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

(upbeat music) >> Live from Orlando Florida. It's the Cube. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to Cisco NetApp and the Cube's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Cube's Live coverage here in Orlando Florida for Cisco Live 2018. It's the Cube's coverage. >> I'm John Furrier. The host. Here for three days of wall-to wall-coverage. Our next guest is Shubha Govil. Whose the director of product management for Cisco DevNet. Welcome to the Cube. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John. Thanks for having me on Cube. >> Great conversation before the cameras came out. We're talking about development and Cloud Native. But we're super impressed with the work you guys have done at DevNet. Certainly it's the top story of the show here is that Cisco has now crossed over the flywheel of innovation where 500,000 registered developers. >> Developers. Not visitors to a website. >> Yes. Or some marketing program. >> Correct. >> Real engaging developers. >> Absolutely. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you John. Thank you. >> A couple of years. Four years and you're here. You've got DevNet. And DevNet Create. Which we've been covering extensively as well. >> Yes. >> Which is the Cloud Native world coming together. >> Yes. >> This is for the first time in Cisco's history where you have now a clear line of sight for network engineers network developers network experts who have been certified in the CCIE and other certifications. CCNA, CCNP. All the stuff you guys do. You can now see a clear line where you can extend the capabilities and knowledge and expertise in power of networking. >> Absolutely. >> Up the stack. >> Absolutely. >> Finally Cisco's moving up the stack. >> Yes. >> Tell us what's going on in the product side? >> Yeah Absolutely. And I'm gonna talk about very specific example today. And today if you heard the keynote speak. And Susie opened up a few things and announcement. One of them was DNA developer center. And I'm gonna talk about that. Because part of it is how network is an open platform now. And that was part of the announcement. You will hear a lot about that. And linking it back to Dev reports. Quite right. They should care about why they should look into it. So three things I'm gonna talk about. DNA, developer center and what they can find there. And once they go there and they really start learning about our platform on API's on DevNet. What cord exchange does for them. And how they can start not only programming the Intent based on our Intent API's and what they want network to do for them but also sharing some community cord. Are using that community cord. Community Cord if they are just getting started. Right? So on DNA Developers Center we have four capabilities highlighted. These are the API's. Whether they are Intent API's Integration API's to connect with other third parties. Or SDK's to manage multi-party devices. Or there for ITSM or a specific use case integrations. >> So hold up. Go slow. >> I'm kind of not on the uptake as you are on this. Because you're in it. IF DNA is a set of abstractions API's on top of the equipment. >> Correct. >> So it's not natively. It's a set of API. >> Set of API's. >> So that people could use those API's to create services. >> To manage their network wealth. To automate and drive these right use cases. So I might. >> Give me an example. >> Yeah let's talk about an example. Intent. My intent might be to. We were talking about radio conferences awhile back. And I come from that environment. I want to drive a Butler QS for certain level of execs. Right? If they are on the call this was the thing of like eight ten years back. If my execs are on a call make sure they have the best experience. So the QS quality of your network should be set up to a level that there's no disruption. There's no latency in the call. Right? So that's an intent. That's a business intent. Give best experience to my execs. >> So really that's combining policy and QOS together to make it meet the outcome. Which is no latency. >> To meet the outcome. But for the network engineer now let's connect back to the developer. The network engineer whose trying to make this intent possible for the execs. There's a places they need to set up the SQSS. And won't it be easy of them if there was a simple API that they can use to create that solution to drive that policy across the devices. Whether Cisco devices or non Cisco devices. >> This has been the challenge for network engineers in general. Because you want to have things in control and locked down but as you want to do more things that are programmable. >> Correct. >> There's been some provisioning and some configuration management things. >> Correct. >> You're saying, hey you're gonna lock down all the architecture and then move up. Use the API's to do better integration. Make things run smoothly without disrupting the network. Is that right? >> That's part of it. But also it's about making it easy for them. Correct? Simplify the process of doing it. The process of making it happen was long steps of CLI command. That now that network engineer was going continuously. A lot of the time people actually tells us that they would have this cut and paste copy of the command. That they will take from one place go to the next place next device and next device. And continue to do that step. And that's the productivity game we are driving by simplifying where one API call can go across all the devices and make that change happen. >> We've heard that a lot from on DevNet and the hallway conversations that said DevNet's made my life easier. >> Yes. >> I don't have to do those mundane tasks. >> Exactly. >> That were part of getting things done. Okay. Let me ask you personal question. As director of product management for DevNet. What is your product scope? What are you working on? Can you take a minute? >> That's a very good question. And that's where some of these offers we were talking about earlier come in to play. So for example, within Devnet we create a lot of offers to make developers lives simple. Whether we are talking about giving them the best quality of learning content. Or giving them hosted Sandbox environment to try and test. All of that requires a lot of product management knowledge and the need. But really what the 2ADS we have work more closely to get them out to market. One is the thing called Code Exchange. It's a tool for our developer committee. Where we have aggregated the public git code across the Cisco technologies. >> That's on GitHub I think. >> GitHub code right. Absolutely. But the second powerful thing on top of that is our Ecosystem Exchange. This is where we are bringing an aggregated view of every partner out there. Every Cisco partner whose creating great solutions on our API's in a single place our developers can go and find that solution. To really address the business outcome they are looking to address. >> Shubha, I want you to put some color commentary around of some of the feedback you've heard. We hear people of the DevNet community saying I've come to Cisco Live and I spend all my week here in DevNet. Because it really is kind of like a kid in the candy store. (Shubha laughs) >> From a computer science or developer prospective. >> Yeah. >> What are some of the cool examples and demos that you guys have here? What's your favorite? What are some of the things that are jumping out that people are gravitating towards? >> I will tell you one of the most popular sessions that I have seen in the last few days here is Network Programmability for Networking Juniors. That's one. There's also a very Network Programmability one-on-one. Coding one-on-one class. It's basic Python. But applying it in network context. Those are some of the most popular sessions that I have seen. But when it comes to cool demos there's a cool demo around Flex IQ. I think you might be talking to Ashish later about that. >> Yes. >> And really it's a retail scenario how you are tracking. Using the location based service example. But in this case camera feed. Really analyzing where people are. And you'll get to hear more about this. >> We took a ad. I saw the demo. >> Yeah. >> The Flex IQ. First of all I love the name. I said trademark it immediately. (Shubha laughs) Get it out there. First use wins. And it's already out there. But it's really taking a A access point. >> This is an access point. >> And it plugs into a camera. And a great example of some of the coolness you can do with a preexisting condition. In this case an access point. >> So each of these information points that data one that they are collecting. Whether it's a camera feed. It's a location service. Like information about the devices and the environment. Each set of data is the relevance in this. Which is driving the newest use cases. And this data is coming through API's that have labeled but I'd say morockie access point API. All the camera API that are labeled that have enabled C Space. >> This is really the aha moment for me. I've been following Cisco really since the 90's. >> Yeah. >> Or at least when they formed. Being the young gun at the time. Younger than I am now. 30 years ago. But it was really networking. Connecting companies together. It was the plumbing. It was the core. >> Yes. Unstoppable since then. Now the success is still there. But it's really the problem solving is never going away. I saw this security challenges that were outlined in the keynote. We all know Cybe Ops is a huge issue. Cloud is here. You've got industrial IOT going on. And IOT. But these examples that DevNet is showing is that these new capabilities with I won't say a hack but a maker faire culture. >> It is a maker culture right. Which is lot of DIY stuff. So this lot of learning by playing with the API's and multiple one of them. And you'd really find use cases you have never addressed before. We also have a design thinking workshop here going on. And part of it is really thinking about the use cases from the user prospective. What you are trying to address. Before finding the cool technologies. Really understand what your users' needs are. >> Yeah. >> And we are doing a lot of things around that. And bringing it connecting it back to the APIs. Once we learn the right needs. And finding these use cases that were never possible before. >> Well I talked to Susie all the time about this. >> Yeah. >> And I know she's really hardcore on this. But you guys have nailed the community aspect as well. You've brought that open source ethos into the formula. Which makes it more collaborative. No one wants to be alone. I mean the last thing a network engineer wants to do is be the old way of being tied to the chair on the network. Troubleshooting problems. They want to have more collaboration As some of this creativity kicks in. So it's really a new time. How are you guys handling this? Is it like people are having an awakening moment? Or what are you guys doing to nature this? What are some of the exciting things? >> And the best part about the community is that communities learning with each other. Right? It's this feeling of we are enabling our community both traditionally and through even like Cisco Live and DevNet Create. We bring them together to be able to learn from each other much as we learn with them. And trying to define the right use cases and solutions. And that's what the company's behind. The 500,000 developers who are coming and learning with us. They have found the use cases they were addressing for their business. They also found a new skill set that they were looking to learn before. >> Yeah. >> And a lot of them have come along where they are showing their tech cred in the community. Really being the community leaders. >> You know it's been kind of a downer some of the narrative I've seen from press outlets other press outlets and other kind of naysayers has been Hey network guys. You're gonna be automated away. Go learn how to code to save your career. Actually that's not happening. >> That is not happening at all. >> The power of networking certainly as security moves down lower on the stack. And policy and these cool service oriented service meshes. Kubernetes. Really points to the relevance of the network engineer more than ever. You've got SDN. Software Defined Data Center. That's not going away. Automation is going to take mundane tasks away. >> Yes. >> But actions happening at the app layer. >> They have that expertise and 20 years plus experience knowing how networks should be running to make these things possible. The use cases around the applications possible. >> They're more relevant than ever. >> They are more relevant than ever. I would say. Exactly. That's the key. >> Well you guys are at the beginning I think of another set of inflection point. Certainly DevNet's gone in a quick four years. You're connecting to the Cloud Native World with DevNet Create. Which is phenomenal. Those are two worlds that are coming together. I just see another inflection point coming. Maybe it's a million developers. But you've been success in the enterprise where it's been really difficult. Even Microsoft with their legacy developer program .net. The Visual Basic and all the MSDM stuff. >> At the by GitHub >> Yup. >> To kind of maintain relevance. Other companies like Oracle VM wear and other ones they're having a hard time. You guys are just kicking butt. >> So part of it for us is not only focusing on traditional infrastructure. But also talking about the app developer. So these application developers who did not know about network at all. A lot of times they had to fight with their networking juniors to get their application the particular function they wanted to have. Right? So that what we are enabling by bringing them together. Also we have been running small programs like we are trying new markets. Global markets. China, India and some of the things like really reaching out to the big large hackathons. Which are traditionally. For example in India we were recently doing a smart India hackathon. >> Nice. >> There are 500,00 students participated in solving real problems for the country. And DevNet was the provider of applications and API's. Bringing them into the application world with the understanding of network. >> A lot of growth in India and China. Certainly massive new developers coming on board. Okay final question to wrap up the segment. I gotta get your prospective. Take your DevNet hat off for a second. >> Okay. Put your Cisco hat on. >> Sure. For the folks who couldn't make Cisco Live this year what's the big story coming out of the event this year? You guys have been successful with the 500,000 developers. What's the big story developing here? What should people know is the most important story for Cisco Live 2018? >> I think the biggest story I would like to call out is that network is open for business. Network is really open for you to really come and make your intent. Your use cases. Your business outcomes possible. And that's the biggest story I will call out. >> Shubha Govil here product management for DevNet. Here on the Cube. Live coverage. Day two of three days. I'm John Furrier. Stay with us for more live coverage. As we start winding down day two. A lot of great action. The network is programmable. It's creating value and new use cases. And the developers are in the center of the action. The network engineers seeing a clear path of the Cloud and more. We'll be back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)

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