>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Presenting Accelerating Automation with DevNet. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got a great conversation and a virtual event, Accelerating Automation with DevNet , Cisco DevNet. And of course we got the Cisco brain trust here. Cube alumni, Susie Wee, Vice President, Senior Vice President, GM, and also CTO of Cisco DevNet and Ecosystem Success CX, all that great stuff. Mandy Whaley, who's the Director, Senior Director of DevNet Certifications, And Eric Thiel, 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 person >> It's great to be here. >> We don't, can't be at the DevNet Zone. We can't be on site doing DevNet Create, all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years. We're virtual, theCUBE virtual. Thanks for coming on. Susie, I got to ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you had has been awesome, but DevNet Create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the DevNet community. This ties into the theme of accelerating automation with DevNet, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service or XaaS as it's called (Susie laughs) and automation plays a critical role. 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 vision? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are coming online as, well I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud, as they're growing in new areas, as we're dealing with security, as 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 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 stack by leveraging automation. >> You know, I remember a few years ago when DevNet Create first started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale, and we were talking about Meraki, you know, not to get in the weeds about 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 at Cisco Europe in Barcelona before all the COVID hit. And you had >> Susie: Yeah. >> The massive cloud surge and 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, because the businesses need to stay alive. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> I just want to get your thoughts on 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? How 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 in countries like, you know, well around the world, but also in India where it was actually not, you know, not, they didn't have rules to 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 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 in that environment today. >> You know one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, Kubernetes microservices. So those things, again, all DevOps and, you know, you guys got some acquisitions, you've bought ThousandEyes, you got a new one. You just bought recently PortShift to raise the game in security, Kuber and all these microservices. So observability super hot, but then people go work at home as you mentioned. How do you (chuckles) >> Yeah What are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's Zooms and Web Ex's and education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this in 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 programmability challenge and observability challenge that's such 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 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, 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 APIs into all of it. But when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. 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 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, you know, 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 been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. >> Susie, I know you got to go, but real quick, describe what accelerating automation with DevNet means. >> (giggles)Well, you've been, you know, we've been working together on DevNet 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 run things. Our DevNet 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 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. >> And we got DevNet Create right around the corner, Virtual, unfortunately, won't be in person, but will 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. >> Thank you. >> Thanks John. >> Okay. Mandy, you heard Susie, it's about people. And one of the things that's close to your heart, you've been driving as Senior Director of DevNet Certifications, is getting people leveled up. I mean the demand for skills, cybersecurity, network programmability, automation, network design, solution architect, cloud, multi-cloud 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. 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 piece of getting the certifications. First, before we get started, describe what your role is as Director of 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 yet they can code more. 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 DevNet Creates, the Cisco Lives and helping the community connect and to help share technical information with them, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? So that's had to pivot quite a bit. Obviously Cisco Live US, we pivoted very quickly to a virtual event 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 our DevNet Day that was kind of attached onto 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, 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 are 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 DevNet site. And then my team also looks after communities, such as the Cisco Learning Network where 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 DevNet certifications and helping other people that are trying to get onboard with programmability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up the community with helping you answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the DevNet space as well, and are helping people with that set of certifications. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that. >> I got to ask you on the trends around automation, what skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? 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 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 now that we need it while we're virtual. So 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 are now figuring out' how can I do this at scale? And I think one good example that Susie was talking about the VPN example. And we actually had a number of 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 didn't normally look at in 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 needed to make sure they have the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the SEs 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 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 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, 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 in the DevNet Zone. Learning's going on, sometimes linearly and non linearly. You 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 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 they want to be able to choose what 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 expert-led 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 kinds of team experiences called Automation Bootcamp. 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 DevNet Fundamentals course, which is available through DevNet. 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 spending a lot of time in our DevNet 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 are three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing some more about that at DevNet Create. >> Awesome. Eric and Mandy, if you guys can wrap up this Accelerating Automation with DevNet package and virtual event here and also tee up DevNet Create because DevNet 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 APIs, I only can imagine the enablement that's going to create. >> Mandy: Yeah >> Can you share the summary real quick on Accelerating Automation with DevNet and tee up DevNet Create. Mandy, we'll start with you. >> Yes, I'll go first and then Eric can close this out. So just like we've been talking about with you at every DevNet event over the past years, you know, DevNet's bringing APIs across our whole portfolio, and up and down the stack and Accelerating Automation with DevNet , Susie mentioned the people aspect of that. The people skilling up and how that 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 DevNet, it's about the DevNet 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 here, Accelerating Automation with DevNet and DevNet 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 DevNet 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 a track 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. 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 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. >> I would >> Go ahead, Mandy. >> Can I add one more thing? >> Add 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 content and speakers and the regions stepping up to have things personalized to their area, to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for DevNet Create that's going to be fantastic this year. >> Yeah, that's it. 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, with this virtual DevNet, virtual DevNet create virtual theCUBE virtual, I think we're learning new things. People are 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 will be resilient. And I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And we'll ride the wave with you guys. >> So thank you so much (Susie laughs) for taking the time to come on theCUBE and talk about your awesome Accelerating Automation and DevNet Create Looking forward to it, thank you. >> Thank you so much, >> All right, thanks a lot. >> Happy to be here. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content and men, we stay virtual until we're face to face. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at DevNet Create. Thanks for watching. (upbeat outro) >> Controller: Okay John, Here we go, John. Here we go. John, we're coming to you in five, four, three, two. >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got a great conversation and a virtual event, Accelerating Automation with DevNet, Cisco DevNet. And of course we got the Cisco brain trust here. Cube alumni, Susie Wee, Senior Vice President GM and also CTO at Cisco DevNet and Ecosystem Success CX, all that great stuff. Mandy Whaley, who's the Director, Senior Director of DevNet Certifications, and Eric Thiel, 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 person. >> It's great to be here >> We don't, can't be at the DevNet zone. We can't be on site doing DevNet Create, all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years. We're virtual, theCUBE virtual. Thanks for coming on. Susie, I got to ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you had has been awesome. But DevNet Create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the DevNet community. This ties into the theme of Accelerating Automation with DevNet, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service or XaaS as it's called. And automation plays (Susie laughs) a critical role. 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 vision? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are coming online as ,well I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud, as they're growing in new areas, as we're dealing with security, as 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 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 stack by leveraging automation. >> You know, I remember a few years ago when DevNet Create first started, 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 Cisco Europe in Barcelona before all the COVID hit. And you had this massive cloud surge and 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 because the businesses need >> Absolutely. >> to stay alive. I just want to get your thoughts on 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? How 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 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 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 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. >> You know one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, Kubernetes microservices. So those things, again, all DevOps and you know, you guys got some acquisitions, you bought ThousandEyes, you got a new one. You just bought recently PortShift to raise the game in security, Kuber and all these microservices. So observability is 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 Web Ex's and education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this in 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 programmability challenge and observability 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 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 scale for Cisco and for our customers and he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation and the APIs into all of it. But when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. 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 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, you know, 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 you know, 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 been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. >> Susie, I know you got to go, but real quick, describe what Accelerating Automation with DevNet means. >> (laughs) Well, you know, we've been working together on DevNet in 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 run things. Our DevNet 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 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. >> And we got DevNet Create right around the corner virtual, unfortunately won't be in person, but will 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 got to go, but stay with us. We're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric. Thanks. >> Thank you so much. Have fun. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, John. >> Okay, Mandy, you heard Susie, it's about people. And one of the things that's close to your heart you've been driving is, as senior director of DevNet Certifications 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. 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. And this is why we created the DevNet certification. Several years ago, our DevNet community, who's been some of those engineers who have been coming into that software and infrastructure side and meeting. They ask us to help create a more defined pathway to create resources, training, all the things they would need to take all those steps to go after those new jobs. >> Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this piece of getting the certifications. First, before we get started, describe what your role is as Director of 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 yet they can code more. 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 DevNet Creates, the Cisco Lives and helping the community connect and to help share technical information with them, doing hands-on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? So that's had to pivot quite a bit. Obviously Cisco Live US, we pivoted very quickly to a virtual event when conditions changed and we were 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 our DevNet Day that was kind of attached onto 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, 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 new learning labs, things like that, that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the DevNet site. And then my team also looks after communities such as the Cisco Learning Network where there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. And 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 DevNet 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 answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the DevNet space as well, and are helping people with that set of certifications. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that. >> Yeah, I mean, it's awesome, and first of all, you guys done a great job. I'm always impressed when we were at physical events in the DevNet Zone, just the learning, the outreach. Again, very open, collaborative, inclusive, and also, you know, you had one-on-one classes and talks to full blown advanced, (sneezes)Had to sneeze there >> Yeah, and that's the point. >> (laughs)That was coming out, got to cut that out. I love prerecords. >> Absolutely. >> That's never happened to me to live by the way. I've never sneezed live on a thousand--. (Eric laughs) >> You're allergic to me. >> We'll pick up. >> It happens. >> So Eric, so I got to ask you on the trends around automation, what skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Is there anything in particular? Obviously network automation has been around for a long time. Cisco has been a 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 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 now that we need it while we're virtual. So 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 are now figuring out how can I do this at scale? And I think one good example that Susie was talking about the VPN example. And we actually had a number of 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 didn't normally look at in 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 licensing started coming into play, where they needed to make sure they had the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the SEs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, used some open source tooling to monitor and alert on these things and then published it, so the whole community 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 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 huge and you know, you brought up this sharing concept. I mean, one of the things that's interesting is you've got more sharing going on. >> Controller: John, let's pause right here. Let's pause right here. I'm going to try and bring Eric and Mandy and everybody out. And then just start right from here to bring Eric and Mandy back in and close up. Stand by Eric just hold tight. >> All right, hold on >> Controller: just for one moment. Hold tight, we got Mandy back >> Controller: Standby. Standby. Standby. Standby, standby, standby. Hold hold hold.

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It's theCUBE covering DevNet Create 2018, brought to you by Cisco. (techy music playing) >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're here live at theCUBE here in Mountain View in the heart of California, the Silicon Valley. I'm John Furrier, my cohost Lauren Cooney. Our next guest is Riaz Raihan, who's the global VP and general manager of Cisco, IOT, CUBE alumni, back... Last on at Cisco Live in Barcelona. We got Cisco Live coming up, but we're here at DevNet Create developer... Develop our ecosystem for Cisco and external cloud native developers, great to see you. >> Thank you, John, pleasure to be back. >> What's a Cisco guy like you doing at a hoody show like this, IOT... >> You know, IOT is so topical and there's so much interest around it, so just happy to be here with the developers and just get to meet a few people out here and just be part of this whole event. >> So, IOT, we last time, and all joking aside is really hot because you have now, you know, the cloud is a foundation, on-premise data, hybrid cloud going on, but the Edge of the network's certainly very relevant. So, you've got a lot of new things happening. So, the question for you is what industries are early adopting... What industries do you see that are adopting IOT in the programmable way? I'm not so much as censored networks, they're out there, but as they bring them into, the IOT into the technology, IT world, which industries are the most adoptive for you guys? >> I talk about, you know, a handful of industries that are really leading the charge, right. Number one I'd say is manufacturing. We see a lot of activity out there primarily because for the first time manufacturers have an opportunity to really converge their data and put it on an IP network, which is exciting. The other big one is energy, both oil and gas as well as utility. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> And then we're seeing huge amount of interest in transportation, both in actually the roadways as well as well as the fleet that run on the roadways. In addition to those I'd say retail and general public sector and cities are big adopters of IOT. >> So, on the IOT side with, say... Let's take transportation, so as we know, we know that Uber happened with Uber. They had a death, now the censor, they sort of argued latency matters, right, so you've got to have a network, support it. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> Is smart cities truly happening in a way that's, in your opinion, moving the ball down the field. Where is the smart cities with IOT respect to cities I mean, is it still early, are they moving the ball down the field, your thoughts? >> You know, I'm asked this question pretty often and I can tell you that moving a city towards a smart city is actually a massive endeavor. What we find is the cities that are doing this successfully, they kind of start small with a few use cases. Let's say parking, maybe lighting, and then they've got to expand out the number of use cases but also geographic spread of where they'll deploy, and specifically, you know, when they work with us one of the big advances we're making is something called the FOG Appliance. Building this easy-to-install appliance that can be used at intersections and at various points to enable cities to go smart. >> So, Lauren, you and I were talking the other day about this, is that, you know, in the cloud, you bring cloud together with the developers. >> Lauren: Yep. >> It's interesting because they have to actually figure out that software going to be powering the Edge-- >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And you know, Kubernetes is in one example, and then when you start looking at what Kubernetes is doing to the network layer you say, "Okay, I've got to write software." >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> But most of the Edge applications, oil and gas, they're like facilities guys. These guys are hardware people. They're deploying cameras, they're not-- >> Well, there has to be their software that actually runs on that as well to enable things for people, places, and things at the Edge and I think you all have to look at the Edge when you are talking about IOT, especially. >> Software, that's the key, what do you say to all those guys that have to relearn software? (laughing) Come to DevNet Create, I mean, this is a real issue. >> Yeah, you know, if you look at software in general, right, software's playing a bigger and bigger role in these applications, not to diminish the role of hardware or networking or any of the other elements, but what software's certainly playing a bigger role, like let me give you an example. Let's talk about the FOG Appliance. You know, one of the things we've been working on quite diligently is building out a single software framework that can sit on a number of different hardware devices depending on what the use case is, and the use case is defined by the customer, it's defined by the industry. It's also defined by the price point, so what we're seeing more and more, John, is having a single software framework but being able to deploy across different platforms, if you will, and therefore building different appliances to solve different problems. >> Lauren: Great. >> Yeah, and one of the things that I think is huge, and I want to get your thoughts on this, I think we should do a deep dive on it, and that is is that video is becoming much more of a bigger app. We use video a lot, as seen on theCUBE. Thank you for watching, but there's a lot of data in the video apps. It's not just do the video to communicate a message. >> Riaz: Yep. >> There's a digital artifact-- >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> That's beyond what it's for. It's now digitized-- >> Riaz: Yeah. >> So, that's now data, your thoughts? >> You know, when we were talking before you mentioned video is a data asset, completely agree. What we're finding is video is now transitioning from just being something that we thought about for safety and security to becoming more of an intelligent asset. Video's also now getting integrated more with the business process. So, let me give you an example. We're working with the manufacturer of nylon, and this is a process industry that works 24/7, and they're using video to actually monitor the output as it comes out of the machines. Because when the temperature rises above a certain limit, and this is obviously a manufacturing defect, it tends to blob up the nylon, which then reduces the value of the nylon from something that's high grade and high margin to low grade and low margin. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And video's helping solve the problem. So, the video creates an alert that's part now of the manufacturing process and manufacturing control, allowing management to intervene quickly to kind of at least cut their losses. So, that's an example of how video's now becoming very much a part of the business process. Not just safety and security but well beyond that. >> Well beyond surveillance. >> Riaz: Yeah. >> Lauren: Yeah. >> This is more than just normal use cases. So, new value activities are going on with video. >> Absolutely, the other big one is traffic, and I'm talking about road traffic. Whether you look at tunnels or you look at parkways and so on, we're now seeing video being used to monitor the flow patterns of cars-- >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> On highways and on parkways-- >> Lauren: Yeah. >> And then not just using that to predict traffic jams, but in some cases predict accidents. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> Because once you take these data labels and data assets through video and compute them, it's a stream of information that can be analyzed mathematically using an algorithm, and then fortunately we are able to now use that-- >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> To prevent accidents potentially, right? >> Lauren: Yeah. >> So, that's the kind of thing we see video in. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And this is just the cusp. You'll see a lot more of use cases where video and IOT get very integrated and again, very happy that Cisco's leading the charge on that. >> Mm-hmm. >> So, Lauren, I want to ask you a question because I know you and I have been talking about this, and that is is that the developer role around this is not obvious... I mean, it's obvious, "Oh, got to write software." >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> But now you've got to create ecosystems. So, let's just say businesses want to integrate video, they have a buy/build decision to make. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> Do they build it from scratch or they integrate it in. So, if you take Riaz's next level of conversation is video is a service, it's a microservice. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> If it's a data asset, if you believe that it's a microservice. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> So, it's not trivial now, you've got to figure out how to codify it. What do you guys think about that? You guys are the experts in the software, what's your thoughts? >> So, you know, I can jump in. I think this is an important trend. You know, especially if you look at three industries that I personally work with: manufacturing, you look at energy, and then you look at retail. These are three industries that I think are leading the charge on how they're using video, you know, in this context, and how the video's actually provided I think is less important. What's more important, as you said, is the microservice that has video as a component, and then consuming that and integrating it with a whole value stream within that industry. The other important element, I believe, is the use of video in conjunction with other types of sensors. So, let me give you an example. We're working with a large telco and you know, they have these cell towers placed all across the country and they actually video, they have video to monitor the cell towers and that's great, but the problem is it gives them a lot of false positives. So, they solved the problem by using human form recognition, still-- >> Like what's a false positive, give me an example. >> A false positive is, you know, a leaf, branch blowing. >> John: Oh, okay. >> And that gives you a positive reading, right. Now, they've kind of used, they've used some technology and they've reduced that down, but they still have too many false positives. So, they decided to combine the video feed with some of the sensors that they have. For example, when someone tries to pull a copper plate from the cell phone tower there's a sensor that tracks that. So, now combining the video input and the sensor input they get, you know, much fewer false positives. >> John: Yeah. >> And are able to take action much more expeditiously. >> The co-occurring incidents are a huge, huge opportunity for the IP. So, the thing I want to ask you, because I think this is much more business oriented, so want to get your thoughts on it... Okay, video's a data asset, people say it. I believe that, now I want to operationalize that in my company. Talk about a new process improvement, that's hard to do because they've never done it before. How are you guys engaging customers and what are some best practices to get them to operationalize a new, not just new technology or service, but actually integrate it into a preexisting or changing value chain? >> One of the things we do, John, is we'll engage with customers to do what we call a value management analysis. So, we actually sit down with them, work out, you know, what their existing process looks like, what an improved process might look like, and importantly, what kind of cost they can take out of the process, out of the system, or what kind of new value they can drive for their customers. So, it's either an increase in revenue, it's a decrease in cost, or an improvement in process efficiencies. Once we've done that it really allows us to then pair up that new process with our technology, and then actually track how much of the value they've received. We've found this approach kind of grounds everything in a very strong ROI, so instead of guessing as to what the output will be and does it actually move the needle on a value basis. We're actually able to document that up front and then actually track the results against what we thought would be. The other advantage of this process is it allows us to improve incrementally. So, the first version of a video enabled business process might give us a certain amount of value, but as we improve on that you could see incremental values and other processes being added on. Very similar to starting small and then adding on incrementally-- >> John: Yeah. >> Kind of a designed way. >> But you got to be open minded. Just let me throw a wrench into the equation here, which is okay, new data source... >> Riaz: Yeah. >> You mentioned the co-occurring identity on the cell tower, for example. There could be, like, multiple data inputs that are new. How does a customer figure that out? >> Different customers are different, and again, as I mentioned-- >> John: Or in generally speaking, because you've got to be prepared for the unknown. >> Yeah, some industries I think are more open to this because they have seen... They have felt this problem before. Going back to manufacturing as an example, monitoring, visually monitoring the output of a manufacturing process is a very labor intensive, you know, proposition. Manufacturers have struggled doing that for a long time. >> John: Yeah. >> Now having used video and getting just a very high level of efficiency-- >> John: Yeah. >> And combining different types of inputs is something they're very open to. >> John: Yeah. >> So, we see them very open to it. Other industries, I think, are coming along, but it all goes back to how important a problem are you solving and what's the payoff of solving the problem? >> John: Yeah. >> The bigger the problem, the more the willingness. >> Great conversation-- >> Lauren: Yeah. >> We had the devops guy on early. Damian, who's with Rundeck and he's saying, you know, bringing down silos and tickets is killing operations. >> Lauren: Yep. >> It's an old paradigm. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> You guys are going down a new road, and we talked about this at Cisco Live in Barcelona. You got tail wind for you guys as this, but you got a clean sheet of paper but you got some preexisting stuff, but it's not like baggage. It's just opportunity, in my opinion. So, I got to ask you how is the business going, what are you guys doing? What are some of the recent successes you've had? Share some insight into the-- >> Yeah, and I think just to add to that, I think what are the revenue opportunities that you see that, you know, you're providing these services to these customers. They must see new revenue opportunities as well. Wondering what those are. >> Absolutely. So, I'll kind of cover both, both sides of my business. I'll start with Jasper, Cisco Jasper. Our Cisco Jasper business is doing fabulously well. We added almost 10,000 devices last month alone, or last quarter, and we are on track to keep adding devices at a very fast pace, so very excited about that. We've just crossed 75 million. So, 75 million devices on Jasper. The last time we spoke, John, the number was 60 million. In addition, we've also seen many more enterprises adopting Jasper. >> John: Yeah. >> The last time we spoke it was 14,000, now it's over 16,400. (laughing) So, that number keeps growing. >> You'll see next month it'll be 20,000. (laughing) >> So, that number just keeps growing-- >> John: Yes. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And that allows us to broaden our reach-- >> John: Yeah. >> Get into different use cases and drive incremental value for our customers. On the Kinetic side, as I mentioned we're seeing a lot of traction in the verticals that I laid out earlier, but specifically what we're finding now is customers are getting serious-- >> Take a minute to explain Kinetic for a second. >> Riaz: Sure. >> Just one minute and then get into it. >> Sure, so Kinetic our data fabric. It's our platform that allows us to extract data from all kinds of IT devices that are sitting on a corporate or a private network. It allows us to process that data at the Edge and then it allows us to transport the data to wherever the customer wants it to be. So, it's really our IOT platform, our data fabric at the core. The Kinetic business is doing great. We've had lots of update, there's actually a booth out here where they're demoing Kinetic. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> I see a lot of people coming in and trying to understand it and we see people deploying Kinetic in more and more unique ways. We're working, for example, with a German manufacturer, a very prestigious German manufacturer that's now launching a pretty large project with Kinetic where they're using Kinetic to monitor the health of not just all their new machines, but also all the Braunfeld machines that they have installed over the past decade, right. So, we're very excited about that and very excited about the future. >> Well, great job, congratulations. Always great to talk with you. I think it's one of the exciting bright spots within Cisco with the IOT, certainly the DevNet developer program has been a huge success and that's only going to help you guys, and obviously the DevNet, create. You want some more software developers, you know, working on Kinetic and also Meraki and all these cool tools. So, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> More live coverage here, DevNet Creates, theCUBE in Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California. We'll be right back after this short break. (techy music playing)