And then now we have people are like, Okay, I'm doing it, I get it. But I can't get my business leaders to understand. So now we're actually helping them express the business case and create use cases that solve business problems more directly, so >>your access to customer success >>and customer success. So now explain that piece. What is that? How >>to be successful at training is everything >>customer direction. What is that piece? So s >>o me and my team were Cisco employees, and sometimes I mean, this doesn't get represented, but we move around the York, so you know, as different things change. And so there's a recent move where it has been in the engineering team. I've now moved into the customer experience organization. We're doing a transformation like a customer experience, customer success, transformation for Cisco and so you know, as we think about that. Well, first of all, Cisco's always been customer oriented, But what does this mean in a world of software in world of partners? ecosystems with the products and opportunities we have now. And so, as we're gearing towards this kind of customer success and customer experience model, is that, you know, they're trying to do a transformation, and it's actually very similar to what Dev Net has already done, which is specifically, let's see. So when you engage with a company on new technology, we can say Okay, come here to the DEV Net Zone and learn about the AP eyes, you know. But as you're working with a customer and you say, Hey, you know you're from the customer, let's go on this journey together. Did you know that we have AP eyes? Let's learn about AP eyes. >>And did you know that >>this product performs this function? But it also has AP eyes. So let's teach you about those. Then you learn a different aspect of the product that you might not have thought about before because you're like, Oh, it can be a platform and then you say, Hey, and you know you need to solve automation. This can be used to solve automation, and so then you're like, Oh, I'm thinking about automation, but how do I do it? so you can't have just one product. That's >>that's a progression that depends on what the customer's orientation is, whether environment looks like >>so it >>means, like start to evolve and think about their problem. Actually, their problem is automation. Their problem is not using this product right. They're trying to solve a bigger product and hopefully this is a bigger business problem or an automation problem. And this product is a piece of the puzzle into it. So we want to kind of engage in the full discussion from what is your need, an automation and then work backwards toe like, How can this product help? And so it's kind of like turning things upside down and ensuring the customer uses. And, you know, we understand their business problem. We're helping them solve it. And this is how these products can play a role in helping you achieve that >>in every business is looking at that from the corner office. They all want to drive automation into their business. They're looking at okay, if the economy turns out more automation, whether it's you know, you see an R P. A takeoff is the cloud is supporting that, Yeah, it's a big trend >>is huge, and it's, you know, and actually moving to an automation infrastructure. It's not like buy a new product and you've automated and you're done. It's actually very hard, and it requires an architectural shift. It means, like I'm going to start to build telemetry, analyze data and get insights from it. Well, if you don't have that implemented somewhere, then you need to architect for them. And then once you start building into that and seeing dashboards and then connecting that into other business APS, then you start to go further and further so every step along the way, we want to get them closer to an automation architecture. But that takes work, >>and it's cultural as well as people hear automation. If it well, that's my job and so >>little >>education. And then once they see it, Oh, you mean I could get rid of all these things I don't like to do, and I can do this instead. Then they really lean in and create new value. >>Yeah, So what we're getting at is this, like, really interesting. I'll call it a new technology trend of looking at kind of automation, plus Ai together, right? And so I've been talking about it out here in some places, which is now we've been talking about automation. We've been talking about AI. You look at these together. There's a set of people who are like, Let's think about what automation means. It could mean Oh my gosh, someone's going to take my job away. I don't need people anymore That would be called like autonomous. And there's some things that you do want to make autonomous and work themselves. But then you can also look at kind of assisting humans. Right? So assisting like, what are you trying to do? Roll out configurations across different places and get them set up where we can automate that and you can assist a human? And being able to do it on this next age is augmenting humans. What is there that a person really couldn't do that they can do now in a night? Example of that is, you know, you take a look at threat intelligence and security going around the world. Cisco has products around the world that are looking for security threats. You put those together, you can see a threat before it comes to a customer environment and say, Hey, we found this threat. We better shut it down over in your system to make sure you're blocked and protected from it. You've augmented human capability, you know, using automation and AI. >>You know, one of the things a lot of companies do is they focus on a big wave and they focus on it. They get on that new wave. Cisco's on a lot of different ways. You got I, O. T. And Security, which you were talking about. This kubernetes and Cloud native is like all these collaboration. They're all their own big waves coming. So I have to ask you because you've been so successful, definite and then a great leader in the industry with all your experience. What's your vision as this comes in? Because Cisco is that one of the benefits uniquely positioned with all the complexity, all the opportunities to the Dev ops, like across the board up and down the stack, these waves are coming. It's not just one. You have a focus on kubernetes. You got a focus on security. There's all these different big things that you guys are working on. What's your vision >>on how >>this all plays out >>like so while there's different, there's different things going on kubernetes and cloud. You know, we're doing networking. What's going on in I O. T and Edge Computing and the Future of Cognitive Collaboration and AI and ML, And you know all of this kind of thing a security I don't actually view them as separate. Actually view them is all part of a bigger system, right? They're part of a platform that's trying to solve a bigger problem, >>and the secret is AP ice. So it's actually a >>combination of architecture in AP eyes and how this works is a fabric together and you know there's benefit. Like if you're trying to do security, sure, you can use security products to do security. But why don't you also use network segmentation to do security, like literally segment out pieces of the network and, you know, data and APS that should not be talking to other places and use that for security? So, you know, I kind of view it is all working together towards a bigger architecture because you're using Ap eyes. You can start to put these things together and start to apply policies across these different domains. So this kind of whole new area, another new technology trend, is looking at multi domain opportunities and cross architecture. So that's really key >>in the data that you get out of that as well, right? Data and metadata that you can analyze and then act upon. Yes, Dr. Inside >>multi domain, multi clouds Having >>data models, right? Look at how do you take, you know, so that all these different systems are adding up to a everything you need to create data models that these different applications can kind of pour into >>that used to be locked inside of a box. Sitting in >>these types of application would have its own >>kind of model, But we're really all working towards the bigger thing in software that lets you down in >>the silicon is a great thing to get so looking One coming, Yes, moving from the box of the chip. Yeah, not a bad strategy. >>Super interesting. So, yeah, >>if you look at, you know, where are the bottlenecks in this? And this is where you need to rethink what your business strategy is. And it's just like you down in the optics down at that layer is where the big opportunities are. And if we can differentiate and provide value in that space, then that's what we've done. We >>were riffing the other night in the taxi came in I said, The day of Digital and digital, which is the Internet's all digital. Now the business model is the killer app, and we're just more of a provocative statement like, What are you trying to dio with that? What all this is? What's the purpose of all this? >>Yeah, I >>have a business model that actually works. >>It is, But it is, Yeah, >>and what's interesting about the business model? Also, to think about that? It's not just your own business model. It's again. That's where that's why I called our new group ecosystem success. It's what you do, you know. And there's this whole model of success, meaning you your customer, your supply chain up above you and then how you deliver. But it's east west now, too, right? It's like, How does your innovation work with your partner's innovation? Another area that and how did this all happen together? Like, how do you take trends in security and advances there and, you know, in workforce and people. And as you take a look at, you know, everything that's happening in cloud and then intersect so that we're all successful >>and it's enabled by what you're saying before automation and AI obviously supported by Cloud AP eyes and data across that system that you guys were talking >>about, I think that I think the bumper sticker for Cisco's Cisco connects businesses because that's really what you're doing. >>There we go way >>shut up for the 1st 500 >>Yes, yes, yes. So yes. So some of the big news over here is that well, in this >>world of where the infrastructure becomes programmable. So what Cisco's had a long time is Cisco's sort of certification program. So we have ccn a Cisco Certified Network Associates. Si Si n Pi's CC III is the expert level, and that's been an industry standard for the last 26 years, and people have job roles. They've gotten promotions, they get recognized, their certified for delivering quality, and what we've introduced is the definite certifications. So, in addition to the engineering certifications or the software certifications and Devon, it's kind of growing to the next level. By so far, everybody who's been in here has been into definite because of their hearts and because they knew they had to learn anything. But now we're giving them a certification so they can be recognized as their efforts, and we're expanding Cisco certification to cover it. Now. This represents the move of engineering plus software together in your I T teams and together for your technology teams and the new certifications. The definite set of Cisco Live February 24th the 1st 500 people to earn a definite certification. We're going to call the definite 500. And >>so they want to be the first >>ones who are really stepping forward in this new industrial shift towards combining engineering and software, making the world of the infrastructure talking to business and driving business happen. >>Well, we'd love to be First, get a list of >>thousands of people 500 seats that will take. We'll take the 501st 10,000 in the 1,000,000 I dive >>Heard Susie. Some Cisco VP's want to get into that 500. >>They yes, Gamification. >>Always a good strategy, Susie. Great to watch your successes with folks watching, seeing definitely come from an idea execution and now core to the business model's been quite an evolution. Congratulations. Always success. >>Thank you. And thank you for joining us on this journey. >>So we've been working together on it. >>We've learned a lot. It's been so much fun. We're in the DEV Net zone. I'm John Furrier Dave Vellante with Susie Wee, the chief of the definite team and the big zones gets bigger every year. And the cube's getting big air thanks to you and the team. Appreciate it is to keep more live coverage from Barcelona. Cisco live 2020 after this short break. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2020. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-hosts Stu Miniman, John Furrier is also in the house. We're here with Ryan Rose, Technical Program Manager at Cisco Devnet. Ryan, great to see you. What's goin' on? >> Hey, thank you so much. I'm really glad to be here. >> You know, we have a soft spot in our heart, for Devnet, because of course, we're in the Devnet zone, Devnet is the reason why theCUBE originally came to Cisco Live, and so it's been awesome seeing the evolution and the ascendancy of DevNet. It's now mainstream, you get a lot of love on the main stage, and really, it is the linchpin of the next generation of training and certifications for the engineers, the network engineers. So, tell us, give us a little quick history of Devnet, You've been here since the beginning, you remember the first Devnet. >> Oh yeah, in fact, so during my time at Cisco, like I was originally in learning at Cisco and being able to move over into Devnet, but I remember the very first Devnet experience that I had, and it started back when Devnet started about five years ago now. It was at Cisco Live San Francisco. At the time, they had split us across two streets, you know, they were trying to put, Cisco was trying to put a lot of activities going on in San Francisco. And they put Devnet in this walkway that was next to the Moscone Center, and, inside the Moscone Center. And when you went in there, it was packed. I mean, it was just shoulder to shoulder. Everyone there was just so excited because everyone was trying to learn, like, what is Devnet? And now, to look back on that, it's just so crazy how people have just been so quick to embrace the Devnet mission, the Devnet philosophy. Really getting into automation and programmability. And it's so exciting for us every year to be coming back, seeing you at theCUBE, being here in the Devnet zone, and being able to help people continue on that journey. Yeah, it's been great. >> Yeah, so, and we got some hard news to talk about today, I said in my breaking analysis this week that Cisco, when it rose, it pulled a number of levers, and one of them was really creating the role of the Network Engineer, the CCIE, and the certifications. People have really understood the challenges of what Stu calls the dark art of networking. And now you're bringing that sort of hardware certification to software, so let's get right into the news. What are you guys announcing today, and why is this important? >> Thank you so much for letting us talk about this because I think everybody has been really excited since Chuck came out in San Diego, announced the Devnet certification, said they were going to be, the new exams were going to be available February 24th, so we're about a month out from there. And to help people get started, we just announced here, about two big new offerings. The first is our Devnet Associate Fundamentals Training. Which we'll be launching on February 21st, so that way we can help individuals that are looking to start building up the skills and the exam readiness that they need to pursue a Devnet Associate Certification. We also announced our new Devnet Study Group Platform. Because we don't want people to just find the tools and the training that they need at Devnet, we want them to find each other. We want them to not just build together, but learn together. So we will now have a brand new Devnet Study Group Platform to help people have that type of interactivity. >> Ryan, I'm curious if you have much visibility into who's going to be taking these. You know, how many of them are the ones that, are the NetVets, the CCIE's that have done this year after year, and how many are new? >> Oh, I will tell you right now, we are actually getting this really wide and diverse audience, in fact, in the Devnet zone, we are providing a presentation on getting ready for Devnet certification four times a day, and it is packed every time we do it. And the audience is networking engineers, veteran networking engineers. When we ask people in the crowd how many of you have certifications, how many of you are CCIE's? We get a wide variety of CCIE's. This morning, we had a crew of software developers. So, we are getting people that are coming from kind of, all job roles, at all stages in their career. What they're embracing is that Devnet philosophy, around coding, around automation. They want to bring those practices back, whether that's DevOps, whether that's bringing a greater understanding of programmability, and so we're actually getting everyone, whether again, they're veterans or brand new. >> Yep, now I love that, because about 10 years ago there was this big movement, and they said, network engineers, your future is miserable, you all need to learn to decode, throw out what you learned, and fast forward to today, there's multiple paths to get there. As you were talking about, there's diverse backgrounds, there's lots of ways to be relevant to automation, of course, is hugely important. Coding is a major piece of it, but it's not, forget everything that you knew, it's how everything all works together. >> Yeah, I completely agree. I feel like, especially because the Devnet certifications aren't just the, are only one part of the launch on February 24th. In fact, the entire certification portfolio, and I know you're going to have other Cisco leaders on to talk about this, that is also being updated and launched on February 24th. And what I think you're going to see here is that flexibility that is in the program now, where you can actually have elements of automation baked into that network engineering journey. So you can still have the elements that people have been focusing on and building upon, except now you can stack on these new skills as you go. >> So, if I go back 10 years, maybe even a little bit more, but certainly 10 years ago, people were reticent to embrace automation. You know, you sort of alluded to that Stu, but now in this day and age, automation is fundamental. You can't scale without automation. And so the Devnet zone is really about taking beyond that existing skill set, going to the next level. Okay, so if you think about the network engineer and the training that they've gotten in the past, to deploy, manage, and optimize networks, automation comes in, simplifies all that. How do you describe what the future looks like for that engineer that's been Devnet certified? What are they doing? >> Oh, I think that now it's like, it opens up a brand new horizon of tasks and even efficiencies. New things that people have yet to even, or new job roles that even starting to emerge. A really good example, and one that we even talked about here at the Devnet zone, is the DevSecOps engineer, or the SecDevOps engineer. It's not that, and Susie has even talked about this as well too, Susie Wee, who leads Devnet. It's that jobs are changing, and roles are expanding, and so rather than just having this opportunity where you're looking at supporting a network or acting as a network administrator, now with automation, to your point, we actually can expand the opportunities of the roles themselves, and really open up things like, maybe you want to add those security automation elements, maybe you're interested in adding the collaboration automation elements, but whatever you are looking to do, the way that the program is built, post February 24th of 2020, you're able to actually have the opportunity to add in those skill validation exams, really build upon where you want to go. So I would say the horizon is wide and bright. >> So, to carry this up further, my question is, so the lines are blurring between, you know, Dev and Ops, right, and then, so a network engineer is going to become more Dev oriented, do you see them actually either contributing to or, certainly contributing to, but actually developing apps, say for instance, for the Edge? Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >> Well, we are actually encouraging, as we have more and more people join the Devnet community, we actually have two elements, two exchanges, our automation exchange and our code exchange, to really help people as they're moving through that. We're already starting to see that learners, individuals, are coming through Devnet, making that change themselves, and actually contributing code to our code exchange, but also adding use cases to our automation exchange. So that way they're able to show not only how they're implementing these cases, buy why they're doing it. And the types of business outcomes that they're achieving. So that's a practice that has already started to take off. And I think certifications and things like the automation exchange, they go hand in hand, building the skills, and then adding to the program. >> Well, you hear in the keynote today, all the talk about bringing IT and OT together. Again, part of that, I've always said that the edge is going to be won by developers. Because critical infrastructure needs to be secured. And, you know, developers, the DevSecOps role, and I think this crowd is actually going to be an important lever in terms of bringing those two worlds together, your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I actually think that that bridge is something that everyone is crossing right now. And, in fact, that's one of the motivations behind the updates to the certification portfolio. In fact, you'll find that we have parts of the portfolio that are shared between the hardware side and the software side. So that way we can have people as they're making that transition, as they're starting to move into that world, that larger world of network automation, we're actually having it be more of a clear journey for them, so they're able to work that into their own certification pouch. And I would say that these people that are here in the Devnet zone, they're the pioneers. They're the ones that are out there on that edge that are doing that exploration and building these new things, these new worlds that we are going to start experiencing in automation. >> And I guess Stu, it goes without saying, but it's worth saying, this is really all about programmable infrastructure, infrastructurous code, bringing the cloud operating model to your data, to your infrastructure, wherever it lives, right? >> Yeah, so Ryan, one of the things that struck us is not only is there so much enthusiasm, but the breadth of the offering here, everything from, here's some cool Meraki IOT things, to you, you talked about security, automation sprinkled throughout, can you just remind our audience a little bit as people get through the certifications, you know, what are some of the PaaS that they have for different parts of the portfolio? >> Oh, absolutely, so the certification journey that we have right now within Devnet, we actually align it to all of our five major technology tracks right now, so there are pathways within the portfolio around enterprise networking, security, collaboration, service provider, and also data center. But we also have pathways, as well, around application buildouts in IOT, and Edge computing, WebEx, and also, we have an entire practice that's now just dedicated to DevOps. And because DevOps is a concentration that can be, that is a horizontal throughout all of the certifications, this is something that you can now add to your journey. So we can actually have people here, and in fact, we've been answering this question more and more, how do I become more proficient at DevOps? A part of that is now in the certification journey. And so we've done that here. >> You should mention that we're in the IOT takeover right now in the Devnet zone. >> So Ryan, what about the partner ecosystem, talk to us about how, what impact do they have, how much of the ecosystem is getting involved in certifications too. >> Oh, well, I will say that we've actually, we've brought in a lot of people to help us develop this program initially. And I know that you're going to have additional Devnet leaders, they're going to be coming on, talking about partner ecosystems, so I don't want to take anything away from them, but I will say this. There is a lot of excitement because of the fact that when we brought the Devnet certifications out and what that would mean, for example, the new Devnet partner specialization. This is something that has been embraced by our partner community, but it's been embraced by the developers, whether they're our partner developers, they're our customers, or our networking engineers. Now that they have these as options for them to pursue, we have only been met with like positive enthusiastic engagement. And in fact, even now, we're starting to see a lot of people that aren't asking anymore, in fact, going back to San Francisco, when everyone was saying, what is Devnet, now they're asking how do I Devnet. And it is so great to be able to come and show them not only the certifications, but the associate fundamentals training, these new Devnet study group platforms that we have to show them you know the what now, here's the how. >> So, how challenging, cus I was talking to a lady on the floor yesterday, and we were chatting, and I said, "you were CCIE", she goes, "Oh, it's my dream, you know, I'm working my way there, it's very challenging, but I'm doing really well". Similar challenges, presumably, to get Devnet certified? >> Yes. >> How trivial. >> No, it is not trivial. It is a certification in the exact same hallmark that we hold CCNA, CCNP, and CCIE. The Devnet certifications are just as rigorous. And so we are giving people a lot of tools to help them get ready. And in fact, one of the things that we've done to help people on this journey take the initial steps, is we are not holding back any secrets. We've hosted every one of our exam topics for all 10 of our Devnet exams at developer.cisco.com/certification. There you can find out the exact skills we'll be testing you on for all of those exams. But we went a step further. We found every Devnet learning lab that you can take today for free to start getting ready on that exam journey. And so for every single exam, you can find training that you can engage with. So as people are starting this journey, if they want to get ready and just build their skills, especially if they're starting at zero, for example, if they think python is just a snake, we have a learning lab for them. So we have an entire plan that's built so they can start getting ready, and advance and move forward for that certification process. >> What should a college kid do to get prepared for this? If he or she wants to get into IT, become a network engineer, or Devnet is interested in them, what should they take, what courses should they be interested in? >> Oh man, that is a great question. We talk to a lot of people that are in a CS program, or computer science program, and so many young people that are moving through college now, they're already in the habit of programming. They've been working on things, they might have even been programming their own video games, or adding something to the new Mario games where you can actually build your own levels. What I would recommend to every young person, and in fact, to anyone that's on this journey, come to Devnet. We have an incredible amount of tools. At developer.cisco.com, just by signing up, you get access, not only to training that can take you from zero to coding, to making your first API call, to finding our Sandboxes, where you can take that theoretical knowledge and put it into practice using Cisco hardware and tools, and then you can also find use cases there too. I think everyone is often just looking for where can I start, how do I start. Devnet is gone so far as to even have a Start Now area on the Devnet main page. So when you come to Devnet, we're always trying to meet you where you're at. If you're a veteran networking engineer, if you're a veteran developer, or if you're just starting out, you're a college student, we've got a plan for you to be able to take. >> Awesome, right, check it out folks, you know, career builder, Cisco's always been renowned at that. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, it's great to have you. >> Oh, hey, thank you so much for having me. >> You're welcome, all right, keep it right there buddy, we'll be back with our next guest from Cisco Live in Barcelona. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)