(bright upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to the cube virtual coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. Virtual, not face to face this year, obviously because of COVID, and all events are going virtual. This is theCUBE virtual. I'm excited to have on CUBE, alumni Mandy Whaley, who's the Senior Director of DevNet & Cisco Certifications. Mandy, great to see you, >> Thank you. >> virtually. >> Great to see you too. It's exciting to be here with theCUBE again, and especially here at AnsibleFest. >> Last time we saw each other at a physical event was Barcelona in January, as the world was taking a turn. I see a lot of people online, learning has been great. What would DevOpsSec things going on, we'll get to that in a second, but I want to first talk about you and your role in Cisco and Red Hat Ansible. You're a trusted adviser. What are customers experiencing? And what are their expectations around automation? The big theme of this conference? >> Absolutely. So, in terms of the community that I work with at Cisco, it's our DevNet, and our learning community, all of our Cisco certified engineers, as well as our DevNet developer audience. And so, automation is at the core of what they're working on. And we've seen even the move to more work from home, all the virtual things that we're dealing with, that's even more emphasis on companies needing to do automation and needing to have the skills to build that within their teams. So we're really seeing that everyone has expectations around platforms being able to have open API's, integrate with tool sets, having choice in how they integrate things into their different workflows that they may already be using. And then we're seeing a big demand for people wanting to skill up and learn about automation, learn about Ansible, learn about Python. Our new DevNet certifications, they actually cover Cisco platforms as well as industry standard topics like Python and Ansible. And we've seen really great feedback from the community around loving that combination of getting to work really deeply with our Cisco technologies, as well as learning things like Ansible and Python. We had a special special challenge when we launched the DevNet Certifications, for the first 500 people to earn that certification. And we were really excited to see the community achieve that within the first 16 days. So I just think that shows how important automation is to our community right now. >> What do you hear from customers around this certification opportunity around Ansible and Python? Can you give an example? >> So what we're hearing from companies and customers and individual developers is that they're having to deal with more scale, they are seeing more opportunity to handle consistent policy to make sure configurations are consistent. All of these things are really important right now with the scale they're trying to handle. And so, they're looking for ways that they can quickly add these skills to their tool set. And since we are working from home, not traveling as much, everyone's schedule is a little bit different. There is extra opportunity for teams to dig in and do some learning. So, leaders, IT leaders are looking for how do they work with their teams to go after these skills and add them into their way that they approach problems, the way solve problems. And then individuals are looking for how they add them to open up new job roles and new opportunities for themselves. >> Well, I want to give you a shout out and props and kudos for the work you guys have done over at DevNet. We've watched the evolution. Obviously you guys have transformed the learning but also, the API enabled products and economy that Cisco is driving with the SaaS. This is consistent with Ansible's success in the cloud and on premise with private cloud. Again, Cloud, Ops, Sec, everything's kind of happening. Tell us the importance of automation within the Cisco products and how Ansible fits in. >> Absolutely. So, like I said earlier, having this open API's really, across the whole Cisco portfolio, and up and down the stack at the device level, at the controller level. That's part of our strategy. It's important to our customers, it's important to Cisco. We actually have a developer event, DevNet Create, coming up. And, Chuck Robbins, will be talking about some of that importance of developers and automation in the Cisco strategy at DevNet Create. So maybe you can tune in and see some of that as well. We have been working with Ansible since early on in terms of how we bring Cisco technologies together with Ansible. And as Ansible moved to the new collections, we stepped into that very early, we knew it was important to have a seamless transition around that for our community. And that's been a big part of our work this year in terms of how we've been working with Ansible and getting ready for the the new collection structure. >> The people who are watching and know theCUBE know that, or maybe new to theCUBE and our work, know that I've been a cheerleader for Cloud Native, but now it's actually happening, Mandy, we've been cheering it on and saying it's going to happen. Cloud Native and the modern app focus, again, this is some of the narrative on the inside, the industry is now mainstream. This is really a big deal because it's now DevOps and sec, so all that's happening mainstream, the rise of Kubernetes. Everything is on the front burner when it comes to Cloud Native. So I got to ask you, how do the developers here at AnsibleFest get to learn more about Cisco? Because now you're bringing everything together. The automation up and down the stack from modern apps down to the plumbing network's certainly super important from edge, 5G's right around the corner. This is a business enterprise opportunity. How can developers at AnsibleFest learn more about Cisco? >> Fantastic, yes. The one place to learn about all of our Cisco platforms, and like you said, how all these things, Cloud Native, DevOps, DevsSecOps, how all of these things are coming together. You can learn about it at developer.cisco.com. It's where all of our developer resources are, it's where you can find, if you're wanting to get started with Cisco products and Ansible. We have learning labs, engineer to engineer tutorials, videos, sample code, all kinds of the resources to help people get started on that journey. And the other thing we're really seeing is, like you said, this coming together and the real move in enterprises towards DevOps is creating all of these new job roles around DevSecOps, and network automation engineer, and web scale developer. And one of the things we're seeing is people are needing to add skills to their current skill set, mix and match, bringing hardware and software together, cloud and networking skills and development skills to really meet the need for these new job roles, which is being driven by the business demands that we're facing. And that's one of the things that we're working really hard on in the DevNet and Cisco community right now. >> Can't go wrong by continuing your career at Cisco and certainly configuration management software comes together as awesome. So, thanks for sharing that. One of the topics at AnsibleFest 2020 virtual this year is the theme is kind of three things, as we heard on some of the interviews, collections, collections collections. This notion of Ansible (Mandy laughs) automation platform has a numerous Cisco certified collections. Can you share some insight and anecdotes from your community on, from the DevNet users on what they're dealing with day to day around automation and how these collections and the certified collections fits in? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, part of my team has been working with our community, with Ansible, to bring the Cisco Ansible collections together. And it's been a big part of our work throughout the year. And we've seen tremendous use by the community. So we've been following the downloads of people downloading connections and using them is growing rapidly. We are really excited to see the use of the community and then the community interest support. And then we're doing our best to make sure that we have playbooks in our DevNet code exchange, so people can go in and find them. That we're helping people understand collections and how all that fits together in the current Ansible structure. And we've just seen tremendous interesting response from the community on that. >> How does this tie into security automation? Another theme that comes up, you talk about network, you got cloud, you got security, intrusion, detection, prevention, these are all useful things to DevNet users, how does that all fit in? >> Security is one of the areas that I'm consistently hearing about from our community and customers. I think people are really looking for how they can deal with increased scale, how they can increase the scale that they're able to deal with and keep it secure. We're seeing people want to take quick action, when a malicious activity occurs, or even something like ensuring that policy is consistent across a range of security endpoints. And these are all places where automation can really help out, and help teams manage the scale that they're having to deal with. So, one of the things we've been working with is showing some learning labs on DevNet, that combine using Ansible with our security products to help people tackle some of those use cases. We have an area called automation exchange. And it's all about these automation use cases, and giving you the sample code to get started on tackling some of these harder use cases. That's where we have seen a lot of interest around security. >> On a broader scale, could you tell us where you see NetOps going? I mean, it's a big theme, Susie Wee, April, yourself. We've all chatted about this in the past NetOps, or DevOps for networking ops for basically DevOps for networking, basically. >> Yes. >> Where's this... Where's it going in the future? Where are we on the progress? Certainly there's been great evolution. How is DevNet evolving to push this mission forward? >> So, one of the things that we talk with customers a lot about when they are moving down this pathway to bringing DevOps to the way that they run their network is we talk about a walk, run, fly progression. And walk is where there, I use cases where maybe you are only doing read-only type things, and you're gathering insight, you're gathering information to help with troubleshooting, you're gathering information that maybe gets packaged up into a ticket that then an engineer takes action on. And this is a great place where a lot of organizations can start. If they are learning these skills, building these practices, they don't have to worry about it, making changes but they get a lot of the benefit of the automation. So, we're recommending that to at least two companies who are getting started, teams that are getting started, as a place to start their automation journey. And then really moving through that progression of next, taking some automated action, all the way to that full DevOps, lifecycle and workflow. And we're seeing companies move through that progression as their teams also move through that progression. >> Just as a side note, one of the things we've been riffing on lately around the Cloud Native, as you know now, it's mainstream as we just talked about, is that the integrations are a big part of it. So, you could have an environment that has a little bit of that, a little bit of this. A lot of integrations because of API's, and also microservices, you get Kubernetes around to tie it on, glue it all together. You got DevNet Create coming up, and you guys always have a great DevNet Zone at your events. It's a real learning environment. Talk of Ansible developers in the community out there and how you guys work together for these classes, because you guys have a lot of learning, is like a cross section of the community that work together, some don't some do. The Cloud Native really enables the integrations to happen quicker. Can you just share what's going on at DevNet Create, and your world? >> Absolutely. So, and it's great because, John, you were at our first DevNet Create years ago when we started it. So it's really exciting. This is our first virtual DevNet Create, that's October 13th. And we had planned it to be an in person event in March when the pandemic hit the US, and so we had to re-plan, and regroup and bring it to a virtual audience this fall. And it's actually been great with our virtual events, we've been able to see how there's many more people who can participate, who can learn who can be a part of that community, because it's not only limited to the people who can be there in person. So we're actually really excited about that virtual part of it. And DevNet Create is the event where we have speakers from all over our community, from companies, from partners, from community groups, and all kinds of technologies, like you said, it's a great place to look at the integrations. So you'll find talks on Ansible, you'll find talks on Kubernetes, you'll find talks on IoT, you'll find talks on mashing up different API's to go after use cases. And it's really about that strength of the community speakers that brings a lot of excellent content into DevNet Create, and we're so thankful for them, and the way that our community likes to, step up and share and help each other. >> Well, yes, we were there for the first one we will still be there with you. But the question that comes up, and I'd like you to just quickly take a minute to clarify the difference between DevNet and DevNet Create, cause there is a nuance here, it's important. Take a minute to explain DevNet and DevNet Create, and the objective of the two. >> Absolutely. So DevNet are DevNet Zone Event, which happen typically in our Cisco lives, they have more of a focus on our more network engineer community who's spanning into programmability, DevOps, moving that direction because it happens within a Cisco live event, normally, the DevNet Zone. DevNet Create is our conference that started to focus on the application developer, the cloud developer, and how they are starting to tackle some of these hybrid use cases. And so DevNet Create is the place where that really comes together. And when, last year, Susie and I are on stage and we really wanted to know kind of what aspects people were bringing to the conference. And we asked the community, how many people are really focused on application development in their day job? That's their main focus. How many people are more on the Ops side? Infrastructure developer, DevOps engineer? And then how many people are really working to bridge that? And it was one third, one third, one third, in terms of the people at Create that year. And that was just really great to see. And to me, I think really shows the community that's building around around DevNet Create. >> And if you look at the trends too, the discussions are about modern applications, and certainly with COVID, people are looking at this and saying, "Hey, it's an opportunity to use this pandemic "and look at the opportunity to be very agile, "and create these modern apps which require programmability, "which require "some instructions away >> That's right. >> "from the complexity, all the way down to the network." I mean, it really gives great vision. >> All the way to the network. Yeah, and even things like, using things with Meraki cameras with using things like our collaboration products, to build those use cases that are really helping out in a lot of the new challenges that we're facing. So that's all what you can find at DevNet Create. It's one of my favorite events because it does cover such a range of topics. >> I'm in my first interview at one of your first event with Todd Nightingale. He is doing the Meraki thing. Now he's running a lot of the big part of the business there. But it really was a great vision. You guys really nailed it. Hats off to you guys. Kudos props. Congratulations and stay safe. And we'll see you at your event. Thanks for joining me. >> Thank you so much, and thanks to AnsibleFest. >> Okay, that's theCUBE virtual coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host with AnsibleFest 2020. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

>> 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.

(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)

>> Narrator: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCube, covering Cisco Live US 2019, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCube, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, day three of our coverage of Cisco Live. We're in the DevNet Zone, we've been here all week. Dave, this DevNet Zone is the place to be at Cisco Live. >> Well, first of all, it's so packed downstairs, not that it's not packed here, but there's a little space you can walk around in, number one, and number two, it's where all the action is from the learning standpoint and education. People are just eating it up, they're like sponges. >> They are eating it up. Speaking of learning, we are pleased to welcome Mike Adams, the VP and GM of Learning at Cisco. Mike, welcome to theCube. >> Thank you, it's my pleasure to be here. >> We talked to Susie a number of times, she's actually coming on to guest host with me in an hour or so, and looking at the DevNet evolution in the last five years, 600,000 members in this community, which is mind-boggling how this is, I teased that it was like a field of dreams. >> (chuckles) >> Dave: Which also was 30 years ago. >> It is, yes. That's kind of scary isn't it? But also so is Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, I think those are two really good ways of looking at DevNet. If we look at some of the things that you guys have announced with respect to bringing software skills and software practices to network engineers, it's a big signal in Cisco's evolution. Talk to us about some of the things you guys have announced from the certification perspective and why that's a signal of changing winds. >> Yeah, absolutely. It's been exciting. Susie and I have been working together very closely for the last year in preparation for this. I'm not sure if I'm Bill or Ted in the combo. >> Lisa: Either one's pretty good. >> You're the one who started the excellent adventure. >> That's right. There's some really fundamental significant changes to the program. The most exciting, of course, is the launch of our DevNet branded software certification. It's one of a kind in the industry. There is not other company that has the mix of network engineering certifications and software certifications like Cisco does, certainly not at the scale that we do. We've certified over 1.7 million people since the program has launched over 25 years ago. You imagine the power of bringing together the community of developers with this community of network engineers that we've created. The sky's the limit. It's going to be amazing. That's the biggest announcement is the launch of the software certification, DevNet certification. We've made some other pretty important changes too, and all of these were based on the feedback that we got from customers and partners. One is you can now use continuing education credits to maintain your certification at any level. Rather than having to go back and retake the test every three years, now you can branch out and learn new things, like software as a continuing education credit to maintain that certification you have. We've also added flexibility into the program. In the past, you had to start at associate level and then go to professional and then go to expert. Today, if you feel like you're ready for professional, we invite you to start right there. If you feel like you're ready for that very rigorous CCIE Lab Exam, bring it on, we'll welcome you into it. We feel like that's going to give learners more of a choice in terms of how they process their learning and training and which certifications they want to pursue. Go on, I could go on. >> Let's keep goin'. You could essentially cut the line if you've had some field experience, and/or you just naturally have an affinity towards this. >> That's right. If you have developed depth of expertise and skill and experience, but you haven't started the certification program, why would I make you go back and take an entry level engineer exam just to work your way into the direction you wanted to go, rather we welcome you to come in and start working where you feel like you're ready. >> Can you explain more about the continuous certification, because if I infer correctly, it used to be every three years you got to re-up, kind of like an EMT has to get re-certified. That's not required anymore? You can traverse across the portfolio? >> I'll answer it very specifically. In today's program, the highest level, the CCIE, the expert level, that level can use continuing education credits to re-certify, to maintain their certification. We've extended that same principle to all the others, so today, if you had a CCNA, and you wanted to maintain that CCNA, you would have to go take that exam again. We think it's a lot more valuable, and it's interesting you would mention EMTs, there are lots of other verticals and professions, there's a lot of data and science behind this, that will say that there's more value in terms of extending and maintaining your skills by doing continuing education rather than studying for a test. >> Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. You're allowing the folks to have more control over their education. >> Mike: Exactly. >> Choose your own adventure kind of thing. >> Mike: That's right. >> Also, one of the things that sort of strikes me about what Cisco has done in this big pivot, software's becoming developer friendly, which for a large organization with a history and the girth that Cisco has is not easy to do. From a competitive advantage perspective, what are you hearing from customers, in terms of, are you seeing this as a dial-up on Cisco's competitive edge? >> Yes, absolutely. We took counsel from Gerri, our Head of Sales, she believes very strongly that the DevNet certification, in combination with our network certification program, gives us a real selling edge because it demonstrates the commitment we have to solving real world problems for our customers. We know our customers are anxious to take advantage of what software on top of the network creates for them. To take advantage of those APIs, to build applications and programs that let them maximize the use of their technology as they compete in their own marketplaces. We're absolutely hearing very positive things about how this differentiates Cisco. I'll just add one more point. Even though it looks like there's two tracks, there's a network engineering track and a software track, that's really not the case. It's one certification program. As an example, at the professional level, to earn that CCNP, you have to take a CORE exam, and then you take a concentration exam in the same technology vertical. Data Center, Enterprise, Collaboration, Security Service Bribe, or DevNet. Interestingly, in each of the first five that I mentioned, you'll take the CORE exam and then the concentration can be a DevNet concentration. So we're inviting people to begin to add that software skills into the traditional network certification track that they've had. >> I wonder if you could help us understand the philosophy of the programs. I've seen some education programs, it's like a Chinese menu. It's deep and wide. My sense is that a lot of companies, some companies, not a lot, have said, "Okay, we're really not relevant to the Cloud market, "Let's do some Cloud certifications," stamping it premature there. It seems like Cisco's strategy is to be very focused. Is that fair? Maybe you could add some comments to that. >> It's absolutely fair. We've been very thoughtful about how we have structured the program and what content we have put into it. We've been very mindful to focus on need-to-know information in the CORE exams, and then allowing the learner to choose concentrations for the nice-to-know, the things they want to round themselves out with. Around relevancy, we built the program with job-role specific skills in mind. As an example we've been talking about it this week. Dev Sec-Ops Engineer is an example. It would maybe get their CCNP in Enterprise, route switch, and then they could add on to that various DevNet concentration exams to earn them specialists that would mix that, whether it be WebEx or IOT, and then those combination of skills speak to a very specific job role, this Dev Sec-Ops Engineer, as an example. There are other ways you can mix and match the components to create the capability around skills for a job. >> I imagine as time goes on with these new certifications that you guys are going to be analyzing the different pathways that each person is taking to understand, maybe looking at some consistencies and maybe even offering some recommendation, recommended pathways. >> That's exactly right, because as those job roles evolve in the industry, we're constantly evaluating what skills are needed for those, making sure that we're bringing those to the market. I just can't say enough how important it is to DevNet certification is. Being able to have developers demonstrate their capabilities and skills through a certification is really powerful. >> What's the strategy with regard to partnering with universities, are you doing things along those line? >> I'm so glad you brought that up. There's another leader that Susie and I have been working with, Laura Quintana, she's runs Networking Academy. Networking Academy reaches out to higher education, and also to high schools, they also create networking academies in underserved areas around the globe. Laura and her team have been at this for a while. They have trained over 9.2 million people and have a goal to graduate another two million within the next year. The reason I mention that is that's the arm of Cisco that reaches into higher education and invites people in underserved areas into our industry by giving them those fundamentals. The primary certification that they graduate with is the CCNA, is that entry-level engineer, and now entry level software DevNet associate, those are the graduation that they'll focus on out of Networking Academy. We do a lot of that. >> How about the technology of learning. When you started this almost three decades ago, this is a massive scale of learning. How has the technology of learning evolved? >> Massively. Think about how you like to learn new things. Much of it is going to the web, or finding some digital format, and then doing it at your own pace. That's the other important thing here as well. We are massively transforming the way we are meeting our customers through digitized products. It's very important. Another one of the other big announcements this week was the move from Cisco's services to customer experience, you may have heard Maria Martinez on stage, day two. If you noticed there were four main pillars to the CX Strategy, one of them was learning, active learning. We know that by embedding learning and education into the digital products that we have and getting it to our customers just in time, and ideally by looking at telemetry coming back from how they're using our products, maybe I can predict what training you need before you know you even need it. That's where we're going. >> Very awesome. Last question for you, Mike. Cisco's a massive part of our Ecosystem, we've been talking with a lot of them this week, and at many events, what's to them, to your partners, what does the certification and this massive change signal to them in terms of Cisco's evolution? >> It absolutely signals where the company is going, our commitment to software, our commitment to continue to evolve and stay on the forefront of technology, giving them what they need to go serve their customers and make money in the meantime. Our partner ecosystem is so critical to this company. The software certification, as an example, is going to allow them to demonstrate to their customers, in a very quantifiable way, how many DevNet certified engineers they have. Some of these partners have over a thousand DevNet members already, but wouldn't it be great via certifications? It's a real differentiator for them. I'll mention one other thing. We have a group of very strong learning partners that we work with that extend our capability globally, that are able to take the content that we create and then form that to meet the needs of very specific customers. There's another aspect of partners that are critical to this transformation. >> So you talk about partners to your customers, to the engineers, when I was at IDG one of the most frequently read articles was the Annual Computer World Salary. >> Mike: (laughs) >> You know what, if everyone's going to publish salaries, I'm going to look and see where do I stand. That's part of it, getting more certifications, you're going to be worth more in the market. >> It is. We've got some really good data that says what an investment in professional or expert level certification should do for your W-2 at the end of the year, and we're very mindful of that. >> DevNet bringing the street-cred. Mike, it was great to have you in the program. I can only imagine how dynamic you and Susie are together. >> We have a lot of fun. >> I got to see that next time. Congrats on all the success. It's palpable. >> Thanks. >> Cool stuff. For Dave Velannte, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCube Live from Cisco Live San Diego. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Male Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's the Cube. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco, and its eco-system partners. >> Hey, welcome back to the CUBE! We are here at Cisco Live on day three of the event. Our third day of continuous coverage. I'm Lisa Martin, with Stu Miniman. Stu and I have a couple of guests joining us right now. (Lisa) We've got to my right, Joe Gorecki, the senior lead product manager for Advanced Network Managed Services from CenturyLink. And Danny Rising, Meraki Product Specialist-Global Service Provider, Cisco. Guys welcome to the CUBE! >> Thank you very much, Lisa and Stu. >> So here we are in the DevNet Zone day three, this is the busiest day so far which I didn't expect it to be as crazy busy but I guess the IoT takeover is going on right now. So the appetite, the enthusiasm for this event, and the DevNet Zone is huge. Danny we'll start with you, talk to us a little bit about the Meraki Portfolio and then we'll get into what you guys are doing with CenturyLink. >> Yeah, so it's been a really exciting conference for us so far, we're seeing a lot of, um, ya know excitement from our customers and our partners. And, um, what you guys have probably seen is a lot of the new products that we've come out with recently, whether it's our new Wi-Fi 6 capable access points, our SD-WAN products and now have the cellular (Danny) embedded in them, as well as our video surveillance cameras. So, we're seeing a lot of, uh, excitement from our customers around that, which really kind of adds to the message around simplicity that we try to bring to the market, and are excited to be working closely with Centurylink on how they deliver that to our customers. >> So, Joe, we've heard a lot about Wi-Fi 6 from Cisco. Talk to us a little bit about, you know, are your customers as excited as Cisco is for this? And, get us into the solutions that you're offering with Meraki. >> I think the customers, once they understand what Wi-Fi 6 will bring to the table for them, they'll get excited about it. I was in a meeting, two years ago with a large big box retailer, electronics that has numerous IoT smart devices in this and 95% of the bandwidth requirements in the store, is for upgrading iOS software and things of that nature and these devices. And they could not get enough Wi-Fi bandwidth, and they could not get away from the signal. Wi-Fi six is going to be to me a deal breaker, game changer for the customers because it's going to give them the opportunity to get more density, and more capabilities out of their Wi-Fi signal which plays right into the Meraki Portfolio goods because they were embedded and started as Wi-Fi. >> Oh my God, Danny I needed a two new t-shirts that says 'Wi-Fi 6, I am your density.' (Laughter) >> That's phenomenal. Joe, talk us a little about you know, we're quite familiar with Centurylink on our program, but you know the Meraki piece, how does that fit into your portfolio and general offerings? >> We've been partnering Meraki for about four or five years. Centurylink in general was the first, very first Gold Partner in the world, with them and we've been a long standing partnership since then. And then when we took a look at the Meraki Portfolio, and when Cisco procured them, we saw a great opportunity. Although they talked about the simplicity of development for their customer base. We took a look at it and says we can benefit from that for our customers to provide that, because it's simple in a way. But we have 24-7 eyes on glass. We provided as a managed rapper, where we do everything from help them design their needs based on their business outcomes, we build it for them, and we will run it giving them a flexible way of securing it. And we support the entire portfolio Meraki opportunities, and it's given us the opportunity to go in there and simplify the solution for the customer. The Meraki MX67C and 68C which Danny brought in, allows you to insert a SIM card for wireless backup into the device creating a true SD WAN capability with one simple elegant device. Which, when you're talking about small retailers and things of that nature, size is critical because they don't have the space. So it gives them something that they can deliver in a simple unified device. >> Okay, let's actually talk about now that customer experience. Danny, from the feet on the street field perspective. When you're going into a Meraki opportunity with a customer, where you were saying, Joe, that that big box retailer example where Wi-Fi 6 is going to be a game changer. And also, I think you said deal breaker really, but for those customers who are, and companies, who are able to take advantage of it, it probably will be a deal breaker. The amount of video, that's going to be offloaded from cellular networks to Wi-Fi in the next couple of years is massive. As is the amount of mobile video data that's being generated, so, that being a game changer. When you go into customer opportunities, Danny, talk to us about some of the challenges that they're facing today. Some of the trends that you're seeing, and the opportunities that Meraki and CTL can bring to them. >> Yeah, great question. And you know, um, you know as you as people you know, see everywhere in the, in the booths and our new messaging, uh, around work simple. And our mission at Meraki has always been around simplicity, and I think Centurylink really adds another layer of that, on how our customers can consume the technology. So, while we make it very easy to see and read in the dashboard, they make it even easier for our customers to consume and view all of that in a managed fashion. So some of the trends that we're seeing, which are pretty interesting, um, is over 60% of our largest Meraki deals are all being sold through our service providers like at Centurylink. So our largest of large enterprise customers, are really seeing the value in a fully managed service. Not just from what Meraki can bring, but what our service providers can bring too. Whether it's, you know, the additional transport services, the managed services, the installation services. Um, and so that gets us really excited because we can partner like great, uh, folks like Centurylink to really enable our customers to consume the technology the way that they want to consume it. >> And what are some of the business outcomes, that you're saying you're seeing this trend there from a service provider perspective. Joe, let me ask you, what are some of the business outcomes that this managed service is enabling customers in any industry to achieve like, that would maybe go all the way up to the top line? >> Well, to the top line, that's what it really is they want, more for less. The companies around the world now with the advent of SD WAN are looking for pushing network costs out of their business. But, uh, interestingly enough, at the same time, they're saying, 'the network is our life blood.' So you think that's a little counterintuitive. So, what Meraki allows us to do, is be able to have dual circuits, multiple capabilities in there, and a very cost effective device with our security they need. But it also, then, what I call it takes the SD WAN and takes it to the land. Because many many many of a non-Meraki type of solutions, you have different switches, you have different AP's, this consolidates it puts it into a common platform. We take that over for them and offer their becoming an extension of. So they can focus on their business, which has been an outsourcing talk for decades, but it's no different. But then we're able to tie it with a network. And us taking care of that for them we can, ya know, provide the uptime that they need, the cost reductions that they're looking for, or providing more for the same cost, and that's where the benefits are. >> Alright, so Danny, I heard security mentioned in what Joe was just talking there. But bring us into, okay, where security fits into the Meraki Portfolio? >> Yeah, so um, you know, the Meraki SD-WAN product was built on top of our security appliance, the MX, and so, we view security as the key foundation to any SD-WAN uh, you know platform, right? Especially as customers are looking to drive traffic out to the open Internet, connect to all the cloud applications, you really need to have security embedded in that. And so we focused on that, and that's why we decided to drive um, our SD-WAN features and functions around our security platform. So, all of our SD-WAN or across all of our, uh, MX platform, which is based around security. So, we see that as a key pillar to the whole SD-WAN story. >> The security business within Cisco grew double digits in Q3, 2019. You guys just announced another impending acquisition at Century, oh last week, so really, you can tell that there's a focus that Cisco has on expanding their security breadth and portfolio. That continues to be a topic that we talk about at every event, with every technology, in any business, security is table stakes. You can have the speed, but at the not at the expense of security. So, from what Joe we'll start with you. From your perspective, what Meraki is doing to build Integrated Security, what does that enable you guys to do from a Centurylink perspective? What opportunities does it open up? >> Well, at Centurylink, we take the same approach. We see security as something that we do. It's embedded in our network, and network based security is critical, and mission critical, so we do that. What Meraki allows us to do then is it takes a secure platform, puts it there. It does allow us to have a secure environment through the open Internet. Which is always scary because it's insecure, but it provides the secure ability to be able to do that, reducing the customer cost bringing it back to our network where we have all the security enabled in there. So, security, when we first launched Meraki there is we thought it was wireless was the key, because that was their foundation. And we looked at and said, 'No, the MX security appliance is the key because that is the secure engine that connects us to our network, brings it back to a single pane of glass and we can provide that solution.' But then it goes into the same portfolio or the portal, into the network, into the land so that we have visibility and it provides that experience for the customer. >> All right, Joe want to give you the opportunity here, Cisco's got a lot of partners out there. So for those out there watching, why Meraki plus Centurylink? >> Well, Meraki and Centurylink, we've been working together since the beginning to be able to provide the solution when we were the first cloud managed security provider in the world. We got that designation last year on the security of the Meraki platform. So we have this embedded, it's embedded in our DNA, we have the appropriate resources. And we have learned, and, trained engineers in the field for feet on the street, and our sales engineering platform and our design engineering platform. That gives us the unique ability to be able to provide that what we call build, plan, build, run. We help them plan their network from the ground up, including into the land. We will build it for them in an orchestrated, controlled fashion, rolling it out with their upgraded network, and we will run it for them in a very flexible badger that makes us an extension of their customers. That coupled with Meraki and the relationships that we've had for 25 years, really brings a good solid solution to our customer base. >> Yeah, and I'll add on to that too, um, you know, don't just you know, we always like to say don't take our word for it. Um, Centurylink was actually the first and currently only Global Service Provider with a Cisco designated, um, Cisco DNA Certification across both SD WAN network access and security which is audited by a third party company. That's all based on their Meraki offering. So, um, they got that certification back in 2018. Uh, and again, we're the first globally and are still currently the only service provider with those designations. So, just kind of represents the amount of work effort and partnership that we've all done together. That's even proven by, you know, an auditing company to get those certifications. >> And those certifications give us and the resources that we have at our disposal. What we like to say is it eliminates the risk. We mitigate the risk because we have the resources, we have the skills, and we have the flexibility to deliver a solution and their needs. >> So, as we look at the evolution of the partnership, the evolution of certifications, and the evolution of Cisco, going from what was traditionally hardware only to now hardware and software. Danny, your perspective on how Meraki is being integrated into Cisco as we look at Meraki, it's been around for about 12 or so years. Talk to us a little bit about the integration of Meraki is really kind of foundational to Cisco's current evolution. >> Yeah, that's that's been really exciting to see and um, for those are the folks that are actually at the show here, you can actually see, you know, before Meraki would have its own booth, and we were, you know, still kind of a one off product family. Um, this year, we're actually integrated into all the different Cisco solutions across the floor. So you'll see us in the service provider booth. You'll see us in the iOT booth. You'll see us in branch in a box. You'll see us over in Wi-Fi. So we've really kind of integrated and Cisco's really embraced a lot of the Meraki technologies, um, from an architecture standpoint. Um, and even you know, all the way up to Chuck, you'll hear him say, you know, we're trying to Mareki-phi, a little bit of everything. So that's been really exciting to see at the show here just kind of where Mareki sits even on the show floor, which has been pretty fun. >> And what's been some of the feedback downstairs across the convention center with prospective customers, seeing and feeling this Meraki integration as a really bonafide substantial part of Cisco's foundation? >> Yeah, you know, I think it just validates, um you know, the investment that Cisco made in Mareki back in 2012, when they acquired us and just really the growth that we've seen over the years and just how we've been able to integrate with all the rest of the Cisco products and solution sets. And our customers are excited to see that, because, you know, while you know a lot of our customers have, you know, tons of Cisco products already embedded, how does Meraki fit into that? I think our story is becoming a lot more clear, uh and we can see it out on the floor today, so our customers are looking forward to seeing that up from us. >> Excellent, Joe, last question for you as we look at. I mentioned a minute ago, Cisco's evolution Cisco's transformation from 30 years ago, this conference started as called conference called Networker and 150 people. And now it's evolved as Cisco Live with 25,000 or so people, as has Cisco evolved from a hardware network, your providers that's mentioning to shifting into software subscription service provider. Your thoughts from Centurylink's perspective on watching Cisco's transformation and how will that enhance the partnership with CTO going forward? >> Well, when Danny had mentioned that Cisco is becoming more Mareki-fied. We look forward to that because when they were more the baseline heights of the networking routers, switches and network as they morphed we've morphed with them, because we kept that, you know, gold designation, masters and everything through the process. So we encourage this type of environment because we see this going away from hardware more to a dumb x86 box out there doing routing and switching, adding more capabilities on there. So moving the software, something that is one we knew it was coming, so we are gearing up to be with them. We see that becoming more simple and elegant solutions from the company with more flexibility. Because in back in the day, you would have a Cisco solution, but you would have four or five different operating systems, as they mentioned. Now, that's a common platform, now it's more unified. And those types of things not only help us deliver a solution better for our customers, but it also creates a more seamless integration and solves more problems. So we look forward to the continued morph that we're going to morph with them. >> Simple, seamless, Mareki-fied, I like it. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining Stu and me this afternoon, we appreciate your time. >> (IN UNISON) Thank you very much for having us. >> Our pleasure. From Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. from Cisco Live, in San Diego.

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live US 2019 Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystems partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, day two, at Cisco Live. we are live in San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host is Stu Miniman, and Stu and I are very pleased to welcome back to theCUBE, Mandy Whaley, senior director of the Developer Experience at DevNet, Mandy, welcome back. >> Thank you so much, happy to be here. >> Well thanks for having us at the DevNet Zone, The last two days this has been jammed packed, it's been tons of activity from the morning in 'til it shuts down, so you get a real sense of how strong this community is, and so something, yesterday, that Chuck Robbins kicked his keynote off with was 30th year of Cisco doing a partner, a customer event. >> Yes, it's incredible. >> So I thought, let's see what else is having a 30th year anniversary this year. And I discovered Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure is 30 and I thought I want to talk to Mandy because how the DevNet experience has been Susie and Mandy's excellent adventure, look what you've built in five years! >> That is a really great analogy. (laughing) I really like that. No, it is really exciting to see where we are in this five year journey, and I was reminiscing with some of the team who is here in the very early days. Our second ever DevNet Express was here in San Diego, and we were in the same space, and I think we were maybe, 1/3 of this space was DevNet Zone, we had a classroom, and a few meeting spaces and some demos, but it was very vibrant and the community showed up then, but it's great to see five years later how we have workshops, and demos, and more interactive things, and what we've been able to build to really help enable the community, and then to see them just soaking it up, that's one of my favorite weeks of the year. >> Mandy, I really see the coming together of Cisco's traditional business, when I think about when I would write about Cisco, it's that army of CCIEs that are out there, whose jobs were relying on Cisco products and technology, and what you've built with the DevNet group, and how you have about 600,000 in this community and everything like that. Now, the certifications went through some major updates and there's some people who was like, oh my God, wait, it's not just the treadmill every year where I get my stamp, and keep my number. Bring us inside a little bit how that happened, and what the new career is and how certifications fit in to that. >> Absolutely, so this has been an exciting week for that reason as well, because we've been working, my team of developer advocates, and our DevNet experts have been working hand-in-hand with learning at Cisco, on this project around certifications, and it's so exciting to be able to finally tell people about it, and share it with the community and get the feedback. And what's really interesting about that program is we started from the beginning, really designing it with this idea of the IT team of the future, the infrastructure skills, the software skills coming together. Whether that's one person that learns both sides of it, or it's a team, that's combinations of those skills, that's really how the certifications are designed. So, there's abilities for someone to go very deep on the networking side, our CCIEs are incredible, and they have this incredible amount of knowledge, and that path is still the same, but there is also an addition of automation and software into that path, even in the very network focus certifications. Then we added the DevNet certifications, and these allow someone who's coming more from, I have a software background, but I am starting to automate infrastructure, I'm starting to span into the OPS world, I'm building on Cisco platforms, and allow those to connect together. And then there is this new concept of the specialist certification and that's where we really let people, kind of, choose and pick, kind of choose your own adventure, in terms of the certifications that you choose and the skills that you've build, so that you could start to take a security automation specialist with a DevNet professional developer and a data center certification, and really focus it on something like DevSecOps, or same kind of things for IoT, where you can put together wireless with IoT application development, and go towards roles like an IoT architect, or something like that. So, it's been an incredible project, my team has been very energized by the work with learning at Cisco on really taking the certifications and adding the software skills to it, and seeing how that's going to help enable this amazing community of people that's here at Cisco Live. >> This seems like this is a part of Cisco's transformation from purely a hardware network appliance vendor to a hardware plus software, subscription service at DevNet is part of that as an accelerate. >> Yeah, it definitely is and I think it really shows, with the certifications how Cisco is putting real effort into that, and how that is the direction that we're heading, and it gives a clear signal to people that we do need both sets of skills, and it gives you a pathway to get those skills, is the really important thing, because we heard requests from our community, We want a DevNet certification, We want a certification path for these software skills, and so, it's really in response to things that we've heard from our partners and our customers, they wanted these define paths to get there, and now we got this way to help them. >> All right so there was some other announcements this week, why don't you walk us through the rest of the news? >> Yeah, the other DevNet announcement that we're really talking with people a lot about here is the DevNet Automation Exchange. This is really focused around network automation and how DevNet and the DevNet community can help lead the way in network automation. And so the automation exchange is focused on tangible use cases, that we've heard from partners and customers some of them very simple, we have a walk, run, fly methodology that we're applying. So a lot of people when they start with network automation they come to us and say, "I don't know where to start. "I don't know where me, personally, with skills, "my organization does not know where to start." And so the walk phase is a lot about using automation to do read only kind of activities, get insights, get information, use it to help maybe do zero touch auditing or something like that. Things that are small projects people can pick up, and start building confidence around that work automation. The run phase is start taking action, you can start to implement policy, and start doing configuration through automation. And then the fly is really connecting all of that together, into a DevOps workflow, where maybe you're adding in a chatbot to communicate back to an Ops team, or you're noting that something drifted out of configuration and taking action to fix it. And so, the automation exchange is a place where we have 50 initial use cases, that we go through, we explain, and then we also give a code project, we actually give sample code, it's a repository on GitHub that matches to solving that use case. And so, automation exchange is curated by Cisco and created by our community. So people would be submitting them in, bringing their use cases in, bringing their code, we'll also be bringing use cases and code into it, and we really want it to be this vibrant place to move that conversation forward, and find out what are those walk, run, and fly use cases that people are really working on. >> With so much of networking changes today, being done manually, I think I saw a stat on the Cisco website, that upwards of 95% of all network changes are still done manually, and I think that's got to be a huge hit to OPEX. What are some, in this early history with network automation, what are some of the success stories that you guys are hearing with the impact that this walk, run, fly methodology or path is enabling businesses to achieve? >> Definitely, so yesterday in Chuck's keynote we heard him talk about the complexities kind of moving beyond human scale, and that's one of the things that automation really helps with, and that's where we hear some of the first real wins from our customers and partners around is we've been able to approach something we couldn't before because we've put things in place using automation, it helps us work more efficiently and scale further. So that's definitely a very common one. And then the other part of it is really, not necessarily just about speed or scale, but it's about reliability and reducing risk, and so doing things in an automated way, also can really help with that, and so it's really the combination of both of those where you get the biggest impact. >> Mandy, can you bring us inside a little bit the ecosystem because we heard on the main stage, lots of discussion of keynote, especially in this multi-cloud world that we live in, Cisco spanning across lots of environments here. From a DevNet standpoint we've talked to startups that are involved, as well as some of the big people, so give us the latest there, and what lessons learned from your team have you started to share with some of the other big companies that are looking to go down similar journeys? >> Yeah, I think that is one of the things that's very unique about the DevNet community is within the community we have technical stakeholders from small startups to really large partners or huge enterprises, and when we're all here in the DevNet Zone, we're all engineers, and we're all exchanging ideas kind of no matter what the scales. So it becomes this great mixing of shared experiences and ideas. And that is some of the most interesting conversations that I've actually heard this week, is people talking about how maybe they're using one Cisco platform in these two very different environments, and exchanging ideas about how they do that, or maybe how they're using a Cisco platform with an open source tool, and then people finding value, and thinking, "Oh, maybe I can do that in my environment." So that part of the ecosystem and community is very interesting and then, we're also helping partners find each other, so we do a lot of work around here's a partner in the Cisco ecosystem who goes and installs Meraki Networks, right? Here's a software partner who builds mapping technology on top of indoor WiFi networks, and getting those two together, because the software partner is not going to install the network, and the network person may not write that application in that way, and so bringing them together, we've had a lot of really good information coming back from the community around kind of finding each other, and being able to deliver those outcomes. >> There's so many impacts that DevNet has made, I'm certainly thinking of expansion of partnerships, and ecosystem, like wow, that you probably in the beginning didn't even realize were going to be some of the outcomes that you're seeing five years in. >> Yeah, it is exciting to be five years into it and certainly when I taught the first coding 101 for network engineers at Cisco Live five years ago in San Francisco I did not expect there to be DevNet certifications five years later, that is a really interesting path to think about how that evolves, and then certainly on the ecosystems side of the same thing. You know, we always knew that the APIs were going to become prevalent across all the Cisco platforms, and up and down the stack. And we always knew developers are this creative force and if you get those two things together, you can unlock a lot of interesting things, but it's been great to see it come into reality. >> So, Mandy, I had the opportunity to hear Fran, who is the chief people person at Cisco, talk to kickoff the event here, and they talked about the fact that 40% of the leadership team at Cisco has changed in the last 12 months, and they did that because something was right, it wasn't that there was problems, but Chuck Robbins has been here for four years the stocks been going gangbusters, but give us a little bit of insight, what does this transformation of DevNet which talk about 600,000 people in the giant community, but what does it mean inside? Fran talked about the people that are engaged are six times more engaged when they work, if they really like what they're doing, and we know kind of the quality of life benefits that happen if I, you know-- >> Definitely, yeah so, I think it's been very positive. I have super confidence in our leadership team right now, and the Cisco culture is one of the biggest things that I love about working at Cisco and I'm a mom of two boys, and I have flexibility to have this amazing job and career, and also be around with my boys, and that's a life goal and that's really meaningful to me. Within DevNet, working within the company to kind of drive some change, I think within this five years we have seen awareness of what developers need and want, and how to be developer friendly, like that has certainly been something we've been working internally to help lots of groups understand, and there's been a ton of progress around that. And then also just the attention from the product teams, and engineering teams, into the work they're putting into their APIs is just incredible, and I think that's the voice of the community coming back in and them seeing that the kind of innovation that it drives in our partner community, and all these people here learning about their platforms, I think that is the best kind of virtuous cycle that you can have. >> I can only imagine Cisco, history as it is, and as large as it is, that having a reputation being developer friendly is a massive competitive advantage. Especially for some probably larger enterprises that are still trying to make that pivot. You have so many demonstrable prove points of Cisco's developer friendliness, that I can only imagine that's probably contributing to all this great revenue numbers we're seeing. >> We do believe it is really important for Cisco's future, if we're going to be a software company, being developer friendly is certainly a very important part of that, and that was part of the original thought with DevNet starting five years ago. We always have more work to do, but it's great to see how far we've come. >> Definitely, well Mandy, congratulations on your excellent adventure, we're excited to see where it goes from here, we also appreciate being in the DevNet Zone, and getting to feel the buzz and the excitement, and I can just imagine how many partnerships are forming behind us, how many new products and services are going to be created, maybe new companies, it's very exciting. >> Mandy: Thank you, it's great to be here. >> We appreciate your time. For Stu Miniman, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live, from Cisco live. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(lively music) >> Narrator: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to San Diego everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman, day one of of our wall-to-wall coverage, three days of Cisco Live. We're here at the DevNet Zone, a lot of action going around us, CCIE's learning how to become programmers too. Gordon Thompson is here. He's the vice president of world wide sales, for Enterprise Networking good to see you again Gordon. Michael Beesley, he's the CTO for Cisco service provider business. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having us. >> So Gordon, we were in Barcelona in February, we talked a lot about some of the big trends here. We're going to focus today on 5G and Wi-Fi six since Barcelona you've been probably talking to a lot of customers what are you hearing from them, what are the big trends in the marketplace? >> Well I think it's interesting right? 'cause the first thing we talk about is well this massive bandwidth improvement and everyone says oh so what? I mean that's not interesting you know? But bandwidth doesn't change the game totally but I take everyone back to 4G right? When we moved from 3G to 4G and when we moved from 3G to 4G there was a social transformation around bandwidth and that was the mobile device right? The mobile device came along where we could do everything on that mobile device and that was a real social transformation the interesting thing was that Wi-Fi wasn't really linked to that social transformation you know I would go and speak to customers back in the day who would say bring your own device? Naw over my dead body we're never bringing you know bring your own device into the environment and what happened over time was organizations gradually recognized the importance of bring your own device and 4G and therefore high speed Wi-Fi what we see this time around is 5G comes along with this massive bandwidth improvement but at the same time organizations are realizing the importance of Wi-Fi 6 similar speeds and actually what I think we're going to see this time round is the business transformation leading the social transformation. The last time it was the public driving the change into the enterprise this time I think we're going to see the enterprise drive the change much faster than we thought. >> That's interesting 'cause obviously the killer app there that coincided with the social change with Facebook and Twitter and really a reemergence of LinkedIn you know as a key tool for business people but it was really the Twitter's and Facebook's that sort of drove that so what's the killer app this time around? (chuckles) >> Well do you know I think it's difficult to say here's the killer app just now 'cause when 4G came out we didn't know what the killer app was so I think it's hard for me to say here's the killer app but what I would say is you know you start to see things like virtual reality, augmented reality becoming a reality and business are all starting to now think about how can we use these technologies to get closer to our customers, to improve the productivity of our employees and how we can reduce cost and these sort of things ultimately businesses'll be very innovative around this and there'll be multiple different killer apps come along, for us to put our hands on our hearts today and say this is the killer app you know I think that's daft. >> You'd be starting a company if you knew. >> Yeah I would. (laughs) >> So Michael share with us what we need to know about 5G other than okay it's faster but from an architect standpoint what do we need to know? What's different and how's that going to affect the adoption? >> Yeah it's interesting obviously there's the speed gains but along with that there's the densification of the RAN that goes with 5G and for some customers for some service providers the opportunity to virtualize that RAN and to replace traditional integrated base band units with virtualized infrastructure on which you can run the infrastructural workloads that are needed in the Radio Access Network to be able to run that on compute rather than wall gardened integrated systems which opens up the opportunity to just distribute computing storage throughout that network infrastructure which obviously is used for infrastructure used for the RAN and used for the distribution of the mobile core in particular as we all embrace and certainly Cisco's embracing from an architecture point of view the separation of the control plane and the user plane for that mobile packet core. But once you have that infrastructure once you have that distributed compute that is much, much closer to the end user both consumer but more importantly the enterprise and user than it's ever been before, that opens up all kinds of opportunities for subsequent workloads to land on that infrastructure obviously caching is the most obvious one as we all consume more and more videos certainly we look at the analyst expectations for video and video growth by 2022 we expect about 81-82% of all traffic on the network to actually be video traffic so being able to put video caches at the edge is very important both from a quality of experience point of view and a pure cost point of view and then you've got the opportunity for the placement of all kinds of third party applications onto that edge compute infrastructure without 5G that edge compute infrastructure probably doesn't come about which marries up with the trends that we see in enterprise which is the continuing expansion into The Cloud continued growth of SAS services as well as their own private data centers and private Cloud which opens up that edge infrastructure to all of those application vendors that are serving enterprise to be able to position workloads at the edge of that network that can take advantage of the low latency and the enhanced bandwidth at those locations in the network. >> So Stu pivoting off of what Gordon said mobile plus 4G and then the social transformation it sounds like it's in this case it's edge 5G and a business transformation. >> Yeah well and Dave actually the word that I kept hearing jump out at me when Michael was going through that is enterprise because when I think about the 4G rollout was Cisco involved? Sure. Was Cisco like the first one you think of, of mobile, social and everything like that? Well you know there's a place that Cisco played but enterprise, enterprise, enterprise well Cisco's got a very strong position in that environment so is that how we should be thinking of it? And the other thing is what Gordon talked about that inside out that 5G plus Wi-Fi 6 that pieces together seems like a perfect place for Cisco to add its you know place in the market. >> Well certainly we're very excited about the opportunities with regards to the enterprise space in general and how we can enable, we can partner with our service provider customers to better serve and to better integrate with that enterprise environment, bringing together these two very powerful and innovative technologies, bringing together Wi-Fi 6 and 5G and certainly we're not the only ones that would observe that there was a study recently a few months ago, a study done of the CEO's of mobile network operators and according to that study 69% of those operators felt that their main monetization and their main way to drive revenue and profit off of 5G was actually orientated towards the enterprise. >> Yeah and look I'm very excited about number one so obviously we're known for being a Wi-Fi 6 player but we're also working very closely with the 5G players in the marketplace to make sure there's seamless handoff between 5G and Wi-Fi 6 you know? So the minute you check into the hotel when you come to San Diego what's the first thing you do? You put in your name and your room number. Those days are gone right? There's a seamless handover now from the 5G network to the Wi-Fi network to say this is exactly who you are, we know who you are and we'll onboard you seamlessly see? And we're working very closely with all of the handset providers to make sure that we integrate neatly there as well. So as we said at the start I think you know it will start this time round with the enterprise transformation it will lead the way the last time round the enterprises were dragged kicking and screaming into this world they're not getting dragged kicking and screaming into this world this time they're ready. >> Where does automation fit in this whole equation? What are your customers telling you? >> Well certainly it's a key area of focus and it's a key area of innovation for us I mean I would say that when we talk about a 5G network we do have a tendency to over abstract that that is a complicated set of technologies of which Cisco is the market leader in many obviously we don't do the macrocell radio's that is not part of our portfolio but we do all of the STN transport both in terms of equipment optical modules the optics themselves we do all of that, we're leading the industry with regards to the mobile packet core all of our routing assets and the full automation suite that you need to be able to deploy and manage a network that is an order of magnitude more dense than we've ever seen before, a network that has more equipment deployed further out than we've ever had before all in an environment where obviously our SP's, the service providers the global kind of comment they must find ways to make more money and to save money and the automation suite that we bring forward facilitates being able to manage and operate these very very large networks in a very cost effective way to the point that the operational costs and the total cost of ownership is significantly reduced but that automation also brings the agility to that network to the point that the service providers mobile network can more quickly address and more quickly activate services that those enterprise customers in particular, need. I mean an enterprise would not want to wait six months for a service activation more likely they want it activated in six minutes and you know the key to that is having a full suite of closed loop automation tools that enable that service creation. >> All right guys sorry we've got to leave it there we're in the speed zone at the DevNet Zone and the planes are backing up so thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE we appreciate it all right keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break you're watching theCUBE live from Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego be right back. (electronic jingle)

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

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

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to, guys, Cisco Live. Introducing some new innovations, Stu and Dave, around reinventing networking. Couple big themes, big announcements around ACI Anywhere application-centric infrastructure, HyperFlex, and the new CloudCenter Suite, where they are doubling down on cloud, redefining the network. Stu we've been here last year, been watching Cisco. Policy based, intent based networking. Cisco's tying it all together with new branding, The bridge to tomorrow. Your thoughts. >> Yeah John, I actually, I like some of the new branding. The bridge to tomorrow. I've been critical of Cisco. Cisco always said, oh well, you know networking's everywhere and it's really important. Well okay, but where's the meat, where's the detail behind this? They've done a number of acquisitions in the space. They're making sure they understand where they are. They had some failures along the way. I mean you know call a spade a spade, John. They are going to be a leader in multicloud. It's where they want to be, but they had some falters along in being a public cloud. You know the Intercloud message that they had. They confused the service providers. We didn't understand how they played with the hyperscale players and now they're understanding where they sit. SD-WAN, critically important. Where they live in the Data Center and It's interesting we talked about do we care about the Data Center or do we care about where the data is centered, and of course that is not in one place, but it is many places. We know customers today live in a multicloud world. How I get to my data, how I leverage my data is critically important, and the networking and management is something that is critical across all those. Right, as you said, ACI and HyperFlex, the CloudCenter Suite I know is an area I know we're going to dig into a bunch this week, because cisco has an opportunity to play across these environments. But Cisco has been trying for a long time to be the manager of managers in these environments. I think back to things that Dave Vellante and the Wikibon team and I have done for years, talking about how you manage in this heterogeneous world and it's just, instead of multivendor we are talking multiclass. >> Multiclass. And you know what everything is coming together, Dave. We've been covering Cisco, with looking at the timing of the positioning. It seems to be coming together and around the rebranding, which by the way I agree with Stu, I like it. The bridge to tomorrow, it resonates with me. Maybe because I am from the Bay area. But they're bridging two worlds, they're bridging On-Premises and cloud together in a very seamless way and elegant way architecturally. So the branding ties in with really much a rounding out of the portfolio, so a lot of storylines to follow: the new branding, Chuck Robbins getting his sea legs now as Cisco goes to the next level. And clearly they see multicloud as their positioning because this has been Cisco's core position for many many years, this idea of enabling other people to do innovation, whether it's applications and work loads. Now they're connecting two worlds. Your thoughts on the timing and their position vis-a-vis the industry. >> Well, Cisco talked this morning in the keynote about another bridge. On one side of the network is users and devices. On the other side of the network are applications and data. And we've talked for years about how the network is flattening and traffic is going east, west, et cetera. But interclouding if you will, puts increased pressure on that and it's clearly Cisco's strategy to be the best at connecting, whether it's On-Prem and public clouds or between public clouds. Cisco's got to make the case that on our networks you're going to be higher performance and more secure. That's certainly what they're implying. They're also making a big transition from being a hardware company to a software company. When you listen to VMware talk about Cisco, they talk about oh they make the best hardware, the best switches. Cisco's like, they're talking software capabilities across the network, new architectures, reinventing, coming at it from the network which is obviously their strong point. And it just really sets up an interesting competitive dynamic between Cisco, certainly VMware, who's trying to do networking and storage what it did to servers. And now you've got IBM and Red Hat coming at it from applications and the development perspective. We're here in the DevNet Zone, and I think that's the other piece of the announcements that we're hearing today is developers can actually program with things IoT and new Use Cases. So, pretty exciting times. >> Stu, storylines around the Data Center, you made the comment and it was kind of a play on words on the keynote. Data is centered, centered, dash, ED, center-ed. So the Data Center concept is moving into the data being center the value proposition. This has been interesting because if you look at what DevNet has spawned and DevNet create under Susie Wee's leadership, you saw the role of APIs. So if data moves around the network, and that's the core competency of Cisco, moving packets from point A to point B, adding automation, adding intelligence, with intent based networking and cloud enabling it on the other side. You got to have access to data, it's got to be traversing and inter operating with multiple environments. This is now a architectural standard. Is Cisco from a product portfolio standpoint, whether it's security analytics, cloud apps management, IoT, and networking. Does it all come together? Your thoughts. >> Yeah so, first of all, Cisco plays in a lot of these environments. We talk not just Data Center but when you talk about branch office, something Cisco has been doing a really long time. And how do I network between all of those remote locations and my central location. And my central location might not be the data center, it might be a or multiple public clouds out there. So Cisco's been attacking this backed WAN optimization many years ago. SD-WAN really has taken that and much more. Super important when we talk about this multicloud environment and how I get that connectivity, so they're there. And Cisco from the ground up has gone through a lot of rebuild. So the CloudCentre Suite we talked about, micro services architecture built with Kubernetes, into that API economy that we're talking about which is a lot of what we talked about here in the DevNet Zone. Absolutely Cisco has, they're known in this space. They have a lot of the skills. They have a very broad platform of products out there. David Goeckeler this morning, he was just reeling off all the different areas they play to in saying, you know, we've got like 6,000 people in the opening key note and he's like I came and look at this room and I've got like 4x the amount of engineers working on your network and security issues that were here. Like 24,000 people. It's an army. There's a few companies outside of Google, Amazon and Microsoft that can haul on that engineering strength and that's just the internal place, what we love. We talked to Susie Wee and she's like we've got 500,000 on our community platform helping to build. IT, OT, IoT, all the network, all the security pieces so Cisco is not new to a lot of these, but is refocused on a lot of what they're doing. >> So the big news obviously is the ACI Anywhere and HyperFlex Anywhere and putting the data center, connecting those two worlds. You got the cloud as well. So the role of hyper-convergence is certainly key in this announcement here today. ACI Application centric-structured infrastructure is codewords for policy-based, intent-based networking, all stuff that Cisco's used to doing. Then when you connect it to the cloud, you've got Data Center, On-Premises, Cloud and Hyper-Convergence at the edge. This is the core, right? They've got the edge, multiple environments. You've got Cloud and you've got the Data Center kind of legacy environment which is evolving. Those are all coming together. Stu, what is, this is a cross-domain challenge. Is Cisco prepared? David, I'd love to get your comments on this as well, to be that domain vendor? Because multicloud truly will require data to be moving around, for policy to be automated and deployed across domains. This is a huge challenge. Yeah I mean John, it is challenging and if you look at the hyper-convergence infrastructure space, where Cisco plays with HyperFlex, goes up against VMware vSAN and Nutanix and the rest there, the people that sell that and build that aren't necessarily the ones that really understand multicloud and we've seen that space maturing for the last couple of years. Obviously Cisco's got a right to be at the table there and they're moving in that direction, but the data center folks and they are data center folks that have done networking and storage and all that piece, are they getting trained up and helping to help bridge to that multicloud environment? I think there's still a lot of work to go when I talk to the channel, when I talk to the people that are out there going to market on that. >> Well that's the big challenge is how do you move the base, how do you get them from point A to point B without spending a billion dollars. You heard Gordon today stand up there and say you got to change. Now, and he admitted it. Anytime anybody tells me I have to change, I kind of get defensive about it, but some of the things that I, I mean obviously this end-to-end architecture, they're in a position in theory anyway to do that. They, what choice do they have? A couple of things that struck me is they've got a new consumption model, the SAAS-based consumption model. They also have four validated designs for OT, for IoT apps which that's good to see some actual meat on that bone. They got like utility substations and mining operations and fleet management. I mean it's stuff that you wouldn't traditionally think about coming from a data center company. So they're making some moves that I think are substantive and necessary. >> Well I took some notes here. I wanted to get your commentary on this, guys 'cause to me this is the core news here is that Cisco is truly trying to put that end to end architecture from across domains. You're seeing their core data center business continue to be robust. That's their bread and butter. You've got the edge that's developing nicely with IoT and Enterprise Edge and other places around campus and then you've got multiclass so you've got the three-legged stool. Core data center, multicloud and Edge. Does this address the industry's demand for apps changing, workloads being distributed and then management across these multiple domains or a multicloud because you've got to manage this stuff. So cost to ownership, these are now the table stakes. Your thoughts on those three areas too. Core data center, multicloud and edge. >> Yeah I mean we've been talking about for the last year, the move from hardware to software is not an easy one. There are things that you need to change for their product. They need to change how their field handles it, compensation and how they support their channel is super challenging. At VMWorld last year, we really highlighted how that intercloud networking, what a critical piece it was. I was so excited that the original vision of what Nicira had for pre-acquisitions was starting to come out there because VMWare's coming after Cisco in that manner. Cisco, not like they're trying to create hypervisors. They're going to live in all those worlds, but there definitely is some conflict there and something I always look at, Cisco's got a giant ecosystem. They have hundreds of thousands of certified Cisco engineers and they've got a great ecosystem here. >> Very strong channel. >> Everybody in a strong channel, right. They go to market partners as well as the technology partners and they're still strong. We're going to have on this week a lot of those players here, but that change is something that is tough to go through and it's this journey that they're on. >> Well this, Dave brought up consumption. I want to dig into the consumption piece because how people consume the cloud obviously means they got to stand up to cloud too, multicloud. Cisco's clearly got Azure AWS and Google Cloud. Google seems to be a strategic partner as well as Amazon Azure but I think Google kind of feels like there's more strategic alliances there. I'm just speculating from my opinion, but if I'm a Cisco customer, it's pretty easy now to go multicloud. I don't need to do a lot differently. The question is how do I manage it, what's the cost, how do I consume it? This is going to be critical. Your thoughts. >> Well Cisco's claiming they're going to abstract that complexity and whatever APIs and software infrastructure or infrastructure of a service that they're using, they're going to make that, simplify that and allow you to have a single management console. So as I said before, they're coming at it from a networking perspective. Vmware is coming at it from the traditional hypervisor and trying to elbow its way into the networking and storage space and then as I said, you've got other companies like IBM and Red Hat now coming at it from the application space and Kubernetes is obviously an important role there. I think personally the networking is a right place, a good place to come from. The problem for customers is still going to be complexity 'cause the cloud providers are going to have their own management framework. Obviously vSphere is a big player here. Now you got Cisco at all and then a bunch of startups saying hey ours is even better. >> Well the IBM Red Hat combination. >> Right and so I don't foresee a day where you're going to have one single painted glass. We never had in this industry. It's always been Nirvana and so then it comes down to Cisco getting its fair share. I think Cisco's in a very good position to get its fair share for the reasons that Stu just mentioned. >> Stu, so I want to get your thoughts. We're in the DevNet Zone. That's where theCUBE is. It's our second year at Cisco Live! We'll be at the American show again this year. It's on the schedule, but the role of the developer, the role of infrastructure as code now is in place actually happening within Cisco's customer base. So if you're a Cisco customer, you're looking at this saying okay, I've been running the Cisco network services. What is the role of the network engineer? Is there a renaissance coming? We said this last year. I kind of see it happening here. The network is now the computer. The network is the data. This is a great opportunity for Cisco. Your thoughts on the culture of the Cisco customer base and that vibe of infrastructure's code. >> Yeah so John, I used to bristle a little bit when you said well we're going to turn all the network engineers and they're going to become coders and I said well I know a lot of network engineers and some of them love and thrive that, but a lot of them, they're in the CLI, they're doing their thing. If you go and walk around this DevNet zone, a lot of stuff that's happening isn't networking. They are builders. This reminds me of going into AWS ReInvent and talking about people here the tools and the skills that you need to have to be a builder and absolutely networking is a part of it, that managing orchestration security, all things that touch into the network, but it's not oh how do I manage my network switch better, which is kind of the hardware focused view and maybe code this, but it really is how am I building APIs, how am I leveraging things? I've got IO key demos out there and networking is in there, but it's not necessarily the thing and so therefore you got the wave of developers and builders and John, we know that's the future. You need to be a builder. How can you create faster? Things like server list or moving in that direction where I don't need, it's less about the coding, it's more about my application, my data and my building. >> You bring up a great point, Stu, and this is something that I always point to when I look at who's kind of bsing the marketplace in terms of speeds and fees and announcements. When you see people actually coding and being enabled to create value, you start to see that's a good signal and here in the DevNet Zone, I saw four or five demos that were writing software and apps taking advantage of the hardware, taking advantage of the network. So now the network is enabling through APIs to extend the data. This is kind of changing the concept of how packages are moved around the networks. So this is truly a tell sign in my opinion of the modern infrastructure. The question is, Dave, how fast will the customers migrate to being true devops or infrastructure as code customers writing apps, building new things, create that value? >> Well I would say this. Of all the sort of traditional large-scale, call them whatever, legacy enterprise data center companies, I think Cisco's the only one that I can really point to that has kind of got developers right. IBM, Blue Mix, StartStop, remember the EMC code initiative that was kind of a joke? And so Oracle owns Java and it still sort of struggles with developers so I think Cisco got it right and I think the reason they got it right is because they're focused. That's what I do like about Cisco's strategy and the reason why you obviously give them a high chance is because they're really focused on that networking piece. They're not trying to be all things to all people even though you can forecast that they're sort of headed in that direction, but they're starting from a position of strength. >> You made a good point. The success or failure of developer programs is about creating an environment where it's compatible with how their expectations are. Microservices containers, these abstraction layers that they're used to dealing with create value. Developers love that. The other thing I would say is that developers look at what they can do, the world's changed. It used to be that the network used to dictate what can happen to applications. Now applications need to program the network. I think this was a shift we saw with DevNet Create and DevNet two years ago where they started moving from the command line interface to more of a software abstractions or application interfaces where they say hey let's just do more with the network. So applications now require programmability. This is the shift, it's upside down from what it was when the industry started. So this new bridge has to be application-centric and to me that's what I get out of the cloud announcement around multicloud. You're starting to see the portfolio up and down their stack. From security they got stealthwatch tetration, that's SAAS, analytics, app dynamics among other things. Data Center, HyperFlex, UCS Nexus all lined up. Cloud-centric container platforms on multiple clouds, IoT nedic, V Edge, Meraki, cloud services router. This is now a portfolio. They've got the products, Stu. >> Absolutely, John. >> Okay guys we're going to have a great day. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We're kicking it off here in Barcelona. Stay with us for more coverage here at Cisco Live! This is theCUBE. We'll be right back. (energetic music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Cisco Live! We're in Barcelona, Dave Villante and Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. George Bentinck is here. He's a product manager for Camera Systems at Cisco Meraki. >> Hi. >> Great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks very much. >> So, we were saying, Meraki's not just about wireless. It's all about cameras now. Tell us about your role. >> The Meraki camera is relatively new. It's one of the newer products. It came out just over two years ago and it's really embodying what we're about as a business unit at Cisco, which is about simplicity. It's about taking normally complex technology and sort of distilling it so customers can really use it. So what we did with the camera was we spoke to a lot of our customers, listened what they had to say, and they were fed up with the boxes. They don't want these servers, they don't want the recording solutions, they just want to get video. And so we built a camera which has everything inside it. All the video is stored in the camera using the latest solid state storage. And then we did all the analytics and the other sort of cool things people want to do with video in the camera as well. And yet to make it easy to use, it's all managed from the Meraki cloud. So that allows you to scale it from one camera to 100 cameras to 100,000 cameras and yet have nothing else other than the cameras and the management from the cloud. >> Well the way you describes it sounds so simple, but technically, it's a real challenge, what you've described. What were some of the technical challenges of you guys getting there? >> Well, there are sort of two components. There's the device piece and when we look at the device piece, we basically leverage the latest advances in the mobile phone industry. So if you look at the latest iPhones and Android phones, we've taken that high density, highly reliable storage and integrated it into the camera. And then we've also taken the really powerful silicone, so we have Qualcomm Snapdragon system-on-chip in there and that performance allows us to do all the analytics in the camera. And so the second piece is the cloud, the scaling, and the management. And with video, it's lots of big data, which I'm guessing you guys are probably pretty familiar with. And trying to search that and know what's going on and managing its scale can be really painful. But we have a lot of experience with this. Meraki's cloud infrastructure manages millions of connected nodes with billions of connected devices and billions of pieces of associated metadata. This is just like video, so we can reuse a lot of the existing technology we've built in the cloud and now move it to this other field of video and make it much easier to find things. >> And when people talk about, y'know, the camera systems, IoT obviously comes into play and security's a big concern. Y'know, people are concerned about IP cameras off the shelf. Y'know, everybody knows the stories about the passwords where, y'know, they never changed out of the factory and they're the same passwords across the, and so, y'know, presumably, Cisco Meraki, trusted name, and there's a security component here as well. >> Yeah, absolutely. This is actually one of my favorite topics because, unfortunately, not many people ask about it. It's one of those, it's not an issue until it's an issue type of things and we put a lot of work in it. I mean, Cisco has security in its DNA. It's just like part of what we do. And so we did all of the things which I think every camera vendor and IoT vendor should be doing anyway. So that's things like encryption for everything and by default. So all the storage on the camera is encrypted. It's mandatory so you can't turn it off. And there's zero configuration, so when you turn it on, it won't record for a few minutes while it encrypts its storage volume and then you're good to go. We also manage all the certificates on the camera and we also have encrypted management for the camera with things like two-factor authentication and other authentication mechanisms on top of that as well. So it's sort of leaps and bounds ahead of where most of the decision makers are thinking in this space because they're physical security experts. They know about locks and doors and things like that. They're not digital security experts but the Cisco customer and our organization, we know this and so we have really taken that expertise and added it to the camera. >> Yeah, George, security goes hand-in-hand with a lot of the Cisco solutions. Is that the primary or only use case for the Meraki camera? Y'know, I could just see a lot of different uses for this kind of technology. >> It really is very varied and the primary purpose of it is a physical security camera. So being able to make sure that if there's an incident in your store, you have footage of maybe the shoplifting incident or whatever. But, because it's so easy to use, customers are using it for other things. And I think one of the things that's really exciting to me is when I look at the data. And if I look at the data, we know that about 1% of all the video we store is actually viewed by customers. 99% just sits there and does nothing. And so, as we look at how we can provide greater value to customers, it's about taking the advances in things such as machine learning for computer vision, sort of artificial intelligence, and allowing you to quantify things in that data. It allows you to, for example, determine how many people are there and where they go and things like that. And to maybe put it all into context, because one of my favorite examples is a Cisco case study in Australia, where they're using cameras at a connected farm as part of an IoT deployment, to understand sheep grazing behavior and so this camera watches the sheep all day. Now as a human, I don't want to watch the sheep all day, but the camera doesn't care. And so the farmer looks at eight images representing eight hours, which is a heat map of the animals' movement in the field, and they can know where they've been grazing, where they need to move them, where this might be overgrazed. And so the camera's not security at this point, it really is like a sensor for the enterprise. >> Yeah, it's interesting, actually I did a walk through the DevNet Zone and I saw a lot of areas where I think they're leveraging some of your technology. Everything from let's plug in some of the AI to be able to allow me to do some interesting visualizations. What we're doing, there's a magic mirror where you can ask it like an Alexa or Google, but it's Debbie, the robot here as to give you answers of how many people are in a different area here. A camera is no longer just a camera. It's now just an end node connected and there's so many technologies. How do you manage that as a product person where you have the direction, where you put the development? You can't support a million different customer use cases. You want to be able to scale that business. >> Absolutely, I think the North Star always has to be simplistic. If you can't go and deploy it, you can't use it. And so we see a lot of these cool science projects trapped in proof of concept. And they never go into production and the customers can't take advantage of it. So we want to provide incredibly simple, easy out-the-box technology, which allows people to use AI and machine learning, and then we're the experts in that, but we give you industry-standard APIs using REST or MQTT, to allow you to build business applications on it directly or integrate it into Cisco Kinetic, where you can do that using the MQTT interface. >> So, Stu, you reminded me so we're here in the DevNet Zone and right now there's a Meraki takeover. So what happens in the DevNet Zone is they'll pick a topic or a part of Cisco's business unit, right now, it's the Meraki, everyone's running around with Meraki takeover shirts, and everybody descends on the DevNet Zone. So a lot of really cool developer stuff going on here. George, I wanted to ask you about where the data flows. So the data lives at the edge, y'know, wherever you're taking the video. Does it stay there? Given that only 1% is watched, are you just leaving it there, not moving it back into the cloud? Are you sometimes moving it back into the cloud? What's the data flow look like? >> You can think of this interesting sort of mindset, which is let's have a camera where we don't ever want to show you video, we want to give you the answer because video is big, it's heavy. Let's give you the answer and if that answer means we give you video, we give you video. But if we can give you the answer through other forms of information, like a still image, or an aggregate of an image, or metadata from that, then we'll give you that instead. And that means customers can deploy this on cellular networks out in the middle of nowhere and with much fewer constraints than they had in the past. So it really depends but we try and make it as efficient as possible for the person deploying it so they don't have to have a 40G network connection to every camera to make the most of it. >> Yeah, so that would mean that most of it stays-- >> Most of it stays at the edge in the camera. >> Talk a little bit more about the analytics component. Is that sort of Meraki technology the came over with the acquisition? What has Cisco added to that? Maybe speak to that a little bit. >> So the camera is a relatively new product line within the last two and a half years and the Meraki acquisition was, I think we're only like five years or more now down that road, so this is definitely post-acquisition and part of the continued collaboration between various departments at Cisco. What it enables you to do is object detection, object classification, and object tracking. So it's I know there's a thing, I know what that thing is, and I know where that thing goes. And we do it for a high level object class today, which is people. Because if you look at most business problems, they can be broken down into understanding location, dwell times, and characteristics of people. And so if we give you the output of those algorithms as industry-standard APIs, you can build very customized business analytics or business logics. So let me give you a real world example. I have retail customers tell me that one of the common causes of fraud is an employee processing a refund when there's no customer. And so what if you could know there was no customer physically present in front of the electronic point of sale system where the refund is being processed? Well, the camera can tell you. And it's not a specialist analytics camera, it's a security camera you were going to buy anyway, which will also give this insight. And now you know if that refund has a customer at the other side of the till. >> Well, that's awesome. Okay, so that's an interesting use case. What are some of the other ones that you foresee or your customers are pushing you towards? Paint a picture as to what you think this looks like in the future. >> It really is this camera as a sensor so one of the newer things we've added is the ability to have real-time updates of the lights' conditions from the camera, so you can get from the hardware-backed light sensor on the camera the lux levels. And what that means is now you have knowledge of people, where they are, where they go, knowledge of lights, and now you can start going okay, well maybe we adjust the lighting based on these parameters. And so we want to expose more and more data collection from this endpoint, which is the camera, to allow you to make either smarter business decisions or to move to the digital workplace and that's really what we're trying to do in the Meraki offices in San Francisco. >> And do you get to the point or does the client get to the point where they know not only that information you just described but who the person is? >> Yes and no. I think one of the things that I'm definitely advocating caution on is the face recognition technology has a lot of hype, has a lot of excitement, and I get asked about it regularly. And I do test state-of-the-art and a lot of this technology all the time. And I wear hats because I find them fun and entertaining but they're amazingly good at stopping most of these systems from working. And so you can actually get past some of the state-of-the-art face recognition systems with two simple things, a hat and a mobile phone. And you look at your phone as you walk along and they won't catch you. And when I speak to customers, they're expectation of the performance of this technology does not match the investment cost required. So I'm not saying it isn't useful to someone, it's just, for a lot of our customers, when they see what they would get in exchange for such a huge investment, it's not something they are interested in. >> Yeah, the ROI's just really not there today. >> Not today, but the technology's moving very fast so we'll see what the future brings. >> Yeah, great. Alright, George, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was really, really interesting. Leave you the last word. Customer reactions to what you guys are showing at the event? Any kind of new information that you want to share? >> There are some that we'll talk about in the Whisper Suite, which I will leave unsaid, unfortunately. It's just knowing that you can use it so simply and that the analytics and the machine learning come as part of the product at no additional cost. Because this is pretty cutting-edge stuff. You see it in the newspapers, you see it in the headlines and to say I buy this one camera and I can be a coffee shop, a single owner, and I get the same technology as an international coffee organization is pretty compelling and that's what's getting people excited. >> Great and it combines the sensor at the edge and the cloud management so-- >> Best of both worlds. >> That's awesome, I love the solution. Thanks so much for sharing with us. >> Fantastic. >> Alright, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from Cisco Live! Barcelona. We'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its Ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to our live coverage here in Barcelona for Cisco Live! 2019's theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Dave Cope who's the senior director, market development, Cisco Cloud platform. Great to see you again. >> Great to see you. >> Thanks for coming on, I really appreciate it. One of your products is the big focus of the keynote, introducing the CloudCenter Suite. One of the core announcements, this was pretty critical for Cisco, obviously multicloud, we've seen the Kubernetes relationship with Amazon. You've got Azure, Google Cloud. Cisco's tied up with the clouds, which is good, >> Right. >> They have the on center core data center, but now dealing with cloud has been really the hot topic, so thanks for coming on. >> Absolutely. >> So I'm looking at your perspective first on cloud in general within Cisco and within your customer base and the industry. What is multicloud? Why is it important? Why is it a wave worth betting on? >> You know, it's a great question, I think. Actually, it's a really fun time right now because if you think about it, it's almost exactly 10 years ago where AWS's EC2 first came out of beta, and so, everybody's talking about the cloud, but it really hasn't been around that long. And even in that sort of ten-year period, it's gone through sort of skepticism to, I think, let me try some non-critical apps, to debate about public or private, or which is the best public, to, today, 94% of the businesses say they either are, or are planning to use, multicloud environments. And, so if you think about it, that's both provided a lot of advantages but also created a degree of complexity in how do I apply traditional disciplines like network management and security across environments that I control and don't control? So it's a whole new world. >> And the DevNet Zone, which for theCUBE is based out of again this year, has a hot growth vibe to it. People are joining the community in record numbers. The demos here aren't just like canned demos, they're actually real code. >> Exactly. >> So you're seeing a developer framework around the network, and the cloud, the cloud is not a one-vendor product. It's an architecture, it's a concept. And so cloud operations is in the cloud, it's also being done on premise and the edge, so everything's cloud now, if you think about it. >> Well I think what we saw is, obviously, huge initial growth of cloud and a lot of applications moving to the cloud, but it's always been my hypothesis and I think it's actually coming true that we're now, and some of the newer technologies support this, we're seeing this natural distribution of workloads across all these environments, whether it's the public cloud, or the edge, or the data center. And it's now technologies that allow you to put the workloads in the right place based on business priorities, not IT priorities. And now I believe you're starting to see this sort of natural stasis and the whole pie grow again. >> So I got to ask you the question from a customer perspective. So I'm a customer, I say, Dave, love it, you had me at cloud, I'm there. I got all this stuff to deal with. I've been working my business, running my business. Love it, what's in it for me though? What's the impact? What do I need to do differently? Is it, do I have to change anything? How does a customer engage with Cisco and the cloud and the multitude of technologies that are available to them? It can seem complex. >> Yeah, I think people had hoped that the cloud would make everything easy, but what they're finding is that the cloud is not the cloud. It's private clouds, public clouds, virtual private clouds. And if you think about it, good free market principles, all these cloud providers are competing with each other so they're all becoming very different. Cisco finds, I think, itself in a very unique position because of its heritage around network management and security, which is connecting everything together. We don't have our own cloud, so what we focus on is providing a very broad and deep solution to be able to manage workloads across all of these environments. So you truly can place the workload in the right place. >> I wonder if you could help us unpack a little bit what you just said, which is, the clouds are actually becoming more different, not more similar, you know. With the Kubernetes show >> That's right. >> we talked to Cisco, we talked to the whole ecosystem. The founders of Kubernetes said they weren't creating a magic layer, that's not what Kubernetes is. There's some base functionality, but everybody's building on top of it, and that's where a lot of the complexity comes in. So, how does CloudCenter Suite, you don't want to do what, in the past it was, you know, let's dumb down everything so that you get a least common denominator. I want to be able to leverage the individual features of my Azure and my AWS, and in my data center. But, I need to be able to get my arms around managing that whole environment. >> Yeah, and if you think about the old world, you know, if you had an application and a target, whether it's a cloud or any data center, you'd have to hard wire those together. And as you have more and more apps and they're changing faster and now more and more cloud environments with no standardization across those environments, this whole hard wiring together doesn't work anymore, so we have to rethink cloud management, and that's what CloudCenter's really all about. How do you describe an application, its components, sequence, and dependencies, independent of the nuances of those targets, and allow CloudCenter, once you define your application, to understand the resources on each of these environments and lay down that application natively on those different environments. And it does provide both least common denominator support around core primitives like compute storage network security, but also provides access to these higher-level services, whether on case of AWS, it's RDS, ELB, et cetera, so you really get the best of both worlds. Move there easily, manage the workload and take advantage of all these rich services. >> You know, I love the keynote clever play on words, data center, center, data is the center of the value proposition. That kind of highlights just basic networking 101, move a packet from point A to point B. Now you have more intelligence in the data, so the data layer is now the enabling opportunity to build software. So look no further than microservices and containers, and you go, hey, this is pretty cool. Policy-based, sounds like the service meshes. So you got policy-based whatever, that's been a core competency in the network, moving to the application with applications programming. So we all kind of like to go, that's great, that's dev ops, thank you, check. Now, how do you deploy it? So, I got to ask you on the CloudCenter 5.0, the suite, so this is new, this is big news, how does that help me move to a microservices architecture? What is it offering? What's different than CloudCenter before it? >> So CloudCenter has always been this platform that allows you to manage the entire life cycle of applications across any private or public clouds. And it's always been a very comprehensive solution, perhaps too comprehensive for some people and so, with CloudCenter Suite 5.0 what we've announced is both new functionality and easier consumption. On the new functionality we've extended our price and performance benchmarking that allowed you to identify where to place workloads, to additional cost optimization capabilities that would actually make recommendations and allow you to remediate and take advantage of those cost optimization recommendations. We have a new Action Orchestrator workflow, which is a customizable workflow but with out-of-the-box connectors that allows you to integrate with both Cisco and third party products. Cisco security products, things like non-Cisco, ITSM ServiceNow applications. So you can provide users with a catalog. So new functionality-- >> That's the workload manager. >> That's the workload manager that provides those out-of-the-box connectors and a workflow to be able to reach out, run those routines. >> So can that do end-to-end management? >> Absolutely, absolutely. And we talk about CloudCenter, sort of full life cycle management, is the modeling of the app sort of the benchmarking or cost optimization, the deployment of the app, whether it be traditional VM based or microservice based, and those working together, and finally, the ongoing day two, day three management. >> So, I get that, you guys had a little bit of workflow management before, but the new things are orchestration, Action Orchestrator, and the cost optimizer. The cost optimizer I can get, that's like a TCO thing. >> Yes. >> The Action Orchestrator's interesting to me. What is that? What does it mean? Is that, like, just cloud-enabled? What is that, what does that mean? Action Orchestrator. >> It's really a dynamic workflow engine that allows you to either create customizable workflows or, if you've already invested in things like script libraries, in your application routine, it can reach out to say, go do a snapshot of the data and then reach back into the application technology. Or reach out to a third party tool, like an ITSM tool, or reach out to their CMDB and update their CMDB to do capacity management. So it gives you all of that flexibility. And, by the way, in all of this, while we were on-prem only, now we're going to provide both on-prem and CloudCenter Suite as a SaaS so now it really makes it nice. It also is available in three tiers, so it's never been easier to start simple and grow. Could be one app, one cloud, and then you could expand clouds, apps, and users, and functionality as you grow. >> But what if I have other systems under other management systems? Does it integrate into those? >> Yes. >> Do I have to toggle between them? What's the-- >> No, it will actually integrate into those management systems. But the whole idea is, if you think about the average Global 2000 company, today they have more than four public cloud providers, and many more regions than that, and this does not include SaaS apps, so what I think most companies realize is they don't want to have siloed management environments where they have to have expensive skills to manage everything. >> Yeah, we spent a lot of time talking about those technical pieces. How do we get something to work in multiple clouds or move them? But one of the biggest challenges I hear from users is the skillset. You know, I'm CCIE certified, I understand how to mange my environment. I've gone through my AWS certification and there's that. I need to learn a new language when I go, you know, go do Azure. So how are you, from a management standpoint, going to help, no matter which point I'm coming from, understand and use this tool simply? >> Yeah, it's sort of interesting. So a very large media company, I can't use their name, but you'll find this analogies, they found that, on average, they needed two fairly highly-paid skilled individuals for every target cloud environment. The other thing, by the way, is sort of interesting they measured, is that without sort of a cloud management platform, for every pairing of an app to a cloud, they had to custom-write about 1,200 lines of script. And every time the app or the cloud changed, and they did, they had to re-write 20% of those script libraries. So, between skilled resources and these manual script libraries, it just becomes unmanageable to have diverse apps across diverse cloud environments. >> And what's the status, just a quick update on the multicloud relationships? Google, AWS, Azure. The recent announcement we covered was the Amazon Kubernetes deal, congratulations, great deal. What's the status of the relationship with Cisco multicloud strategy for your customers that have Google, Azure, and AWS? >> Sure, well first of all, more broadly, CloudCenter today allows you to deploy and manage applications across all of the popular private and public clouds, and I think that adds up today to be about 15. So you can do that. From time to time, we'll see new technologies, in this case, Kubernetes, where we'll provide specific strategic partnership solutions to let our customers take advantage of that. So we announced the hybrid Kubernetes solution with Google and that with AWS. And these are very interesting because now we're taking Kubernetes, which is evolving from really a cool developer thing and now starting to move into production where IT ops gets involved and they say, how do I apply policies? How do I have governance, security? And these solutions with Google and AWS create really that transparency of the data center and those cloud environments. >> We were talking before we came on camera here about your history, and I want to get your perspective a little bit more on the entrepreneurial side in a bit, but I got to ask you, you go back, seen the early waves of IT. It started out single vendor, big mainframe, you know the history there, then it became the whole open systems, networking, the web and the internet. >> Client-server along the way. >> Client-server. But the one thing that was consistent over those decades was the word multi-vendor. Multi-vendor was important. Support multiple vendors, that became the interoperability and then growth happened. So good things came behind that. We're seeing the same trend with multicloud. Similar dynamic, >> I think you're right, yeah. >> But different environment, obviously cloud. If that's the case, multi-vendor created a lot of opportunities, how do you see multicloud creating opportunities for customers who are changing, as well as people building apps? >> I think we have actually seen that shift in the cloud, so I think for a lot of people the cloud may be reducing costs or shifting from CAPEX to OPEX, but today what I see is it's about accessing innovation and that these clouds are often becoming an extension of their engineering organizations and you never know where that innovation is going to be able to occur. And so I may want an Alexa API for a voice-driven application, or access AIML from, say, Google. And so now I think multiclouds, multi-vendor, is driven by access to innovation and it's also about optionality. CFOs talk a lot about optionality and maintaining purchasing power and they'll often put a value on that, 10 to 15% value. Just having that optionality as innovation occurs I can take advantage of it. >> And the speed too, on the agility. >> Oh yeah. >> I mean, this is like, real competitive advantage. People are building management practices around encouraging versus discouraging experiments or tests. >> Well think about where we started this talk, is that, it was just 10 years ago where there was really one person, there was AWS EC2, and today there are a lot of choices and a lot of technology and innovation. The whole idea is, how do I easily access that? >> Well I want to get your perspective, since you're here, on, people might not know that Dave has an entrepreneurial background, done eight startups. Last one was sold to Cisco, so you're now in the big company with a great product, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> But customers have to be entrepreneurial. We were just talking about being agile, that's an entrepreneurial vibe or spirit, >> Right. >> and you're starting to see agile really be very tactically like entrepreneurs. You know, taking new territory, trying things, failing, iterating. This is kind of the dog whistle for entrepreneurship. >> Right. >> How can customers, Cisco customers, be more entrepreneurial with this new set of technologies from Cisco and the cloud? Because that's really what's happening. I got to refactor my existing resources and be entrepreneurial. How can a customer be entrepreneurial? What's your advice? >> Well, I probably have a bit of a jaded position today, but I would say that technology enables that agility because now I can start to have an abstracted access to some of these capabilities. So we talked about hard wiring into different environments, once I did that, I made that investment, and I could not be very agile. Today, whether it's things like cloud management platforms, or things like Kubernetes, it gives me that agility to develop and deploy anywhere. Things like data hub technologies, like SAP's Data Hub that says, now I have apps anywhere accessing data anywhere, I no longer have to hard wire everything, multicloud doesn't have to mean lifting and shifting or refactoring everything, I can now start stretching these configurations across multiple environments which gives me that agility to set it up and to change as things change. >> So, more creative thinking probably going to come to the table. >> Well, more creative thinking, but more agile abilities to implement your creative thinking. I think technology-- >> Very valuable solutions. >> Exactly. >> You know, you got to make money. >> Yeah, exactly. >> And fun. >> Yeah. >> Dave, thanks so much for coming on. Great to see you, congratulations. Dave Cope is senior director, he's talking about CloudCenter here among other things, at Cisco Live! Barcelona. This is theCUBE, I'm Jeff Furrier, Stu Miniman. We'll be right back with more coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Live, from Barcelona Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, here at Cisco Live! 2019 in Barcelona, Spain, I'm Stu Miniman, happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest, but someone I've known for many years, Jason Edelman, who is the founder of Network to Code. Jason, great to see you, and thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me, Stu. >> Alright, Jason, let's first, for our audiences, this is your first time on the program, give us a little bit about your background, and what led to you being the founder of Network to Code. >> Right, so my background is that of a traditional network engineer. I've spent 10+ years managing networks, deploying networks, and really, acting in a pre-sales capacity, supporting Cisco infrastructure. And it was probably around 2012 or 13, working for a large Cisco VAR, that we had access to something called Cisco onePK, and we kind of dove into that as the first SDK to control network devices. We have today iPhone SDKs, SDKs for Android, to program for phone apps, this was one of the first SDKs to program against a router and a switch. And that, for me, was just eye-opening, this is kind of back in 2013 or so, to see what could be done to write code in Python, Seer, Java, against network devices. Now, when this was going on, I didn't know how to code, so I kind of used that as the entrance to ramp up, but that was, for me, the pivot point. And then, the same six-week period, I had a demo of Puppet and Ansible automated networking devices, and so that was the pivot point where it was like, wow, realizing I've spent a career architecture and designing networks, and realizing there's a challenge in operating networks day to day. >> Yeah, Jason, dial back. You've some Cisco certifications in your background? >> Sure, yes, CCIE, yeah. >> Yeah, so I think back, when this all, OpenFlow, and before we even called it Software-Defined Networking, you were blogging about this type of stuff. But, as you said, you weren't a coder. It wasn't your background, you were a network guy, and I think the Network to Code, a lot of the things we've been looking at, career-wise, it's like, does everyone need to become coders? How will the tools mature? Give us a little bit about that journey, as how you got into coding and let's go from there. >> Yeah, it was interesting. In 2010, I started blogging OpenFlow-related, I thought it was going to change the world, saw what NICRO was doing at the time, and then Big Switch at the time, and I just speculated and blogged and really just envisioned this world where networks were different in some capacity. And it took a couple years to really shed light on management and operations of networking, and I made some career shifts. And I remember going back to onePK, at the time, my manager then, who is now our CEO at Network to Code, he actually asked, well, why don't you do it? And it was just like, me? Me, automate our program? What do you mean? And so it was kind of like a moment for me to kind of reflect on what I can do. Now, I will say I don't believe every network engineer should know how to code. That was my on-ramp because of partnership with Cisco at the time, and learning onePK and programming languages, but that was for me, I guess, what I needed as that kick in the butt to say, you know what? I am going to do this. I do believe in the shift that's going to happen in the next couple years, and that was where I kind of just jumped in feet first, and now we are where we are. >> Yeah, Jason, some great points there. I know for myself, I look at, Cisco's gone through so much change. A year ago, up on stage, Cisco's talking about their future is as a software company. You might not even think of us as networking first, you will talk to us about software first. So that initial shift that you saw back in 2010, it's happening. It's a different form than we might have thought originally, and it's not necessarily a product, but we're going through that shift. And I like what you said about how not everybody needs to code, but it's this change in paradigms and what we need to do are different. You've got some connections, we're here in the DevNet Zone. I saw, at the US show in Orlando last year, Network to Code had a small booth, there were a whole bunch of startups in that space. Tell us how you got involved into DevNet, really since the earliest days. >> Yes, since the early days, it was really pre-DevNet. So the emergence of DevNet, I've seen it grow into, the last couple years, Cisco Live! And for us, given what we do at Network to Code, as a network-automation-focused company, we see DevNet in use by our clients, by DevNet solutions and products, things like, mentioned yesterday on a panel, but DevNet has always-on sandboxes, too. One of the biggest barriers we've seen with our clients is getting access to the right lab gear on getting started to automate. So DevNet has these sandboxes always on to hit Nexus API or Catalyst API, right? Things like that. And there's really a very good, structured learning path to get started through DevNet, which usually, where we intersect in our client engagement, so it's kind of like post-DevNet, you're kind of really showing what's possible, and then we'll kind of get in and craft some solutions for our clients. >> Yeah, take us inside some of your clients, if you can. Are most of them hitting the API instead of the COI now when they're engaging? >> Yeah, it's actually a good question. Not usually talked about, but the reality is, APIs are still very new. And so we actively test a lot of the newer APIs from Cisco, as an example. IOS XE has some of the best APIs that exist around RESTCONF, NETCONF, modeled from the same YANG models, and great APIs. But the truth is that a lot of our clients, large enterprises that've been around for 20+ years, the install base is still largely not API-enabled. So a lot of the automation that we do is definitely SSH-based. And when you look at what's possible with platforms, if it is something like a custom in Python, or even an ANSEL off the shelf, a lot of the integrations are hidden from the user, so as long as we're able to accomplish the goal, it's the most important thing right now. And our clients' leaderships sometimes care, and it's true, right? You want the outcome. And initially, it's okay if we're not using the API, but once we do flip that switch, it does provide a bit more structure and safety for automating. But the install base is so large right now that, to automate, you have to use SSH, and we don't believe in waiting 'til every device is API-enabled because it'll just take a while to turn that base. >> Alright, Jason, a major focus of the conference this year has been around multi-cloud. How's that impacting your business and your customers? >> So, it's in our path as a company. Right now, there's a lot of focus around multi-cloud and data center, and the truth is, we're doing a lot of automation in the Campus networking space. Right, automating networks to get deployed in wiring closets and firewalls and load balancers and things like that. So from our standpoint, as we start planning with our clients, we see the services that we offer really port over to multi-cloud and making sure that with whatever automation is being deployed today, regardless of toolset, and look at a tool chain to deploy, if it's a CI/CD Pipeline for networking, be able to do that if you're managing a network in the Campus, a data center network, or multi-cloud network, to make sure we have a uniform-looking field to operations, and doing that. >> Alright, so Jason, you're not only founder of your company, you're also an author. Maybe tell us about the, I believe it's an update, or is it a new book, that recently got out. >> Yes, I'm a co-author of a book with Matt Oswalt and Scott Lowe, and it's an O'Reilly book that was published last year. And look, I'm a believer in education, and to really make a change and change an industry, we have to educate, and I think the book, the goal was to play a small part in really bringing concepts to light. As a network engineer by trade, there's fundamental concepts that network engineers should be aware of, and it could be basics and a lot of these, it could be Python or Jinja templating in YAML and Git and Linux, for that matter. It's just kind of providing that baseline of skills as an entrance into automation. And once you have the baseline, it kind of really uncovers what's possible. So writing the book was great. Great opportunity, and thank you to Matt and Scott for getting involved there. It really took a lot of the work effort and collaborated with them on it. >> Want to get your perception on the show, also. Education, always a key feature of what happens at the show. Not far from us is the Cisco bookshop. I see people getting a lot of the big Cisco books, but I think ten years ago, it was like, everybody, get my CCIE, all my different certifications updated, here. Here in the DevNet Zone, a lot of people, they're building stuff, they're building new pieces, they're playing in the labs, and they're doing some of these environments. What's your experience here at the show? Anything in particular that catches your eye? >> So, I do believe in education. I think to do anything well, you have to be educated on it. And I've read Cisco Press books over the years, probably a dozen of them, for the CCIE and beyond. I think when we look at what's in DevNet, when we look at what's in the bookstore, people have to immerse themselves into the technology, and reading books, like the learning labs that are here in the DevNet Zone, the design sessions that are right behind us. Just amazing for me to have seen the DevNet Zone grow to be what it is today. And really the goal of educating the market of what's possible. See, even from the start, Network to Code, we started as doing a lot of training, because you really can't change the methodology of network operations without being aware of what's possible, and it really does kind of come back to training. Whatever it is, on-demand, streaming, instructor-led, reading a book. Just glad to see this happen here, and a lot more to do around the industry, in the space around community involvement and development, but training, a huge part of it. >> Alright, Jason, want to give you the final word, love the story of network engineer gone entrepreneurial, out of your comfort zone, coding, helping to build a business. So tell us what you see, going forward. >> So, we've grown quite a bit in the past couple years. Right now, we're over 20 engineers strong, and starting from essentially just one a couple years ago, was a huge transformation, and seeing this happen. I believe in bringing on A-players to help make that happen. I think for us as a business, we're continuing to grow and accelerating what we do in this network automation space, but I just think, one thought to throw out there is, oftentimes we talk about lower-level tools, Python, Git, YAML, a lot of new acronyms and buzzwords for network engineers, but also, the flip side is true, too. As our client base evolves, and a lot of them are in the Fortune 100, so large clients, looking at consumption models of technology's super-important, meaning is there ITSM tools deployed today, like a ServiceNow, or Webex teams, or Slack for chat integration. To really think through early on how the internal customers of automation will consume automation, 'cause it really does us no good, Cisco, vendors, or clients no good, if we deploy a great network automation platform, and no one uses it, because it doesn't fit the culture of the brand of the organization. So it's just, as we continue to grow, that's really what's top of mind for us right now. >> Alright, well Jason, congratulations on everything that you've done so far, wish you the best of luck going forward, and thank you so much, of course, for watching. We'll have more coverage, three day, wall-to-wall, here at Cisco Live! 2019 in Barcelona. I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Cisco Live! We're in Barcelona, Dave Villante and Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. George Bentinck is here. He's a product manager for Camera Systems at Cisco Meraki. >> Hi. >> Great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks very much. >> So, we were saying, Meraki's not just about wireless. It's all about cameras now. Tell us about your role. >> The Meraki camera is relatively new. It's one of the newer products. It came out just over two years ago and it's really embodying what we're about as a business unit at Cisco, which is about simplicity. It's about taking normally complex technology and sort of distilling it so customers can really use it. So what we did with the camera was we spoke to a lot of our customers, listened what they had to say, and they were fed up with the boxes. They don't want these servers, they don't want the recording solutions, they just want to get video. And so we built a camera which has everything inside it. All the video is stored in the camera using the latest solid state storage. And then we did all the analytics and the other sort of cool things people want to do with video in the camera as well. And yet to make it easy to use, it's all managed from the Meraki cloud. So that allows you to scale it from one camera to 100 cameras to 100,000 cameras and yet have nothing else other than the cameras and the management from the cloud. >> Well the way you describes it sounds so simple, but technically, it's a real challenge, what you've described. What were some of the technical challenges of you guys getting there? >> Well, there are sort of two components. There's the device piece and when we look at the device piece, we basically leverage the latest advances in the mobile phone industry. So if you look at the latest iPhones and Android phones, we've taken that high density, highly reliable storage and integrated it into the camera. And then we've also taken the really powerful silicone, so we have Qualcomm Snapdragon system-on-chip in there and that performance allows us to do all the analytics in the camera. And so the second piece is the cloud, the scaling, and the management. And with video, it's lots of big data, which I'm guessing you guys are probably pretty familiar with. And trying to search that and know what's going on and managing its scale can be really painful. But we have a lot of experience with this. Meraki's cloud infrastructure manages millions of connected nodes with billions of connected devices and billions of pieces of associated metadata. This is just like video, so we can reuse a lot of the existing technology we've built in the cloud and now move it to this other field of video and make it much easier to find things. >> And when people talk about, y'know, the camera systems, IoT obviously comes into play and security's a big concern. Y'know, people are concerned about IP cameras off the shelf. Y'know, everybody knows the stories about the passwords where, y'know, they never changed out of the factory and they're the same passwords across the, and so, y'know, presumably, Cisco Meraki, trusted name, and there's a security component here as well. >> Yeah, absolutely. This is actually one of my favorite topics because, unfortunately, not many people ask about it. It's one of those, it's not an issue until it's an issue type of things and we put a lot of work in it. I mean, Cisco has security in its DNA. It's just like part of what we do. And so we did all of the things which I think every camera vendor and IoT vendor should be doing anyway. So that's things like encryption for everything and by default. So all the storage on the camera is encrypted. It's mandatory so you can't turn it off. And there's zero configuration, so when you turn it on, it won't record for a few minutes while it encrypts its storage volume and then you're good to go. We also manage all the certificates on the camera and we also have encrypted management for the camera with things like two-factor authentication and other authentication mechanisms on top of that as well. So it's sort of leaps and bounds ahead of where most of the decision makers are thinking in this space because they're physical security experts. They know about locks and doors and things like that. They're not digital security experts but the Cisco customer and our organization, we know this and so we have really taken that expertise and added it to the camera. >> Yeah, George, security goes hand-in-hand with a lot of the Cisco solutions. Is that the primary or only use case for the Meraki camera? Y'know, I could just see a lot of different uses for this kind of technology. >> It really is very varied and the primary purpose of it is a physical security camera. So being able to make sure that if there's an incident in your store, you have footage of maybe the shoplifting incident or whatever. But, because it's so easy to use, customers are using it for other things. And I think one of the things that's really exciting to me is when I look at the data. And if I look at the data, we know that about 1% of all the video we store is actually viewed by customers. 99% just sits there and does nothing. And so, as we look at how we can provide greater value to customers, it's about taking the advances in things such as machine learning for computer vision, sort of artificial intelligence, and allowing you to quantify things in that data. It allows you to, for example, determine how many people are there and where they go and things like that. And to maybe put it all into context, because one of my favorite examples is a Cisco case study in Australia, where they're using cameras at a connected farm as part of an IoT deployment, to understand sheep grazing behavior and so this camera watches the sheep all day. Now as a human, I don't want to watch the sheep all day, but the camera doesn't care. And so the farmer looks at eight images representing eight hours, which is a heat map of the animals' movement in the field, and they can know where they've been grazing, where they need to move them, where this might be overgrazed. And so the camera's not security at this point, it really is like a sensor for the enterprise. >> Yeah, it's interesting, actually I did a walk through the DevNet Zone and I saw a lot of areas where I think they're leveraging some of your technology. Everything from let's plug in some of the AI to be able to allow me to do some interesting visualizations. What we're doing, there's a magic mirror where you can ask it like an Alexa or Google, but it's Debbie, the robot here as to give you answers of how many people are in a different area here. A camera is no longer just a camera. It's now just an end node connected and there's so many technologies. How do you manage that as a product person where you have the direction, where you put the development? You can't support a million different customer use cases. You want to be able to scale that business. >> Absolutely, I think the North Star always has to be simplistic. If you can't go and deploy it, you can't use it. And so we see a lot of these cool science projects trapped in proof of concept. And they never go into production and the customers can't take advantage of it. So we want to provide incredibly simple, easy out-the-box technology, which allows people to use AI and machine learning, and then we're the experts in that, but we give you industry-standard APIs using REST or MQTT, to allow you to build business applications on it directly or integrate it into Cisco Kinetic, where you can do that using the MQTT interface. >> So, Stu, you reminded me so we're here in the DevNet Zone and right now there's a Meraki takeover. So what happens in the DevNet Zone is they'll pick a topic or a part of Cisco's business unit, right now, it's the Meraki, everyone's running around with Meraki takeover shirts, and everybody descends on the DevNet Zone. So a lot of really cool developer stuff going on here. George, I wanted to ask you about where the data flows. So the data lives at the edge, y'know, wherever you're taking the video. Does it stay there? Given that only 1% is watched, are you just leaving it there, not moving it back into the cloud? Are you sometimes moving it back into the cloud? What's the data flow look like? >> You can think of this interesting sort of mindset, which is let's have a camera where we don't ever want to show you video, we want to give you the answer because video is big, it's heavy. Let's give you the answer and if that answer means we give you video, we give you video. But if we can give you the answer through other forms of information, like a still image, or an aggregate of an image, or metadata from that, then we'll give you that instead. And that means customers can deploy this on cellular networks out in the middle of nowhere and with much fewer constraints than they had in the past. So it really depends but we try and make it as efficient as possible for the person deploying it so they don't have to have a 40G network connection to every camera to make the most of it. >> Yeah, so that would mean that most of it stays-- >> Most of it stays at the edge in the camera. >> Talk a little bit more about the analytics component. Is that sort of Meraki technology the came over with the acquisition? What has Cisco added to that? Maybe speak to that a little bit. >> So the camera is a relatively new product line within the last two and a half years and the Meraki acquisition was, I think we're only like five years or more now down that road, so this is definitely post-acquisition and part of the continued collaboration between various departments at Cisco. What it enables you to do is object detection, object classification, and object tracking. So it's I know there's a thing, I know what that thing is, and I know where that thing goes. And we do it for a high level object class today, which is people. Because if you look at most business problems, they can be broken down into understanding location, dwell times, and characteristics of people. And so if we give you the output of those algorithms as industry-standard APIs, you can build very customized business analytics or business logics. So let me give you a real world example. I have retail customers tell me that one of the common causes of fraud is an employee processing a refund when there's no customer. And so what if you could know there was no customer physically present in front of the electronic point of sale system where the refund is being processed? Well, the camera can tell you. And it's not a specialist analytics camera, it's a security camera you were going to buy anyway, which will also give this insight. And now you know if that refund has a customer at the other side of the till. >> Well, that's awesome. Okay, so that's an interesting use case. What are some of the other ones that you foresee or your customers are pushing you towards? Paint a picture as to what you think this looks like in the future. >> It really is this camera as a sensor so one of the newer things we've added is the ability to have real-time updates of the lights' conditions from the camera, so you can get from the hardware-backed light sensor on the camera the lux levels. And what that means is now you have knowledge of people, where they are, where they go, knowledge of lights, and now you can start going okay, well maybe we adjust the lighting based on these parameters. And so we want to expose more and more data collection from this endpoint, which is the camera, to allow you to make either smarter business decisions or to move to the digital workplace and that's really what we're trying to do in the Meraki offices in San Francisco. >> And do you get to the point or does the client get to the point where they know not only that information you just described but who the person is? >> Yes and no. I think one of the things that I'm definitely advocating caution on is the face recognition technology has a lot of hype, has a lot of excitement, and I get asked about it regularly. And I do test state-of-the-art and a lot of this technology all the time. And I wear hats because I find them fun and entertaining but they're amazingly good at stopping most of these systems from working. And so you can actually get past some of the state-of-the-art face recognition systems with two simple things, a hat and a mobile phone. And you look at your phone as you walk along and they won't catch you. And when I speak to customers, they're expectation of the performance of this technology does not match the investment cost required. So I'm not saying it isn't useful to someone, it's just, for a lot of our customers, when they see what they would get in exchange for such a huge investment, it's not something they are interested in. >> Yeah, the ROI's just really not there today. >> Not today, but the technology's moving very fast so we'll see what the future brings. >> Yeah, great. Alright, George, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was really, really interesting. Leave you the last word. Customer reactions to what you guys are showing at the event? Any kind of new information that you want to share? >> There are some that we'll talk about in the Whisper Suite, which I will leave unsaid, unfortunately. It's just knowing that you can use it so simply and that the analytics and the machine learning come as part of the product at no additional cost. Because this is pretty cutting-edge stuff. You see it in the newspapers, you see it in the headlines and to say I buy this one camera and I can be a coffee shop, a single owner, and I get the same technology as an international coffee organization is pretty compelling and that's what's getting people excited. >> Great and it combines the sensor at the edge and the cloud management so-- >> Best of both worlds. >> That's awesome, I love the solution. Thanks so much for sharing with us. >> Fantastic. >> Alright, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from Cisco Live! Barcelona. We'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its Ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to our live coverage here in Barcelona for Cisco Live! 2019's theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Dave Cope who's the senior director, market development, Cisco Cloud platform. Great to see you again. >> Great to see you. >> Thanks for coming on, I really appreciate it. One of your products is the big focus of the keynote, introducing the CloudCenter Suite. One of the core announcements, this was pretty critical for Cisco, obviously multicloud, we've seen the Kubernetes relationship with Amazon. You've got Azure, Google Cloud. Cisco's tied up with the clouds, which is good, >> Right. >> They have the on center core data center, but now dealing with cloud has been really the hot topic, so thanks for coming on. >> Absolutely. >> So I'm looking at your perspective first on cloud in general within Cisco and within your customer base and the industry. What is multicloud? Why is it important? Why is it a wave worth betting on? >> You know, it's a great question, I think. Actually, it's a really fun time right now because if you think about it, it's almost exactly 10 years ago where AWS's EC2 first came out of beta, and so, everybody's talking about the cloud, but it really hasn't been around that long. And even in that sort of ten-year period, it's gone through sort of skepticism to, I think, let me try some non-critical apps, to debate about public or private, or which is the best public, to, today, 94% of the businesses say they either are, or are planning to use, multicloud environments. And, so if you think about it, that's both provided a lot of advantages but also created a degree of complexity in how do I apply traditional disciplines like network management and security across environments that I control and don't control? So it's a whole new world. >> And the DevNet Zone, which for theCUBE is based out of again this year, has a hot growth vibe to it. People are joining the community in record numbers. The demos here aren't just like canned demos, they're actually real code. >> Exactly. >> So you're seeing a developer framework around the network, and the cloud, the cloud is not a one-vendor product. It's an architecture, it's a concept. And so cloud operations is in the cloud, it's also being done on premise and the edge, so everything's cloud now, if you think about it. >> Well I think what we saw is, obviously, huge initial growth of cloud and a lot of applications moving to the cloud, but it's always been my hypothesis and I think it's actually coming true that we're now, and some of the newer technologies support this, we're seeing this natural distribution of workloads across all these environments, whether it's the public cloud, or the edge, or the data center. And it's now technologies that allow you to put the workloads in the right place based on business priorities, not IT priorities. And now I believe you're starting to see this sort of natural stasis and the whole pie grow again. >> So I got to ask you the question from a customer perspective. So I'm a customer, I say, Dave, love it, you had me at cloud, I'm there. I got all this stuff to deal with. I've been working my business, running my business. Love it, what's in it for me though? What's the impact? What do I need to do differently? Is it, do I have to change anything? How does a customer engage with Cisco and the cloud and the multitude of technologies that are available to them? It can seem complex. >> Yeah, I think people had hoped that the cloud would make everything easy, but what they're finding is that the cloud is not the cloud. It's private clouds, public clouds, virtual private clouds. And if you think about it, good free market principles, all these cloud providers are competing with each other so they're all becoming very different. Cisco finds, I think, itself in a very unique position because of its heritage around network management and security, which is connecting everything together. We don't have our own cloud, so what we focus on is providing a very broad and deep solution to be able to manage workloads across all of these environments. So you truly can place the workload in the right place. >> I wonder if you could help us unpack a little bit what you just said, which is, the clouds are actually becoming more different, not more similar, you know. With the Kubernetes show >> That's right. >> we talked to Cisco, we talked to the whole ecosystem. The founders of Kubernetes said they weren't creating a magic layer, that's not what Kubernetes is. There's some base functionality, but everybody's building on top of it, and that's where a lot of the complexity comes in. So, how does CloudCenter Suite, you don't want to do what, in the past it was, you know, let's dumb down everything so that you get a least common denominator. I want to be able to leverage the individual features of my Azure and my AWS, and in my data center. But, I need to be able to get my arms around managing that whole environment. >> Yeah, and if you think about the old world, you know, if you had an application and a target, whether it's a cloud or any data center, you'd have to hard wire those together. And as you have more and more apps and they're changing faster and now more and more cloud environments with no standardization across those environments, this whole hard wiring together doesn't work anymore, so we have to rethink cloud management, and that's what CloudCenter's really all about. How do you describe an application, its components, sequence, and dependencies, independent of the nuances of those targets, and allow CloudCenter, once you define your application, to understand the resources on each of these environments and lay down that application natively on those different environments. And it does provide both least common denominator support around core primitives like compute storage network security, but also provides access to these higher-level services, whether on case of AWS, it's RDS, ELB, et cetera, so you really get the best of both worlds. Move there easily, manage the workload and take advantage of all these rich services. >> You know, I love the keynote clever play on words, data center, center, data is the center of the value proposition. That kind of highlights just basic networking 101, move a packet from point A to point B. Now you have more intelligence in the data, so the data layer is now the enabling opportunity to build software. So look no further than microservices and containers, and you go, hey, this is pretty cool. Policy-based, sounds like the service meshes. So you got policy-based whatever, that's been a core competency in the network, moving to the application with applications programming. So we all kind of like to go, that's great, that's dev ops, thank you, check. Now, how do you deploy it? So, I got to ask you on the CloudCenter 5.0, the suite, so this is new, this is big news, how does that help me move to a microservices architecture? What is it offering? What's different than CloudCenter before it? >> So CloudCenter has always been this platform that allows you to manage the entire life cycle of applications across any private or public clouds. And it's always been a very comprehensive solution, perhaps too comprehensive for some people and so, with CloudCenter Suite 5.0 what we've announced is both new functionality and easier consumption. On the new functionality we've extended our price and performance benchmarking that allowed you to identify where to place workloads, to additional cost optimization capabilities that would actually make recommendations and allow you to remediate and take advantage of those cost optimization recommendations. We have a new Action Orchestrator workflow, which is a customizable workflow but with out-of-the-box connectors that allows you to integrate with both Cisco and third party products. Cisco security products, things like non-Cisco, ITSM ServiceNow applications. So you can provide users with a catalog. So new functionality-- >> That's the workload manager. >> That's the workload manager that provides those out-of-the-box connectors and a workflow to be able to reach out, run those routines. >> So can that do end-to-end management? >> Absolutely, absolutely. And we talk about CloudCenter, sort of full life cycle management, is the modeling of the app sort of the benchmarking or cost optimization, the deployment of the app, whether it be traditional VM based or microservice based, and those working together, and finally, the ongoing day two, day three management. >> So, I get that, you guys had a little bit of workflow management before, but the new things are orchestration, Action Orchestrator, and the cost optimizer. The cost optimizer I can get, that's like a TCO thing. >> Yes. >> The Action Orchestrator's interesting to me. What is that? What does it mean? Is that, like, just cloud-enabled? What is that, what does that mean? Action Orchestrator. >> It's really a dynamic workflow engine that allows you to either create customizable workflows or, if you've already invested in things like script libraries, in your application routine, it can reach out to say, go do a snapshot of the data and then reach back into the application technology. Or reach out to a third party tool, like an ITSM tool, or reach out to their CMDB and update their CMDB to do capacity management. So it gives you all of that flexibility. And, by the way, in all of this, while we were on-prem only, now we're going to provide both on-prem and CloudCenter Suite as a SaaS so now it really makes it nice. It also is available in three tiers, so it's never been easier to start simple and grow. Could be one app, one cloud, and then you could expand clouds, apps, and users, and functionality as you grow. >> But what if I have other systems under other management systems? Does it integrate into those? >> Yes. >> Do I have to toggle between them? What's the-- >> No, it will actually integrate into those management systems. But the whole idea is, if you think about the average Global 2000 company, today they have more than four public cloud providers, and many more regions than that, and this does not include SaaS apps, so what I think most companies realize is they don't want to have siloed management environments where they have to have expensive skills to manage everything. >> Yeah, we spent a lot of time talking about those technical pieces. How do we get something to work in multiple clouds or move them? But one of the biggest challenges I hear from users is the skillset. You know, I'm CCIE certified, I understand how to mange my environment. I've gone through my AWS certification and there's that. I need to learn a new language when I go, you know, go do Azure. So how are you, from a management standpoint, going to help, no matter which point I'm coming from, understand and use this tool simply? >> Yeah, it's sort of interesting. So a very large media company, I can't use their name, but you'll find this analogies, they found that, on average, they needed two fairly highly-paid skilled individuals for every target cloud environment. The other thing, by the way, is sort of interesting they measured, is that without sort of a cloud management platform, for every pairing of an app to a cloud, they had to custom-write about 1,200 lines of script. And every time the app or the cloud changed, and they did, they had to re-write 20% of those script libraries. So, between skilled resources and these manual script libraries, it just becomes unmanageable to have diverse apps across diverse cloud environments. >> And what's the status, just a quick update on the multicloud relationships? Google, AWS, Azure. The recent announcement we covered was the Amazon Kubernetes deal, congratulations, great deal. What's the status of the relationship with Cisco multicloud strategy for your customers that have Google, Azure, and AWS? >> Sure, well first of all, more broadly, CloudCenter today allows you to deploy and manage applications across all of the popular private and public clouds, and I think that adds up today to be about 15. So you can do that. From time to time, we'll see new technologies, in this case, Kubernetes, where we'll provide specific strategic partnership solutions to let our customers take advantage of that. So we announced the hybrid Kubernetes solution with Google and that with AWS. And these are very interesting because now we're taking Kubernetes, which is evolving from really a cool developer thing and now starting to move into production where IT ops gets involved and they say, how do I apply policies? How do I have governance, security? And these solutions with Google and AWS create really that transparency of the data center and those cloud environments. >> We were talking before we came on camera here about your history, and I want to get your perspective a little bit more on the entrepreneurial side in a bit, but I got to ask you, you go back, seen the early waves of IT. It started out single vendor, big mainframe, you know the history there, then it became the whole open systems, networking, the web and the internet. >> Client-server along the way. >> Client-server. But the one thing that was consistent over those decades was the word multi-vendor. Multi-vendor was important. Support multiple vendors, that became the interoperability and then growth happened. So good things came behind that. We're seeing the same trend with multicloud. Similar dynamic, >> I think you're right, yeah. >> But different environment, obviously cloud. If that's the case, multi-vendor created a lot of opportunities, how do you see multicloud creating opportunities for customers who are changing, as well as people building apps? >> I think we have actually seen that shift in the cloud, so I think for a lot of people the cloud may be reducing costs or shifting from CAPEX to OPEX, but today what I see is it's about accessing innovation and that these clouds are often becoming an extension of their engineering organizations and you never know where that innovation is going to be able to occur. And so I may want an Alexa API for a voice-driven application, or access AIML from, say, Google. And so now I think multiclouds, multi-vendor, is driven by access to innovation and it's also about optionality. CFOs talk a lot about optionality and maintaining purchasing power and they'll often put a value on that, 10 to 15% value. Just having that optionality as innovation occurs I can take advantage of it. >> And the speed too, on the agility. >> Oh yeah. >> I mean, this is like, real competitive advantage. People are building management practices around encouraging versus discouraging experiments or tests. >> Well think about where we started this talk, is that, it was just 10 years ago where there was really one person, there was AWS EC2, and today there are a lot of choices and a lot of technology and innovation. The whole idea is, how do I easily access that? >> Well I want to get your perspective, since you're here, on, people might not know that Dave has an entrepreneurial background, done eight startups. Last one was sold to Cisco, so you're now in the big company with a great product, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> But customers have to be entrepreneurial. We were just talking about being agile, that's an entrepreneurial vibe or spirit, >> Right. >> and you're starting to see agile really be very tactically like entrepreneurs. You know, taking new territory, trying things, failing, iterating. This is kind of the dog whistle for entrepreneurship. >> Right. >> How can customers, Cisco customers, be more entrepreneurial with this new set of technologies from Cisco and the cloud? Because that's really what's happening. I got to refactor my existing resources and be entrepreneurial. How can a customer be entrepreneurial? What's your advice? >> Well, I probably have a bit of a jaded position today, but I would say that technology enables that agility because now I can start to have an abstracted access to some of these capabilities. So we talked about hard wiring into different environments, once I did that, I made that investment, and I could not be very agile. Today, whether it's things like cloud management platforms, or things like Kubernetes, it gives me that agility to develop and deploy anywhere. Things like data hub technologies, like SAP's Data Hub that says, now I have apps anywhere accessing data anywhere, I no longer have to hard wire everything, multicloud doesn't have to mean lifting and shifting or refactoring everything, I can now start stretching these configurations across multiple environments which gives me that agility to set it up and to change as things change. >> So, more creative thinking probably going to come to the table. >> Well, more creative thinking, but more agile abilities to implement your creative thinking. I think technology-- >> Very valuable solutions. >> Exactly. >> You know, you got to make money. >> Yeah, exactly. >> And fun. >> Yeah. >> Dave, thanks so much for coming on. Great to see you, congratulations. Dave Cope is senior director, he's talking about CloudCenter here among other things, at Cisco Live! Barcelona. This is theCUBE, I'm Jeff Furrier, Stu Miniman. We'll be right back with more coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Okay welcome back everyone, we're here live in the Cisco DevNet Zone, at Cisco Live 2018. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage. This is Go Live, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman there, here with Suzie Wee who is the CTO and Vice President of Cisco. This is her baby DevNet, the fastest growing developer program in Cisco history, only four years old. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Hey John good to see you, hey Stu. >> I made that stat, it was only four years old. So DevNet, obviously just for color commentary, really successful developer program, only in it's fourth year or so for Cisco. But it's really changing the face of Cisco. It's showing that a new collaboration, a new co-development, a new developer framework is being built on top of networks and it's on a collision course with Cloud Native. Kay, this is a great path for network engineers. It really changed the show vibe so congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you. Yeah, and why do you say collision course? There's like a whole new paradigm, right? And it's pretty amazing, it's pretty amazing. >> Well some of the things that we've been seeing here, obviously CCIE's or 25 years of excellence and stats was out here >> Yes, Yes. >> The key note from the CEO, Chuck Robbins, talks about an old way and new way. Developers are clearly in the driver's seat here and network engineers, Cisco partners, customers technical folks and engineers. They're at the keys to the kingdom and you introduced a concept called Network Dev Ops. >> Yes. >> Okay, a few years ago when we first had you on theCUBE. Where is that now? Where is Network Dev Ops now? What's the vibe internally? Is there a full acceptance to it? Is there embracing it? >> It's amazing and ya know it's like, when we were pushing it we were just saying, "Hey, the network is changing, the network "is gonna be programmable, the network "is going to have API's", and you go back four years and then you're just like, "What was the buzz?" The buzz was SDN, y'know the buzz was SDN. SDN was open flow, it was separation of control plain from data plain. But, it was still kind of research. And what we knew is like, it wouldn't become real until the people who are building and operating the World's networks were ready to adopt it. And so, at first of course, it was like, there were the people who were like, "Okay this network thing, this programmability "is gonna come to the network, but what can we do there?" And since then, people have jumped in, they've like really gotten in. And like here at this Cisco Live, what we're seeing is that people are ready to code. And so the concept of, I'm a networker, now there's software built into my entire network programming portfolio. How do I build the skills? I'm a developer, and the networkers are getting comfortable with understanding that they need to code, they need to understand these skills. But one thing that we did, was we actually separated out, like, the definition of developer. >> Yep. >> Y'know. >> You guys done a good job of really defining a path for the network engineer, who can extend their skill set and solve network problems, be creative, and also do great business outcome oriented things. So, I want you to take a minute to explain the DevNet story because you guys just didn't throw a PowerPoint at this. You dug in, you built it up, and you threw a lot of resources for Cisco, I mean small for Cisco's scale, but you guys dug in, you did the homework and you're doing new things. So take us to the DevNet story and what's happening this year in the momentum. Take us through that little journey. >> Yeah, so the story was back in actually 2013. Cisco was saying, "Hey, we're gonna get into software "we're doing software, we have a software strategy." And all of that is fantastic, either... But the thing that was missing, was like, Hey, we need an ecosystem, like the reason you do software is to have an ecosystem. And in order to have an ecosystem you want people to build upon your stuff. You need to expose your API's. It doesn't happen by itself, you need to have a developer program so that you can actually really let people use all of that and partake in the ecosystem. So we, kind of, I evangelized, evangelized, evangelized, gave a couple hundred pitches, got the okay to start DevNet, and that was in 2014. And then in 2014, then we said okay. So now we got the okay to start a developer program for Cisco. But, y'know, it's still not a sure shot that it would work. >> Yeah. >> And then we said our dream is to have a developer conference at Cisco Live. And so we wanted to have that developer conference at Cisco Live and then three months later, we had it. And we're like okay, 24 hour hack-a-thon, deep dive API sessions, but would the people come? Would they be ready? And then, they came. Like, they came, it was packed. It was just like wall to wall of people, who are excited to learn about software. So now you go and then you fast forward, y'know, four years, and now we just hit 500,000 developers. 500,000 people have registered for DevNet. And you can be like, "Well what does that mean?" We have half a million developers. Is it a real number? Well, my team kept scrubbing the database. Like so, we had hit 400,000 and then our numbers got lower and I was like "Come on guys, stop it!" And they were like, "No, no, no, we have to scrub it, "we gotta out the duplicates." And then finally we got it up and we've grown it. It basically is at 500,000 registered developers. And what that means is like, now we have a community. We have a community of people who are getting up on network API's, we have a community of people who can develop, and once you do that you hit this completely different inflection point. Where at first our mission was just to help networkers be developers, to help the app developers understand that the network has API's and to do stuff there. That's still our goal, to enable developers. But now we have a community, what we can do is really catalyze that community into business and impact. >> Suzie, first of all congratulations. It's been so much fun to be here in the DevNet Zone. It'd been a few years since I'd been to Cisco Live. And y'know, people in these sessions every time. And you go, people are coding, they're white-boarding, they're, y'know building. Playing with Legos, they're doing all sorts of stuff. Over the last five years, y'know, we all knew that, y'know, developers of the new Kingmakers. It's been talked about a lot. But we've seen many infrastructure companies try. They create little developer conferences, they bring in speakers, they'll get some momentum, and then after a year or two, it kind of fizzles out. >> Yes. >> Give us a little bit behind the scenes, as to, y'know is it because networking people are worried about their jobs and they're getting on-board? Is it, y'know, I know part of it is your team and the ecosystem you've built here. But, give is some of the reasons why this has succeeded when so many other have, kind of, come and gone. >> Yeah well, I mean we're very fortunate that we've kind of executed in a way that it has continued to be here and we know that's really hard to do. It takes executive support, it takes the troops, it takes fighting anti-bodies, and kind of all of that kind of stuff. But I think, like, the key has been that we've been working with the community. When we had that first DevNet Zone, that first developer conference at Cisco Live four years ago, people came. And that told Cisco something, right? And then as we've continued to build it out, we've actually been not doing it as a silo within Cisco. We've been doing it with our sales organization, with our partner organization, we've been doing it with our ecosystem and our partners and out there. We've just continuously been doing it based on what their needs are. >> And Suzie, I love that, because there are some of the events I saw, they were like, "Well, the developer "is this special unicorn", and we're gonna have this special area, it's velvet rope, we're gonna treat 'em really well. But, this is the first thing you see when you come in, you're very approachable. The line I've heard from your team is, "We are going to meet them where they are." There are no, y'know, "Gosh I haven't "touched programming in 20 years." No, no, no, you're fine, you're good come on in. I'm not sure if I'm really (mumbles). Well you're not programming, you're coding. So, I think that's part of the success, is these people. Y'know, this is their careers, and you're giving them that path forward. >> It is, and when we look at like, developer programs, you'd think it would be easy to start a developer program. But, there's no formula for it, y'know? And when we did it for Cisco, like as we've grown this, it depends on the products that we have, it depends on the community that we have, the types of solutions, what our customers want. And basically what happens is, we did have a core set of networkers who are scared. And we, instead of making DevNet the elite place for the elite developers, we said it is the place to bring in the community. We're gonna be welcoming, we're bringing them in on the journey, because they're the ones who need to be there. And so we've really tried this more open approach. And if you look at Cisco's community of networkers, they're amazing, like, they are developing and installing and operating networks around the World in every country. They've been dedicated, but they are scared of that transition to software and programmability. And they've been dedicated to us, we're dedicated to them, getting to that next level. >> You just did a good job of bringing that tribe kind of mentality and co-development, co-creation, people who are learning. So you have first time learners kicking the tires on coding and growing and experts. So Cisco Champions coming in; Powerhouse developers. >> Yeah >> Not Cisco employees, it's Cisco Champions, and so a nice balance. So that's a good sign of success. >> And you're right, that's key because it's not just, like just beginners. I mean, first of all, there is a very large stage of new people who are just coming in and then wanting to get started and that's awesome. And in addition, very advanced folks, who are like, y'know, just the most advanced developer you'd find, who also has networking expertise. And then of course, the app developers. We're talking to app developers and cloud developers and DevOps pros, and they're coming in as well. >> Yea, and Suzie you bring up a great point. Cause one of the challenges when you have the cool new innovation stuff, is the business, like well how does that connect back? So help connect the dots, we heard Chuck Robbins on stage. Not only was it just DevNet and 500,000 but the new products that are coming out just tie right into it. >> It's crazy, like yea, it's awesome. Because what happens is, programmability, Cisco, is building programmability into our entire portfolio. It's not that we have one product that has API's, I mean that's where we were a few years ago. But now we look... Our enterprise networking products, y'know, for the data center, for service provider, for wireless. All of those products are programmable. Our security products are programmable. IoT, collaboration, our entire portfolio is now programmable, so it gives you this kind of whole portfolio of programmability to play with, and that cross-domain. Who covers that many domains? And that's really powerful. When we take a look at the programmability, it was like for the network devices themselves. Like those have Asics that are programmable. So if there's like a new protocol that comes up to handle IoT things, we can actually re-program the Asics to get that going at line rates. You can do like, on-board application hosting on those network devices. We have controller levels, so you can hit the network, and then now you have like analytics and insights that you can do to pull out information from the network, and then be able to, y'know, operate at that level as well. >> So a strategic advantage architecturally for Cisco, certainly in the network side and scaling up at the stack with Kubernetes and (mumbles). We saw Google on-stage, kinda giving an indicator of where it's going. I want to ask you about the culture question for DevNet. Obviously people are fascinated with the success of DevNet, we've been great to follow the success through your journey and being part of it. But for the folks that are now seeing the success, and want to join: What can they expect, if I join the DevNet mission? What's the expectation? What's gonna be the vibe? What would you share to someone watching, that's gonna jump in and join the journey, what can they expect? >> Well, I think that first of all, it's going to be very welcoming. Like, they're gonna feel welcome. And I'm just proud of my team, because people come in and they actually say, "Wow, sometimes you go to developer conferences "and it's a little bit intimidating." And yea, you might be intimidated, but here you're going to feel welcome. Because, y'know, we really want things to happen. And then there's gonna be this kind of like, intrigue in terms of what you can build. Because what we're building is different. It's not a well known area, like everyone knows how to build apps for a mobile device. People don't know how to build applications for programmable infrastructure. Like, the fact that hey, your wireless access points now give you location and proximity information. I can write an indoor location app. Sounds simple, but it's awesome. >> Connect a camera to it. >> It's amazing, right? >> Hello! >> And then what happens is, as you're doing that, you have like, connect a camera, you're like put a Playstation into a hospital... The Children's Hospital of L.A came and spoke, and they were talking about the business problem. They had a patient, who was very sick, a young boy. And his wish was to have Playstation so he could play it. And then they had to go to their networkers cause you don't put Playstations in hospitals. They had to make that happen and intent-based networking lets you make that wish, and then activate that in the network, that's now a programmable infrastructure. So the types of problems that you can solve are different, it's amazing. >> The new apps are coming out and you're creating a new, first generation green field of networked apps. >> Yes. (chuckles heartily) >> Like what iPhone did for mobile apps, you guys are doing for networks. >> That's right, that's right. >> So that's awesome, it's super cool. Programmable infrastructure, all DevOps kinda geeky stuff. For the next steps, as you guys are now at the beginning of the next inflection point. >> Yes. >> What're you guys focused on? What's happening with the team? What's happening with some of the initiatives you're doing? Also demos get better and better. The training classes are still going on. What's your focus? >> So with some of the things that are happening now, which is... So we've hit this milestone of half a million developers. But what does that mean? What that means is that, we have half a million people who can use network API's. What that means also, is that they're contributing code. So it's no longer just, "Here I'm gonna help "you use your API", but now it's also like, they're contributors back. And what we're doing, is we're actually embracing that and making that part of the innovation model for networking. So, you're not just taking Cisco's platforms and the innovation there, which is of course growing tremendously, but now you can also add in innovation by the community. And I know it's a straight forward concept for software. It's not a straightforward concept for networking and infrastructure. >> To bring an open-source ethos, to code sharing, co-contributing. >> Exactly, and something that we've released is code exchange, definite code exchange. And what it is, is just a list of curated software. Software that's out of GitHub, that works for our platforms, y'know. But the thing that developers are always like, "Okay there's a lot of software out there, "which one should I use?" and then basically giving them like, the curated list of here's the stuff that you can use. >> So Suzie, it's been fun to watch the transformation of Cisco overall. As we look at... Before, we used to measure in boxes and ports. What's the measurement internally? When you talk about saying, "Okay how are we doing "on our journey to become a software company?" Give us a little insight as to internally how Cisco measures that. >> The way that we measure that now is, we're talking to our customers and our partners and their adoption of API's, of programmability, their ability to execute on that and to be successful in this business. And so, it's really an external looking view. So it's all just like okay, how much do they get it? How much can they use it? How much are they building the skills? So it's really looking at the success of the community and being able to build the skills and use these products and build solutions with them. >> Suzie, congratulations on continuing growing, hitting a major milestone, 500,000 developers, half a million developers, that's a real community. It's just the beginning now, it's the start line. >> (chuckling) The start line, it is. >> One finish line is another start line. >> It is a start line, it's absolutely the start line. >> And you guys had a great event last night at the Mango party, the Mango Cafe. Talk about that, you had a celebration. Turns out a lot of people showed up. It was supposed to be a little private party. >> It was a little private party, yea. So we, y'know, just wanted to thank the team and thank our community. Because, quite honestly, to get to this half a million it wasn't just the people who work for me who got it there. It's the fact that, there's of course our team who's very dedicated to that, but then it's our partners. It's even you guys, right? It's our partners who have like... I understand this mission, I'm gonna jump in, I'm gonna help it happen. It's our systems engineers, it's our partners, it's our innovation folks, it's people from the community who understand the mission and have joined in to push it forward. So we had this party last night at Mango Cafe, you guys were there. The people were callin it kinda the best one. It's really just appreciation for our community and what they've done to get it there. Because it's not us, it's our community who've done it. >> This is the open ethos. Cisco becoming open. What's it like to be on the inside and seeing Cisco open up like this? >> It's, I mean, it's amazing. And what's amazing is like, when I started DevNet you'd think like okay, "I'm gonna run a developer program." The thing that surprises me is just, how hurtful it is to so many people. Like, people, they find a path. They see a new opportunity, they figure out a new way they wanna advance their businesses and their careers. And it's like, all heart. And that's how it grew. Like with the resources, it's just because people who had felt this heart and this connection into this mission and drive, they're taking it to the next level so it's amazing >> Like open-source software, people love to be part of a great project. >> It is, it is. >> And DevNet certainly is. And DevNet Create. Don't forget DevNet Create is your other event that bring the cloud native world with the networking world together. >> It is. >> Great project. >> You were with us at DevNet Create and that's where it's this mixing of communities of like, the app developers with the networkers who are getting out there. And what's funny is, we didn't know how those communities would interact. And they're mixing, they're getting it. They're just like "Okay, I have this location software, "I need to work together with the guys "who are gonna install the network and then "we can make this amazing experience." And they're mixing and when they do it the right things happening. >> Very complimentary, there's love going wild. >> App guys love the network guys to take care of the network and the network guys love the app guys that take care of the apps. >> Exactly! Exactly. >> It's a win-win. Great stuff, congratulations. Again, a new way to program. Just like we saw the iPhone creating the app store. Networking now is programmable. We expect to see a lot of great creativity, new problems, new things being created. And that's an opportunity for all. We're here at theCUBE bringing you all the action from the DevNet Zone at Cisco Live. More live coverage. Day three, stay with us, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, we'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. This is Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Orlando, Florida. Happy to welcome to the program, welcome back to the program first, Vinu Thomas, who's the CTO of Presidio and welcome to the program for the first time Brad Haczynski, who's a general manager with Intel. Gentleman, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu for having us. >> Alright so, we're about the midway point of the show. It actually been many years since I'd been at Cisco Live. 26,000 people here. Seeing a large transformation in what's going on from Cisco, you know, still dominant in the network space, but talk a lot about cloud. We're here in the DevNet Zone, where, you know, one of the big news pieces was 500,000 developers registered on the platform here. What's your take been of the show so far? >> Yeah, I mean Presidio has been a long term proud partner with Cisco. We've been a gold and master partner for the longest time. As Cisco started to really transition into the software design world, Presidio started investing along with Cisco. So back at the DevNet Zone, you'll find that Presidio has a number of showcase items about DevOps, especially about things like Cat9k and HyperFlex. So we are excited on this partnership with Cisco, and with Intel, and what we are trying to do. So, good times. >> Yeah, Brad, same for you. >> Oh absolutely. I think this is my fifth Cisco Live. And seeing the evolution of Cisco as they traverse from becoming a hardware centric company into a company that's truly evolving around software, and services, and capabilities. As the world becomes more complicated, they're truly innovating in ways to create the business outcomes that customers are looking for in these complicated environments. And as Intel, it's been really exciting because we transform into a data centric company. We talk a lot about that. The Intel technology has been the underpinning of many of the Cisco technologies that are continuing then down this path. And of course our great partnership with Presidio it's a great triangulation effect and it's great to see at Cisco Live. >> Vinu, change isn't always easy. I think back actually, you know, I've worked a long time on the vendor side. And when Cisco came out with UCS and started doing things like Vblock, you know there were some folks at Presidio who were like, "We make a lot of money racking, stacking, cabling" "these solutions." Conversion infrastructure, hyper conversion structure, cloud solutions. Talk a little bit about the partnership. How Presidio's been, you know, helping to expand and mature with these offerings. >> Yeah, you know the whole digital transformation is the one that's driving this move from legacy three tier architecture into conversation to hyper conversion to multicloud. And what we've realized along this journey is we had to transform ourselves. So we went from saying, "You know, look we wanted to be" "the number one digital transformation" "solutions provider building secure" "digital infrastructure in a multicloud world." And for us to be in a position to put that vision into execution, we had to really partner with Cisco, partner with companies like VMware and Vblock and obviously the other providers in the hyper converg space and also with Intel to really try and take our ability to, not just rack and stack, but to design solutions so we created what we call as Presidio Data Center Solutions Set where we bring all this together. We're able to do some custom modification on these things. And we had to that because that's what our customers were asking us for. And then wrap that around with managed services so we can essentially offer a true platform as a service. >> Yeah, I'd love to hear from your viewpoint. What are your customers saying to you when you know, they say "I've got a cloud strategy" or "I'm building my cloud strategy." What does that mean to them? What's important to them? And you know, I'm sure you got solutions that fit. >> Yeah, we, you know Stu, we've seen a slight change. It used to be that it was a cloud first strategy. And now I would kinda as a cloud right strategy. Which is let me choose the right cloud for the right type of workload. Make sure that I have an optimized workload placement in which cloud. One of the value adds that we bring is we can evaluate all those workloads and applications and your use cases, like your data center, and then recommend to you, in partnership with Cisco and Intel, what is the right placement for your workload. Now when you look at what is coming up in the future is, you know, the world is getting into containers. And you look at Cisco's strategy with containers. You know, their Cisco container platform, what they're doing with Google, Presidio's right in the center of that along with Intel. Where we are building solutions in a multicloud fashion. So HyperFlex for the on-prem. Running on top of HyperFlex is a Cisco container platform and then we are able to then take that and merge that with Google Cloud. That's what customers want. They want that flexibility to say, "If this is the workload that needs to be on-prem, great." "If this is something that I need to move" "as my applications get containerized," that's what they want to go to. >> Yeah, Brad. You've got a large team playing in all of these environments. I remember, you know, optimization for virtualization, back in the day. When I was first learning about containers, Intel Developer Form was one of the places I went to go learn about this. Build on what Vinu was saying as to, you know, where your teams are making bets and helping to, you know, optimize and build solutions for customers. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think Vinu said it very well. Especially if your auger in on the world of cloud. One of the challenges, I think, enterprise customers have really had is, it's about cloud's economics. I think that's basically the underpinning of what Vinu was talking about is the economies of scale and capability of the large public cloud service providers have caused most enterprise customers to pause. So I think what customers are really looking for is, "How do I deploy applications?" The scalability with ease of deployment while having policy round security, networking, compute storage, et cetera. And then move the applications around the data center. What Intel does is we work very closely with Cisco as they're designing a lot of these platforms. HyperFlex is an example is you know, utilizing, best utilizing some of the underpinnings of the C compiler or whether it's the ISL instruction set. The storage acceleration libraries which are part of the CPU telemetry. In which they can, you know, take the code from Springpath and really fine tune it to get the best performance. And then by the time, you know, Presidio gets it in house, they further fine tune it for the customer needs. So it's just a great triangulation. And then we want a scale when Cisco scales in the market, Intel wins. Across the entire stack of compute, network, and storage. So, therefore, it's very very you know, we're all in the same boat rowing in the same direction. >> It's a very good cohesive partnership. >> Yes, cohesiveness. >> It's so funny, cuz so much has wave. We talk a lot about simplicity. And it's like, oh well, you know, HCI and public cloud we're gonna make it really simple. It's gonna be heterogeneous. Some people like, oh remember it was like white box and nothing fancy. It's like, underneath the covers there's a lot that goes in to make sure that. I say we're in a world of hyper optimization. >> Yes. >> Because there's a lot of things that have to. Talk a little bit about that balance. >> So a perfect example of that is what we build in partnership with Intel and Cisco is a Presidio Data Center Solutions Set. So the challenge our customers were having is, yeah, it's great to get a hyper converg, but the hyper converg has to plug into something. It has to be on a rack. It has to be, you know, power cooling has to be measured. You know, we have to get telemetry data you know, using Intel CPUs. So what we decided to do was, we built a custom based solution, call it a cloud in a box, with hyper converged, with the networking gear in it, with advance software solutions, with power cooling, and we wrapped around our professional services and managed services. And what we also helped our customers to do is if they decided that they want to consume this as a service in a OpEx model, we could do that. If they wanted to do it in a CapEx, we could do that. So we made it very flexible. Because it's not just about hyper converg. Hyper converg has to connect. Hyper converg has to be load balanced. Then there's a possibility that you want to connect to a GCP or an AWS so, there was a lot of things that we could do with that. >> Yeah Brad, we talk about customers want to have a similar operating model. Whether it's in their data center or you know, outside of their environment. You know, I think Intel at the bottom layer helps but how do you help make sure there's flexibility as customers choose all of their various solutions in a multicloud world? >> Well, first and foremost, I think that has a lot to do with, we have a significant partnership with most of the public cloud service providers. It's no secret that, you know, whether it's GCP, it's AWS or it's Azure, or even Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, that these data centers are built upon Intel technologies. And then as you get back into the on-prem data center at the enterprise, the close work we do with Cisco and with partners like Presidio. I'll give you a perfect example is, when you look at one of the strengths Cisco's had traditionally over the years, it's this developer community. And it was the developer community what seems to have been born in networking and the networking spaces, and it's really created scale for Cisco. Well as you look at the nascent technologies there's two things we see. One is application developers inside of the enterprise IT, don't have a simple way to build applications. So they go do a swipe on AWS. Start a instantiation to write an application, but with things like OpenShift and working with Cisco on a redhat, enterprise easy DevOps platform, or things like container development. We work very closely with Google and GKE on the Kubernetes development and the Kubernetes engine. As well as with Cisco. And then so, when you bring that all together and you say, "Now we have a developer community" "of a technology, which is clearly the future," "which is containers." And Cisco working with Intel, Cisco working with Presidio, Intel working with Presidio, it's really a three legged stool. And how do we refine the capabilities and also help define the future roadmap requirements in order to become, add more value for the customers. >> And I think that's a, just to, you know, piggyback to what Brad said. I think that's a key aspect too, right, is. When you look at our customers when they ask us to come up with stuff. Cisco, Presidio, Intel, we're not shy to make those investments, because there might be customer requirements that are very unique. And it's almost bespoke. That we have to work on those kind of solutions and it's great to have partners that are ready to invest with us and make those investments, and, you know, make those changes. >> Great. Want to give you both a final world. What should we look for going forward? You know, some areas, maybe, that you're pushing new solutions in? You talked about, you know, analytics and the like. >> Yup. >> What should we look for as the partnership continues to grow in the future? >> Yeah so, when you look at Presidio's go to market here, we are focused on three key areas. One is digital infrastructure, multicloud, and then security. And in addition we want to really focus on data analytics and business insights. So, digital infrastructure for us is the whole software defined infrastructure. That's getting more and more automated and orchestrated. Multicloud, you know, you gonna see us make more investments in container technology as well as working with companies like Google and Intel, and the whole GKE, the Google Kubernetes engine. And then in the security part at the end of the day, everything we do has to be secure. It's not about pulling point products, it has to be a full fledged strategy. And then the last thing our customers are asking us is "We've build us this software defined infrastructure," "in a multicloud along with security." "Can you give me business insights?" So this is where we are working very closely with Intel and Cisco on tetration, which is the whole network flow and security analytics that, you know, obviously is powered by the telemetry from Intel CPUs, and you're gonna see us make more investments there with tetration, with you know, obviously app dynamics and companies like, Splunk. So. I think that's what you're gonna see us do a lot in the future. >> Yeah, I think, well said Vinu. And I think at a very basic level, all of this software, all the complexity, all of the security is gonna require more insatiable desire for Compute. But Intel's clearly investing beyond Compute. We're very open about becoming a data centric company, looking at about how this tidal wave of data's coming in a world of billions of connected devices. So as Intel continues to invest, whether it's in FPGAs, storage memory technologies, you know, the blog for the launch of HyperFlex 3.5 just went out, an all NVNe version, of HyperFlex. And then we're gonna talk on Thursday about using Optane, Intel Optane technology as a caching tier. FPGAs, over into silicon photonics technology. There's just a wealth of capabilities in silicon, that Intel's bringing the market to bear. And working with our partners, again like, Presidio to understand. By the way, the way we do business at Intel is, we have an account team that also calls on Presidio. And what we do is, our team triangulates with them. So Presidio is understanding the future roadmap of technologies from Intel at the same time Cisco's understanding it. Cisco then can innovate on platforms based on Intel technologies, but as Presidio knows what's comin' down the pike, they can start building their plans for how they can then take it from Cisco's hands, further encapsulate it in a valuable offering, say cloud in a box as you said so well, and deliver easy business outcomes for the customers. >> Yup. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, absolutely. For a long we watched the tick tock coming out of Intel, as what drove innovation and you know, new advancements in the industry. Now everyone's moving faster, even Intel. You know, it's not the chip itself that is the you know, driving factor of all the change. So, Brad, Vinu, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. >> Absolutely, thank you Stu. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Really appreciate all the updates and congrats on the progress. >> Thank you. Alright we'll be back here with lots more coverage three days wall to wall coverage of Cisco Live 2018 here in Orlando. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)