>> Narrator: TheCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante here bringing you day one of theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 22. We've had a lot of great conversations so far. Just a few hours in. We have two of our alumni back with us. Powerhouses, two powerhouses from Nutanix. Two for the price of one. Mandy Dhaliwal joins us. The CMO of 90 days at Nutanix. It's great to see you. Congratulations on the gig. >> Thanks Lisa. It's great to be here and great to be at Nutanix. >> Isn't it? And Tarkan Maner, the Chief Commercial Officer at Nutanix. Welcome back Tarkan. >> Great to see you guys. >> So this is only day one of the the main show Tarkan. We've been hearing a lot about cloud as an operating model. We've heard your CEO Rajiv talking about it. Break that down from Nutanix's point of view. >> Yeah, look at the end, the tech conference we are talking a lot technology but at the end it is all about outcomes. I saw Keith was here earlier, you know, GreenLake's story. We were on a session earlier. Everything is about business outcomes for the customers. And obviously our partner Ecosystems, NBC all these double technologies come together and become an open model. And our customers are moving from a CAPEX model, old school model, what I call dinosaur model, into an OPEX model, subscription model. Which Nutanix basically the category creator for this, in a hybrid multi-cloud fashion. One platform, one experience, any app, any user, anytime, and make it count. Let the customers focus on business outcomes. Let us deal with infrastructure for you. >> What are some of the key outcomes that you're seeing customers achieve? We've seen so much change in the last couple of years. >> Tarkan: Right. >> A lot of acceleration. >> Tarkan: Right. >> Every company has to be a data company today to compete. >> Right. >> What are some of the outcomes that you're really proud of? >> So look, at the end of the, day's it's all about digital transformation and it's a big loaded word. But at the end of the day every company is trying to get digitized. And hybrid multicloud is the only way to get there in a cost effective way. So that cost is a big story. Highly secure. Manageable, available, reliable, total cost ownership definitely depressed and take the complexity out. Let us deal with the infrastructure for you. You focus on your time to market, and the best applications for the best users. >> So Mandy, I remember, you know you talked about your category creator Tarkan, and I remember Stu Miniman and I, were in the Wikibon offices. We were just getting started and he said, "Dave you got to come in here." And Dhiraj was on the phone. They were describing this new category and I was blown away. I'm like, wow, that's like the cloud but you know, for on-prem. So what does the, what does the cloud operating model mean to Nutanix Mandy? >> Really, what we're trying to do is become this common cloud platform across Core, Edge and Cloud. We're known for our strength in HCI on premise. We have capability across. So it's really important for us to share this story with the market. Now, also one of the reasons I joined. You know this story needs to be told in a bigger fashion. So I'm here to really help evolve this category. We've won HCI, right? What's next? So stay tuned. >> So we call that super cloud. I call it. >> Yes, I love that name. >> So it, but it needs has meaning, right? >> Right. >> It's a new layer. It's not just, oh, I run on Azure. I run an Aw or running green. >> Mandy: Right. >> It's actually a common infrastructure. >> Yes. >> Common experience across maybe and even out to the edge. >> Mandy: Right. >> Right. So is, is that, do you guys see that or do you think this is just a little buzzword that Dave made up? >> No, I think it has legs. And I think at the core of it, it's simplicity and elegance. And if you look, and, and again, I'm drinking the the champagne, right? We have that we architected for that. We've solved that problem. So we now can extend it to become ubiquitous in the market. So it's, it's an amazing place to be because we've got the the scale, frankly, and the breadth now of the technology platform to be able to go deliver that super cloud. >> And you have to do the work, right? You, you, you have to hide all the complexity- >> Mandy: Yeah. >> Of whether it's AWS, Azure, Google, GreenLake wherever you go on prem. >> Mandy: Right. >> And not only that, as you know Dave, many people think about cloud, they automatically think about public cloud. AWS, Azure, or Google. Guess what? We have customers. Some of the workloads and apps running on a local country. If you're in Singapore, on Singtel, and your, if you're in Switzerland on Swisscom, if you're in Japan on NTT, guess what? Our cloud runs also on those clouds. For those customers who want the data, gravity, local issues with the security and privacy laws in the local country then all this SI you have HCI, Emphasis VIDPro, Accenture, CAPS, JAM, and ITCS. They have also cloud services. What we build as Mandy said as the creator, make the platform run anywhere. So the customers can move data, apps, workloads from cloud to cloud. From private to public and within public, from public to public. From AWS to Singtel. From Singtel to Swisscom to Azure, doesn't matter. We want to make sure one platform one experience, any app, any user. >> And at least a lot of those guys are building on OpenStack. We don't talk about OpenStack anymore. But a lot of the local telcos they actually it's alive and well and actually growing. >> So you, you make it sound simple. So I got to ask you as the chief marketing officer how do you message that simplicity and actually make it tangible for customers? >> That's a great question. It's really about the customer story, right? How do we share that we're able to take something that took months to deploy and have it done in in days, minutes, right? So there's a lot of those kinds of stories that you'll see across the platform coming. We're getting a lot more messaging around that. We're also tightening up the message to be more easily conveyed. So that's a lot of the stuff that I'm working on right now and really super excited. You know, we've got leading retailers, financial services institutions, public sector agencies that are running on our platform. So we've got this amazing cadre of customers and their stories just need to be told. >> That voice of the customer is so powerful. >> Mandy: Yep. >> As you well know Tarkan. That's, that's the objective voice right? That is ideally articulating your value proposition. >> Yeah. >> Validating that helping other customers understand this, these are the outcomes we are achieving. >> Mandy: Right? >> You can do the same. >> Mandy: Right. >> And, and different personas. >> Mandy: Right. >> It's not one customer fits all right. You heard Home Depot, Daniel with Antonio on the keynote. The stores, the distribution center, the warehousing and their service department, their mobile app all that data has to move from place to place. And we want to make sure it's cost effective. It's secure. And not only for the system, people like Daniel but also for application developers. Dave, you talked about, you know, Open Source, OpenStack, a lot of new application development is all open source. >> Mandy: Yep. >> And we need to also gear toward them and give them a platform, a hybrid multicloud platform. So they can build applications and then run applications and manage lifecycle applications anywhere in simple ways securely. So this platform is not only for running applications but also build a new set of digital transformation driven applications. >> So what are you doing with GreenLake especially in that context, right? 'Cause that's what we're looking for. Is like are people going to build applications on top. Maybe it's the incumbents. It might not be startups, but what what are you doing there? >> Right. So look, I'll give you the highlights on this. I know you talked to Keith again we had the session earlier. We have about 2000 plus customers. Customers are moving from a CapEx model to an OPEX model. They like the subscription side of the business and basically our strategy and many is leading this globally making cloud on your terms. So you have the control, you move from CapEx to OPEX and we bring the data in cloud to you. So you can manage the data securely, privately build your applications, and then they're ready. You can move applications based on microservices capabilities we deliver to different cloud as, as you wish. >> So then what are you hearing from customers? What are they most excited about right now given the massive potential that you're about to unleash? >> It it's really about best in class, right? So you get these these amazing technologies to come together. We abstract the complexity away for the customer. So HP GreenLake brings economic benefit. Nutanix brings experience. So you couple those two. And all of a sudden they've got time to value. Like they've never had before. Add on top of that the skills gap that we've got in the market, right? The new breed of folks that are deploying and managing these applications just don't have an appetite for complexity like they did in the old world. So we've got elegance, that's underpinning our architecture and simplicity and ease of use that learn that really translates into customer delight. So that's our secret sauce. >> You talk about time to value. Sorry, Dave. Time to value is no joke as a marketer. Talk to me about what does that mean from a translation perspective? Because these days, one of the things we learned in the pandemic, other than everyone had no patience and still probably doesn't is that access to realtime data no longer a, oh, it's awesome. It's Fanta, it's, it's table stakes. It is it's, what's going to help companies succeed. And those not. So from a time to value perspective, talk a little bit more about that as really impactful to every industry. >> Right, And, and, and underpin underpinning, all of it is that simplicity and ease of use, right? So if I can pick up and have portability across all aspects of my platform, guess what? I've got a single pane of glass that's that I'm able to manage my entire infrastructure through. That's really powerful. So I don't have to waste time doing an undifferentiated heavy lifting, all of a sudden there's huge value there in simplicity and ease of use, right? So it translates for things that would take months and you know, hundreds of developers all of a sudden you can vend out infrastructure in a way that's performant, reliable, scalable and all of a sudden, right? Everybody's happy. People are not losing sleep anymore because they know they've got a reliable way of deploying and managing and running their infrastructure. >> Perfect example for you very quick. Just is very exciting. Mandy and I, were in the session, Texas Children's Hospital. >> Yeah. >> Theresa Montag. I mean, Tonthat, she's the head of infrastructure, with Keith, with us you should listen to the patient care Pediatric, you know, oncology, realtime data. Hip regulation, highly regulated industry data. Gravity is super important. State laws, city laws, healthcare laws. The data cannot go to a public cloud service but has to be cloud driven, cloud enabled and data driven and eccentric on the site. But cloud operating model, Nutanix again with GreenLake, delivers a subscription methodology, a you know, OPEX model and delivers desktop service cloud native applications, supporting all these tools like epic all happening in healthcare. >> You guys have a high net promoter score. What, what got you there? And what's going to keep you there in the future. >> It's underpinned by the technology itself and also our outstanding support team right. We hear our competitors' customers call us for support first, before they call our competitors. If you can't take that to the bank, what can you, right. It's crazy. They, our customers tell us this >> Dave: Really? >> Really. >> It's pretty validating. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, help us with has help us with this XYZ stuff. Yeah. >> And it becomes even more important with this new cloud era. >> Yes. >> As you're moving the data, the applications to different places, they want the same experience. And look as a company, we spent the investment. It's not free. >> Mandy: Yeah. >> It costs us a lot of money to make that happen. One of the best support organizations I've been in industry for 30 years, I've never seen this kind of a maniacal focus on customer service. And without that success will not come. >> Yeah, I mean, I've met a lot of Nutanix customers at the various shows over the years. Ridden in taxis bus rides, you know, cocktail parties. They're, they're an interesting bunch, right. They, they were kind of leading edge early on. They saw the light bulb went off, they adopted. >> Right. >> Right, so, and think about thinking about aligning with where they're going where are they going and how is Nutanix aligning with them? >> There's, there's so much complexity in the world, right? So we're abstracting away the complexity. Not all workloads are meant to run in an either or situation. >> Right. >> Right, and we're hearing from IDC as well in, in, by 2026, 75% of workloads are going to be misplaced. How do they have a strategic partner? That's going to help them run their organization effectively and efficiently. We become that open and neutral player in the market. That can be the trusted advisor for them to help with workload placement optimization. They're standardizing, they're consolidating they're modernizing, they're transforming. There's a lot going on right. And so how do they come to somebody? That's voice of reason that also is well networked across the ecosystem. And that interoperability is key and yes, I'm still drinking the Kool-Aid, but it, I see it. It's, it's a tremendous story. >> Switzerland with weapons. (everyone laughing) >> You said it, you said it, Dave. >> And also one other thing it's important competition makes us better not bitter. >> Yeah. >> We have the best best partner network, 10,000 plus partners but more than numbers, quality, constantly working theater. And some of our partners also are competitors. We compete with them and we deliver solutions this way. Customers don't have to forklift out forklift in Nutanix. We leverage their past investment, current investment so they can tie Nutanix in different ways for different workloads, not one size fits all. We have multiple solutions, multiple ways you know, small, medium, large, extra large D in terms of scale and different workloads from the, you know Edge to the Cloud. And to at the end of the day to data as a whole, as you heard from HP today, our strategy, our roadmaps super aligned. That's why we were having a lot of success with GreenLake as well. >> Mandy, can you talk a last question about the partner ecosystem that Tarkan mentioned? How were you leveraging that to, to modify the messaging that you talked about? You've only been here almost 90 days. >> Mandy: Right. >> How is the partner ecosystem going to be a facilitator of the Nutanix brand and messaging and the reach? >> They're, they're tremendous, right? Because we're able to now, like we're doing here, right. Be able to reach into their customer base, and showcase our stories in a purpose built way right. This is, this is reality and solutions that we're driving for the customers with like-minded problems, like-minded people so they can see that. And so we do that across the, the ecosystem and all of a sudden, we've got this rolling thunder if you will. So it's up to us to, to, to really hone in on the right narrative and hand it to them and have them run with it that there's going to be practices built on this, even in a deeper way, moving forward. I see it, you know, we've done, I've done this before in my career. And so I've got conviction that we're on the right track and, you know, watch the space. >> Dot, dot, dot, to be continued. Watch the space. You heard it here on theCUBE. Mandy, Tarkan, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about the power of Nutanix with HPE, what you're doing and what you're enabling customers to achieve. It's transformative and, and best of luck. You'll have to come back in the next 90 days so we can see some of those customer stories. >> Absolutely. Absolutely, would love to, thank you. >> Thanks guys. >> Mandy: Yeah. For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from the show floor of HPE Discover 22. Day one coverage continues after a short break.

>>Welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of AWS reinvent 2021 live from Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin. We have to set two live sets here with the cube two remote sets over 100 guests on the program for three and a half days talking about the next decade and cloud innovation. And I have two alumni back with me. Please. Welcome back, Mandy Dolly, while the CMO of Boomi and ed. Makowski the head of product at Boomi guys. It's so great to see you. Great to see you, Lisa, thank you in person zoom. Incredible. So in the time, since it's been, since I've seen you, booty is a verb. You, I can see your cheeks bursting. Yeah. Just >>Boom, yet go, boom. It go. Boom. Yet, >>Talk to me about what, what that means, because this is something that you discovered through customers during the pandemic. >>Absolutely. And really it's a Testament to the platform that's been built and the experience of 18,000 customers, a hundred thousand community members, anytime there's disparate data. And it needs to be connected in a way that's secure, reliable performance. And it just works that confidence and trust our customers are telling us that they just Boomi it. And so we figured it was a rally cry. And as a marketing team, it was handed to us. We didn't have to push a Boulder up hill. Our customers are, are just booming it. And so our rally cry to the market is take advantage of the experience of those that have come before you and go build what you need to. It works, >>Period. It works well as the chief marketing officer, there's probably nothing better, nothing better than the validating voice of the customer, right? That's the most honest that you're going to get, but having a customer create the verb for you, there's going to be nothing that prepares you for that. Nothing like it, but also how great does that make it when you're having conversations with prospective customers or even partners that there's that confidence and that trust that your 18,000 plus now customer's house right in >>Lummi right. And adding what? Eight a day. Yeah. Every day we're adding eight new customers. >>Thank you customers a day. The Boomi versus what? A hundred thousand strong now. Yes. >>In two years we built that. Is that right? Yes. >>Wow. Oh my goodness. During the >>Pandemic, the momentum is incredible. Yeah. It's >>Incredible. >>Then you're on your growth from a usage perspective. So yeah, we're skyrocketing >>Use the most need like, uh, you know, neck braces from whiplash going so fast. >>Oh, we're ready. >>Good. I know, I know you are. So talk to me about, you know, we've seen such change in the last 22 months, massive acceleration to the cloud digital transformation. We're now seeing every company has to be a data company to survive and actually to be competitive, to be a competitor. But one of the things that used to be okay back in the day was, you know, these, uh, experiences that weren't integrated, like when you went to well, like when I was back in college and I would go in and you would pay for this class and that cause everything was disconnected and we didn't know what we didn't know. Now the integrated experience is table stakes for any organization. And talk to me about when you're talking with customers, where are they like across industries and going, we don't have a choice. We've got to be able to connect these experiences for our customers, for our employees and to be a comparator. >>Okay. Yeah. I mean, it used to be about for us application data integration, that sort of thing. That's where we were born. But particularly through the pandemic, it's become integrated experiences and automation. It's not just about moving data between systems, that sort of thing. It's about connecting with your end users, your employees, your customers, et cetera, like you were saying, and automating and using intelligence to continue automating those things faster. Because if, if you're not moving faster in today's world, you're, you're in peril. So, >>And that was one of the themes that we were actually talking about this morning during our kickoff that you're hearing is every company is a data company. And if they're not, they're not going to be around much longer many. Talk to me when you're talking with customers who have to really reckon with that and go, how do we connect these experiences? Because if we can't do that, then we're not going to be around. >>Yeah. The answer lies in the problems, right? There are real-world problems that need to be solved. We have a customer just north of here, a, a university. And, um, as they were bringing students back to campus, right, you're trying to deliver a connected campus experience. Well, how do you handle contact tracing, right. For COVID-19 that's a real modern day problem. Right? And so there you're able to now connect disparate data sources to go deliver on a way, an automated way to be able to handle that and provide safety to your students. Table-stakes oh, it is right. Digital identity management again in a university set setting critical. Right? So these things are now a part of our fabric of the way we live. The consumerization of tech has hit B2B. It's merging. Yeah. >>And it's good. There's definitely silver linings that have come out of the last 22 months. And I'm sure there will be a few more as we go through Omicron and whatever Greek letter is next in the alphabet, but don't want to hear we are at reinvent so much. There's always so much news at reinvent. Here we are. First 10th, 10th reinvent. You can't believe 10th reinvent. AWS is 15 years old brand new leader. And of course, yesterday ad starts the flood of announcements yesterday, today. Talk to me about what it's like to be part of that powerful AWS ecosystem from a partner perspective and how, how influential is Boomi and its customers and the Boomi verse in the direction that AWS goes in because there's so customer obsessed like you guys are >>Well, it was really exciting for us because we're a customer and a partner of AWS, right? We, we run our infrastructure on AWS. So we get to take advantage of all the new announcements that they make and all the cool stuff they bring to the table. So we're really excited for that. But also as all these things come up and customers want to take advantage of them, if they're creating different data, sets, different data silos or opportunity for automation around the business, we're right there for our customers and partners to go take advantage of that and quickly get these things up and running as they get released by AWS. So it's all very exciting. And we look forward to all these different announcements. >>One of the things also that I felt in the last day and a half, since everything really kicked off yesterday was the customer flywheel. AWS always talks about, we work backwards from the customer forwards. And that is a resounding theme that I'm hearing throughout all of the partners that I've talked about. They have a massive ecosystem. Boomi has a massive ecosystem to working with those partners, but also ensuring that, you know, at the end of the day, we're here to help customers resolve problems, problems that are here today, problems that are going to be here tomorrow. How do you help customers deal with Mandy with, with some of the challenges of today, when they say Mandy help us future-proof or integrations what we're doing going forward, what does that mean to Boomi? Yeah, >>I think for us, the way we approach it is you start with Boomi with a connectivity kind of problem, right? We're able to take disparate data silos and be able to connect and be able to create this backbone of connectivity. Once you have that, you can go build these workflows and these user engagement mechanisms to automate these processes and scale, right? So that's 0.1, we have a company called health bridge financial, right? They're a health tech company, financial services company. They are working towards, they run on AWS. They, they have, uh, a very, um, uh, secure, compliant infrastructure requirement, especially around HIPAA because they're dealing with healthcare, right? And they have needs to be able to integrate quickly and not a big budget to start with. They grew very quickly and Lummi powered their, their AWS ecosystem. So as our workloads grew on RDS, as well as SQS as three, we were able to go in and perform these HIPAA compliant integrations for them. So they could go provide reimbursement on medical spending claims for their end customers. So not only did we give them user engagement and an outstanding customer experience, we were able to help them grow as a business and be able to leverage the AWS ecosystem. That's a win, win, win across the board for all of us. >>That's one plus one equals three, for sure. Yep. One of the things too, that's interesting is, you know, when we see the plethora of AWS services, like I mentioned a minute ago, there's always so many announcements, but there's so much choice for customers, right? When you're talking ed with customers, Boomi customers that are looking for AWS services, tell me about some of those conversations. Can we help guide them along that journey? >>I mean, we help them from an architectural standpoint, as far as what services they should choose from AWS to integrate their different data sources within the AWS ecosystem and maybe to others, um, we've helped our customers going back a little bit to, to the future-proofing over the time we've at our platform, we've connected with our customers over 180,000 different data sources, including AWS and others, that as we continue to grow, our customers never need to upgrade. We're a cloud model, ourselves running an AWS. So they just get to keep taking advantage of that. Their business grows and evolves. And as AWS grows and evolves for them, and they're modernizing their infrastructure bringing in, in AWS, we continue to stay on the forefront with keeping connectivity and automation and integration options. >>And that's a massive advantage for customers in any industry, especially, I know one of the first things I thought of when the pandemic first struck and we saw this, you know, the rise of the pharma companies working on vaccine was Madrona. Madonna's a Boomi customer. If they are talk to me about some of the things that you've helped them facilitate, because there was that obviously that time where everyone's scattered, nobody could get onsite having a cloud native solution. Must've been a huge advantage. Yeah. Well getting us all back here, really >>Exactly. First and foremost, getting more people on board into their business to help go find the race for the cure. And then being able to connect that data right. That they were generating and really find a solution. So we had an integral role to play in that. That's definitely a feather in our cap. We're really proud of that. Um, again, right. It's it's about speed and agility and the way we're architected, we're a low code platform. We're not developer heavy. You can log in and go and start building right away. What, what used to take months now takes weeks. If not days, if you use the Boomi platform, those brittle code integrations no longer need to be a part of your day to day. >>And that probably was a major instrument in the survival of a lot of businesses in the very beginning when it was chaotic, right? And it was pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot, that, that, you know, one of the things we learned during the pandemic is that there is access to real-time data. Real-time integrations. Isn't a nice to have anymore. It's required. It's fundamental for employee experiences, customer experiences in every industry >>And banking. We've had several banks who were able to stand up and start taking PPP loans. Uh, they used to do this in person. They were able to take them within literally some of our banks within four days had the whole process built into it. >>Wow. And so from a differentiation perspective, how have your customer conversations changed? Obviously go Boomi. It is now is something that you do, you have t-shirts yet, by the way, they're coming. And can I get one? Yes, absolutely. Excellent. But talk to me about how those customer conversations have changed is, is what Boomi enables organizations is this snow at the C-suite the board level going? We've got to make sure that these data sources are connected because they're only gonna keep proliferating. >>Yeah, I think it's coming, right. We're not quite there yet, but as we're starting to get this groundswell at the integration developer level at the enterprise architect level, I think the C-suite especially is realizing the value of the delivery of this integrated experience now, right? These data fueled experiences are the differentiators for new business models. So transformation is something that's required. Obviously you need to modernize. We heard about that in the keynotes here at the conference, but now it's the innovation layer and that's where we're squarely focused is once you're able to connect this data and be able to modernize your systems, how do you go build new business models with innovation? That's where the C-suites leaning in with >>Us. Got it. And that's the opportunity is to really unlock the value of all this data and identify new products, new services, new target markets, and really that innovation kicks the door wide open on a competitor if you're focused on really becoming a data company, I think. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. What are some of the things that, that you're looking forward to as we, as we wrap up 2021 and let's cross our fingers, we're going into a much better 20, 22. What question for both of you and we'll start with you, what's next for Boomi? >>So we just recently laid out our hyper automation vision, right. And what hyper automation is, is adding intelligence, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to your automation to make you go faster and faster and help you with decisions that you may have been making over and over as an example, or any workflows you do as an employee. So there is this convergence of RPA and iPads that's happening in the market. And we're on the forefront of that around robotic process automation. And then bringing that, those types of things into our platform and just helping our customers automate more and more, because that's what they're looking for. That's what go Boomi. It's all about. They've integrated their stuff. We were taking the lead from our customers who are automating things. We had blue force tracking as an example, where in Amsterdam, they have security guards running around and, and, and using, um, wearable devices to track them on cameras. And that's not an application integration use case that's automation. So we're moving there, we're looking with our customers on how we can help them get faster and better and provide things like safety and that use case. So, >>And we're our customers in terms of, of embracing hyper automation. Because when we talk about, we know a lot of, uh, news around AI and, and model last day and a half, but when you think about kind of like, where are most organizations with from a maturation perspective, are they ready for hyper automation? >>I think they're ready for automation. They're learning about hyper automation. I think we're pushing the term further ahead. You know, we're, we're, we're on the forefront of that because industries are thinking, our customers are thinking about automation. They're thinking about AIML, we're introducing them to hyper automation and, and kind of explaining to them, you're doing this already. Think more along these lines, how can you drive your business forward with these? And they're embracing it really well. So >>Is that conversation elevating up to the board level yet? Is that a board level initiative or >>What it is? It's, it's a little more grassroots. I think that's, I was thinking that's where came from because the employees teams are solving problems. They're showcasing these things to their executives and saying, look at the cool stuff we're doing for the business. And the executives are now saying, well with this problem, can we now go boob? Can we Boomi it because they're there, they're starting to understand what we can do. Okay. >>That's awesome. Oh my goodness. Mandy, you've been the chief marketing officer for three over three years now. I can't believe the amount of change that you've seen, not just the last 22 months, but the last three years. What are you excited about as Boomi heads into 2022? I think, >>And new opportunities to get deeper and broader into the market. Our ownership changed as you know this past year. And, um, you know, we have a new leg on growth, if you will, right? And so whole new trajectory ahead of us, bigger brand building more pervasiveness or ease of use around our platform, right? We're available now in a pay as you go model on our website and on a $50 a month model or, uh, um, atmosphere go and then also on marketplace. So we're making the product and the platform more accessible to more people so they can begin on faster, build faster, and go solve these problems. So really democratizing integration is something that I'm very excited about. Democratizing integration, as well as more air cover, just to let people know that this technology exists. So it's really a marketer's dream >>And why they should go buy me it. Right. Exactly. You guys. It was great to have you on the program. Congratulations on the success on, on becoming a verb. That's pretty awesome. I'll look forward to my t-shirt. So I smelled flu and >>You got it. >>All right. For my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube, the global leader in life tech coverage.

>>Hello, welcome to the cubes coverage of Boomi's out of this world. I'm John for your host of the cube at two great guests here, Chris port, chief operating officer of Boomi and Mandy deli wall. Who's the chief marketing officer of Boomi, Chris Mandy. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Appreciate it. >>Thank you for having us. >>This segment is really about the Boomi, uh, trend and customers, um, and the success you guys had obviously now on a new trajectory go to the next level. And you got a lot of trajectory and success. Chris, as the chief operating officer, we've talked many times about the customer base, uh, and growing poised perfectly for this next wave. Give us the update on the macro trends around your customer base and how Boomi's helping them and how you're, you're getting your growth. >>Absolutely. And John really look forward to seeing you soon later, yo, again, this is a great moment in time. We're now more than 18,000 customers, 800 partners globally. We've actually seen an acceleration of the business through the pandemic. Obviously people are trying to do more with less. So it's just an amazing time to see what our customers are doing. Obviously, an explosion of SAS applications. And when we started thinking about, you know, explosion of endpoints, explosion of data, and now you compound that with a labor sheet, which you know, I know if anyone's looking at movies hiring more than we've ever hired in our life. And obviously we're all seeing this in space. So now basically a high productivity, high time to value tool set like Boomi is an imperative. It's no longer a luxury. And we're seeing that accelerate where our customers you've heard Chris talking about 189,000 unique importance that we now connect to. That's the power of movie. You do that in minutes and that's happening every single day. So again, just extending our footprint, extending our customer, really taking advantage. We're seeing there are real tailwind for the business right now. So really excited. Are you excited to work with, >>You know, Chris, uh, Dave Volante, we're talking about, you know, how do you tell the next big breakout success is rogue usage, shadow it. When you have rogue users, that means there's some innovation happening and you guys have a lot of customers that are hiring because it's all new, it's all new innovation, Mandy. This is kind of like a marketing opportunity. It's like rogue is not a bad word here. There's new functionality. You guys are showing the market that you go with Boomi, you can get more value. And then new things just emerge. New positions, open up value is being created. It's kind of a sign of value. Not, not a negative. It's a positive. >>Yeah, absolutely. We give our customers innovate. They're looking to modernize, transform new business models, right? The world we live in today. And so there's really your choice. We abstract away that complexity. So our platform gives people the ability to go build quickly. And so that's really the thought leadership. >>You know, I love, I love Andy Jassy former CEO of AWS. Now the CEO of Amazon always said, uh, Chris, you know, you know, he's no compression algorithm for experience. And he always talked about Amazon being misunderstood. And then finally people go, oh my God, that's the flow. That's the formula of success. And then they're late to the game. A lot of similarities in the Boomi culture, uh, with his law under undifferentiated, heavy lifting, you guys take away and create net new opportunities. This is an operational opportunity for customers. What's your quick comment on that? >>I love the quote again, 26 billion minutes of working with our customers directly. That's a perfect way to put it. I mean, it's not, it's a mode. There's no substitute for that. Trying to bring that to bear every day. And again would just the imperative of being agile speed, time to value. I mean, Forrester did a study recently, you know, Boomi 65% faster in terms of building integration, manual coding, and more importantly, legacy middleware. And these are now just embarrass. They're not luxuries anymore. So again, you know, when we take the, you know, we bring the bear that 26 billion minutes, everything we do from a successful or which is now double more than double from a footprint, you know, over the last 12 to 18 months. And again, trying to build more and more people into that organization, but cumulating success, successes that part of our DNA. I mean, you know, the thousand plus people across the globe, it's what we think about every single day is how to make customers successful. And again, to your point, there's, there is no substitute for the experience of, >>You know, um, we've been covering Boomi for a long time, Mandy, you know that, and, and we kind of got the picture right away. And you mentioned Chris, some of those KPIs, those are real value points that you look to, but ultimately you guys are, have been successful. And I think one of the tell signs is customer customer value always have great customers. So customer success, this is a pass term SAS term. I I-PASS term is part of the, of the cloud. You have to have customer sets built in from the beginning. You guys always had that as part of your culture, customer success, organizations and operations. What's the update, Chris with customer it's customer success. >>Yeah. Again, I mean, you know, more than doubling the team over the last 18 months in building this even more into the DNA of Boomi overall, we've completely overhauled what we think is a world-class onboarding experience for both our new customers, as well as our existing customers. John, you brought it up, you know, call it road, call it whatever. I mean, we're existing customers every day when you give them the best onboarding experience too, so that they can accelerate their journey, which kind of gets into the Boomi person, our whole community, which when we were together last time, face to face, you wouldn't be seen. We weren't just two years ago, we're now over a hundred thousand members and part of our community growing every single day, incredibly excited about that because that brings the knowledge base to all of their experience. And again, it really brings what customers really want to interact in a digital way and the Boomi versus so, so much significantly the number of knowledge base articles, the number of marketplace type vehicles that our cohorts construct talking to each other about what they're doing is so much more than comms. >>We didn't do this year, but again, you know, the Boomi versus so vibrant now it's kind of a force multiplier for more importantly, how our customers are learning from each other. Yeah. And just to tag onto that, John, over 38% of our customers are publicly. There's a movement here, industry, average of averages are high. So the platform really sells itself and customers nowadays, we're very grateful for that. >>I think you guys are a great example of product market fit and go to market fit. As people look at these metrics, you gotta nail customer success, which from day one, you gotta have the usage metrics. You've gotta have the integration. Now you've got hyper automation. And as you start getting the ecosystem, Mandy, you've got a branding opportunity here. You got, you have, uh, ecosystem, which is another tale sign of success. When you start having that word of mouth. I remember when shadow, it was kind of like poo-pooed, but that was the road behaviors became the cloud. You starting to see you guys see this ecosystem, you've kind of crossed the chasm, create opportunity for your brand. What's your reaction. >>Yeah, absolutely. And we haven't done any brand work yet. Right? That's common. So, you know, we're just getting started. >>Okay. So I have to ask what this viral thing going on. That's going to go, boom, go Boomi it. So a lot of kind of double entendres there, it and boom, you know, everyone knows that icon on their text. Boom. You know, it's good. Things are booming. What's going on? He was the update go, boom. It Boomi is, >>Yeah. So it's go movie. And this was something that our customers brought to us during the pandemic. We didn't have much opportunity. Honestly, we were all sitting behind our computer screens. So we decided that we were going to start to hold wine conversations with customers, just to check in, see how they're doing, see how we can help and get them together to share a story of how they're handling disruptions to the business. So over the course of several months, talking to customers globally, I started to hear people say, well, I told my so-and-so because it'll get done. If you have a problem, doesn't matter what it is. And all of a sudden they crystallized for me like, you know what, this is a movement. And so this wasn't something the marketing team dropped up. This is something we heard from our and have taken it to market. Now our team members talk about it or customers are talking about it. And really, again, it's a Testament to the pervasiveness and capability platform. You start with the connect, but you're able to grow with us as your business changes and opportunities advisement. >>Well, you know, that's a really good indicator of, uh, net, net, net promoter score kind of vibe when people are giving you your marketing slogans, uh, from happy customers. So a really great congratulations to the whole team there. Can you give us some specific examples since you mentioned referenceable customers of customer examples and take me through some of the highlights in your opinion, that kind of show where this is going in terms of customer use case and value. >>Yeah. And I'll start with one that's very near and dear and obviously very relevant, right? There's there's been some press on Moderna here recently. Um, you know, they were in the race to find a cure for COVID-19. They were looking to bring on new employees and they couldn't bring them on onboard these people. So they leveraged the technology to do an integrated, uh, pursuit of driving customers onto their own to their employee platforms. So we ripped, it celebrated their onboarding cut that time in half. So they could actually start working on what matters. So then undifferentiated heavy lifting around the administrative tasks associated with getting my social security number, as well as other aspects that we all have joining a company that's automated, you can get to work faster. So that really helped improve drug development time and make a real difference in terms of getting the vaccine to market. >>So that's a net that's one tangible example, second example, customer of ours, uh, drink customer with net suite. They had to find different routes to market, right? And so they went direct to consumer. So they expanded their business through a global pandemic by leveraging Boomi technology and integrating commerce with their financial systems to be able to get to customers directly and also manage their Omni channel in a, in a new way. So again, innovator die. Right? Great. When you have another customer in India, that's a government, small country, citizens had to go in in-person together for their health ID cards. Well, offices are closed. Nobody's allowed to go be in person anymore. Within one week, they digitally transform. So they can disseminate healthcare cards in a critical time in a global pandemic to their citizens and have them get healthier. So three tangible examples of how we just in the last 18 months have been able to help these customers. >>So Chris, you guys have been operating a great business. Okay. Now you're on your own. You're independent. You got some great financing partners behind you, independent company, great trajectory building on that. A lot of economies of scale, you guys have built into it. Mandy, you've got great customers. Where's the next journey for you guys, take us through the operational growth strategy, uh, for Boomi. >>Well look, I mean, obviously we're on a hiring screen or hiring than we've ever done, and that's pervasive across the entire business, real focus on product engineering, who our go-to market, but we're also, you know, when you heard Chris, we're really redefining I-PASS. I mean, when I think about what I'm most excited about, it's a few things a we're violently aligned from kind of call it the chairman of the board to the newest team member. You know, we know what the opportunity is. We're all aligned, but as importantly, it's what we're doing from a product perspective. You know, when you've heard about intelligent connectivity, you've heard about automating connectivity, what we're doing from a discover perspective, EDA, everything we're doing in the marketplace, really accelerating what the adoption opportunities are for movie across the whole Boomi verse and across all of those new customers that we're acquiring and then ultimately seeing what they do. I mean, again, I, I, I love what Mandy says. I mean, it literally always, I feel so strongly about this within every single company in the world. I mean, it literally should be, no movie is because the opportunities are expansive and endless in terms of what we can do together. And that's what I'm excited about is really kind of unleashing this company on the world, see what we can do next. It was, we really think about this next iteration, >>Mandy, real quick to you, uh, when people say go Boomi it, when your customers say that, what does it mean to them? Why are they saying it? Take us through some of the psychology and some of the implications of, and the meaning of the word go Boomi from a customer perspective. >>Yeah. Great question. I think it's, first of all, it's a Testament of the trust, right? It's just going to work, right? So go get it done. It'll be fast. It'll be easy. It is not complex at all. Drag and drop visual interface. Just go make it happen and go move on to the next data is critical, right? It's the lifeblood of any organization or that backbone of connectivity that gives our customers confidence to go to work. >>Awesome stuff. Chris, final word for you. If you can just share in your opinion and be talking to your customers out there and future customers, what would you say to them as you guys go this next leg of the journey for Boomi? What would you say to them? >>Yeah, I would say come partner with us. Come on, understand what we can do for your business. Come understand what true intelligent, automated connects in Lightspeed in terms of how fast we can do that with you. And let's go explore the art of the possible because to me, that's >>Awesome, Chris. Great to see you, Amanda and great to see you virtually. Can't wait to see you in person and next event, uh, and congratulations on all the success and looking forward to covering the next leg of the journey of Boomi. Thanks for coming on. Okay. This is the cube coverage of Boomi's out of this world event. I'm John furrier hosted the cube. Thanks for watching.

(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)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Presenting Accelerating Automation with DevNet, brought to you by Cisco. (downbeat music) >> Hello, and I'm John Furrier of theCUBE, your host for Accelerating Automation with DevNet by Cisco. And we're here to close out the virtual event with Mandy Whaley, the senior director. Mandy, take it away. >> Thank you, John. It's been great to be here at this virtual event and hearing all these different automation stories from our different technology groups, from customers and partners. And what I'd like to take a minute now is to let people know how they can continue this experience at DevNet Create, which is our free virtual event happening globally on October 13th. There's going to be some really fun stuff. We're going to have our annual Demo Jam, which is kind of like an open mic for demos, where the community gets to show what they've been building. We're also going to be giving out and recognizing our DevNet Creator award winners for this year, which is a really great time where we recognize our community contributors who have been giving back to the community throughout the year. And then we've got really interesting channels. We have our Creators Channel, which is full of technical talks, lightning talks. This is where our community external to Cisco people come in, share what they've been working on, what they've been learning during the year. We also have a channel called APIs in Action, which is where you can go deep into, you know, IOT or collaboration or data center automation and get demos, talks from engineers on how to do certain use cases. And also a new segment called Straight from Engineering, where you get to hear from the engineers building those products as well. And we have a Start Now for those people just getting started who may need to dive into some basics around coding, APIs, and GET. That's a whole channel dedicated to getting them started so that they can start to participate in some of the fun challenges that we're going to have during the event, and we're going to a have a few fun things. We have some DevNet Advocate team members who are also musically talented. They're going to share some performances with us. So we encourage everyone to join us there. Pick your favorite channel. Join us in whichever timezone you live in, because we'll be in three different timezones. And we would love for you to be there and to hear from you during the event. Thanks so much. >> That's awesome, very innovative, multiple timezones. Accelerating Automation with DevNet. Thank you so much for watching, and we'll see you at DevNet create. Thanks for watching. (downbeat music)

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

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

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Presenting Accelerating Automation with DevNet. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got a great conversation and a virtual event, Accelerating Automation with DevNet , Cisco DevNet. And of course we got the Cisco brain trust here. Cube alumni, Susie Wee, Vice President, Senior Vice President, GM, and also CTO of Cisco DevNet and Ecosystem Success CX, all that great stuff. Mandy Whaley, who's the Director, Senior Director of DevNet Certifications, And Eric Thiel, Director of Developer Advocacy, Susie, Mandy, Eric, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you, John. >> So we're not in person >> It's great to be here. >> We don't, can't be at the DevNet Zone. We can't be on site doing DevNet Create, all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years. We're virtual, theCUBE virtual. Thanks for coming on. Susie, I got to ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you had has been awesome, but DevNet Create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the DevNet community. This ties into the theme of accelerating automation with DevNet, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service or XaaS as it's called (Susie laughs) and automation plays a critical role. Could you please share your vision because this is really important and still only five to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and programmability. What's your vision? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are coming online as, well I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud, as they're growing in new areas, as we're dealing with security, as everyone's dealing with the pandemic, there's so many things going on. But what happens is, there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking, it has security, it has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be able to, you know, really satisfy everything that businesses need? And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable. The infrastructure is programmable, and you don't need just apps riding on top, but now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation, you can rise to higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the stack by leveraging automation. >> You know, I remember a few years ago when DevNet Create first started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale, and we were talking about Meraki, you know, not to get in the weeds about you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about then, this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was at Cisco Europe in Barcelona before all the COVID hit. And you had >> Susie: Yeah. >> The massive cloud surge and scale happening going on, right when the pandemic hit. And even now more than ever the cloud scale, the modern apps, the momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing more innovation at scale because the pressure to do that, because the businesses need to stay alive. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> I just want to get your thoughts on what's going on in your world, because you were there in person. Now we're six months in, scale is huge. >> We are. Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is as all of our customers, as businesses around the world, as we ourselves all dealt with, how do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because you have to go home and then figure out how from home can I make sure that my IT infrastructure is automated? How from home can I make sure that every employee is out there and working safely and securely? You know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and be in kind of, you know, just, you know, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. So we had to extend business applications to people's homes in countries like, you know, well around the world, but also in India where it was actually not, you know, not, they didn't have rules to let people work from home in these areas. So then what we had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer, you know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home. So that put extra stress on automation. It put extra stress on our customer's digital transformation and it just forced them to, you know, automate digitally transform quicker. And they had to, because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers, you had to figure out how to automate all of that. And we're still in that environment today. >> You know one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, Kubernetes microservices. So those things, again, all DevOps and, you know, you guys got some acquisitions, you've bought ThousandEyes, you got a new one. You just bought recently PortShift to raise the game in security, Kuber and all these microservices. So observability super hot, but then people go work at home as you mentioned. How do you (chuckles) >> Yeah What are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's Zooms and Web Ex's and education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this in the app side? How are you guys looking at the, what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this programmability challenge and observability challenge that's such a huge deal? >> Yeah, absolutely. And you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right? You know, back when we talked to Todd before, he had Meraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use, this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place. And now he has Cisco's entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that bigger, at that bigger scale for Cisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation and the APIs into all of it. But when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. They had to build in. And what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people to work from home and how well you could reach customers. All of that used to be an IT conversation. It became a CEO and a board-level conversation. So all of a sudden, CEOs were actually, you know, calling on the Heads of IT and the CIO and saying, you know, "How's our VPN connectivity? Is everybody working from home? How many people are connected and able to work and what's their productivity?" So all of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure IT stuff became a board level conversation and, you know, once again, at first everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people working, but now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they are now building in automation and digital transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observability, you know, looking for those events, the dashboards, you know, so it really has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. >> Susie, I know you got to go, but real quick, describe what accelerating automation with DevNet means. >> (giggles)Well, you've been, you know, we've been working together on DevNet and the vision of the infrastructure programmability and everything for quite some time and the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that and you need the right skill sets and the programmability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people and it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people run things. Our DevNet community has risen to this challenge. People have jumped in, they've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. You know, we have, you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals, we have partners, you know, they're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerating automation, while it is about going digital. It's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications, of, you know, cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people, just as much as it is about automation and technology. >> And we got DevNet Create right around the corner, Virtual, unfortunately, won't be in person, but will be virtual. Susie, thank you for your time. We're going to dig into those people challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you've got to go, but stay with us. We're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric. Thanks. >> Thank you so much. Have fun. >> Thank you. >> Thanks John. >> Okay. Mandy, you heard Susie, it's about people. And one of the things that's close to your heart, you've been driving as Senior Director of DevNet Certifications, is getting people leveled up. I mean the demand for skills, cybersecurity, network programmability, automation, network design, solution architect, cloud, multi-cloud design. These are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >> Oh yes, absolutely. You know, what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers, that Susie was mentioning. Those are what's accelerating a lot of the technology changes and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like DevSecOps engineer, network automation engineer, network automation developer, which Susie mentioned, and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current scope and broaden out and take on new challenges. >> Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this piece of getting the certifications. First, before we get started, describe what your role is as Director of Developer Advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving. What's the state of it now because with COVID people are working at home, they have more time to contact Switch, and get some certifications and yet they can code more. What's your role? >> Absolutely. So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our, historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the DevNet Creates, the Cisco Lives and helping the community connect and to help share technical information with them, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? So that's had to pivot quite a bit. Obviously Cisco Live US, we pivoted very quickly to a virtual event when conditions changed. And we're able to actually connect as we found out with a much larger audience. So, you know, as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of, you know, how big the convention center is, we were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with our DevNet Day that was kind of attached onto Cisco Live. And we got great feedback from the audience that now we were actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it, but to your broader question of, you know, what my team does. So that's one piece of it is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We are always helping out build new sandboxes, new learning labs, things like that, that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the DevNet site. And then my team also looks after communities, such as the Cisco Learning Network where there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. We've seen a huge shift now in that group, that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the DevNet certifications and helping other people that are trying to get onboard with programmability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up the community with helping you answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the DevNet space as well, and are helping people with that set of certifications. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that. >> I got to ask you on the trends around automation, what skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Is there anything in particular, obviously network automation has been around for a long time. Cisco has been leader in that, but as you move up the stack as modern applications are building, do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What are people learning? >> Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned observability was big before COVID and we actually really saw that amplified during COVID. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observability now that we need it while we're virtual. So that's actually been a huge uptick and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that are now figuring out' how can I do this at scale? And I think one good example that Susie was talking about the VPN example. And we actually had a number of SEs in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up. And one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that IT departments might care about, about their firewalls, things that you didn't normally look at in the old days. You would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. And when that number went to 100%, things like licenses started coming into play, where they needed to make sure they have the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the SEs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use some open source tooling to monitor and alert on these things and then published it, so the whole community could go out and get a copy of it, try it out in their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that in trying to figure out, okay, now I can take that and I can adapt it to what I need to see for my observability. >> That's great. Mandy, I want to get your thoughts on this too, because as automation continues to scale, it's going to be a focus and people are at home and you guys had a lot of content online for you recorded every session in the DevNet Zone. Learning's going on, sometimes linearly and non linearly. You got the certifications, which is great. That's key, great success there. People are interested, but what other learnings are you seeing? What are people doing? What's the top top trends? >> Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time. They want to advance their skillset. And just like any kind of learning, people want choice they want to be able to choose what matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors leading them through a study plan. And we have two new expert-led study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do an immersive learning experience together with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kinds of team experiences called Automation Bootcamp. And then we're also seeing individuals who want to be able to, you know, dive into a topic, do a hands-on lab, get some skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. And so we have really modular self-driven hands-on learning through the DevNet Fundamentals course, which is available through DevNet. And then there's also people who are saying, "I just want to use the technology. "I like to experiment and then go, you know, "read the instructions, read the manual, "do the deeper learning." And so they're spending a lot of time in our DevNet sandbox, trying out different technologies, Cisco technologies with open source technologies, getting hands-on and building things. And three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD-WAN. There's a huge interest in people skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about. Security is a focus area where people are dealing with new scale, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways. and then automating their data center using infrastructure as code type principles. So those are three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing some more about that at DevNet Create. >> Awesome. Eric and Mandy, if you guys can wrap up this Accelerating Automation with DevNet package and virtual event here and also tee up DevNet Create because DevNet Create has been a very kind of grassroots, organically building momentum over the years. And again, it's super important cause it's now the app world coming together with networking, you know, end to end programmability and with everything as a service that you guys are doing, everything with APIs, I only can imagine the enablement that's going to create. >> Mandy: Yeah >> Can you share the summary real quick on Accelerating Automation with DevNet and tee up DevNet Create. Mandy, we'll start with you. >> Yes, I'll go first and then Eric can close this out. So just like we've been talking about with you at every DevNet event over the past years, you know, DevNet's bringing APIs across our whole portfolio, and up and down the stack and Accelerating Automation with DevNet , Susie mentioned the people aspect of that. The people skilling up and how that transforms teams, And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so what I think about Accelerating Automation with DevNet, it's about the DevNet community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community with those new skills. >> Eric, take us home here, Accelerating Automation with DevNet and DevNet Create, a lot of developer action going on in Cloud Native right now, your thoughts. >> Absolutely. I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for DevNet Day this year, for Cisco Live and we're seeing, we're able to leverage it even further with Create this year. So, whereas it used to be, you know, confined by the walls that we were within for the event. Now we're actually able to do things like we're adding the Start Now track for people that want to be there. They want to be a developer, a network automation developer for instance, we've now got a track just for them where they can get started and start learning some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. So I love that we're able to bring that together with the experienced community that we usually do from across the industry bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. So I'm really excited to bring that whole mix together, as well as getting some of our business units together too and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new APIs into their platforms? What problems are they hoping that customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So like I said, Cisco learning network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. >> Awesome. Thanks so much. >> I would >> Go ahead, Mandy. >> Can I add one more thing? >> Add one more thing. >> Yeah, I was just going to say the other really exciting thing about Create this year with the virtual nature of it is that it's happening in three regions and you know, we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions and content and speakers and the regions stepping up to have things personalized to their area, to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for DevNet Create that's going to be fantastic this year. >> Yeah, that's it. I was going to close out and just put the final bow on that by saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now during, with this virtual DevNet, virtual DevNet create virtual theCUBE virtual, I think we're learning new things. People are working in teams and groups and sharing content, we're going to learn new things. We're going to try new things and ultimately people will rise up and will be resilient. And I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And we'll ride the wave with you guys. >> So thank you so much (Susie laughs) for taking the time to come on theCUBE and talk about your awesome Accelerating Automation and DevNet Create Looking forward to it, thank you. >> Thank you so much, >> All right, thanks a lot. >> Happy to be here. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content and men, we stay virtual until we're face to face. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at DevNet Create. Thanks for watching. (upbeat outro) >> Controller: Okay John, Here we go, John. Here we go. John, we're coming to you in five, four, three, two. >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got a great conversation and a virtual event, Accelerating Automation with DevNet, Cisco DevNet. And of course we got the Cisco brain trust here. Cube alumni, Susie Wee, Senior Vice President GM and also CTO at Cisco DevNet and Ecosystem Success CX, all that great stuff. Mandy Whaley, who's the Director, Senior Director of DevNet Certifications, and Eric Thiel, Director of Developer Advocacy. Susie, Mandy, Eric, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you, John. So we're not in person. >> It's great to be here >> We don't, can't be at the DevNet zone. We can't be on site doing DevNet Create, all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years. We're virtual, theCUBE virtual. Thanks for coming on. Susie, I got to ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you had has been awesome. But DevNet Create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the DevNet community. This ties into the theme of Accelerating Automation with DevNet, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service or XaaS as it's called. And automation plays (Susie laughs) a critical role. Could you please share your vision because this is really important and still only five to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and programmability. What's your vision? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are coming online as ,well I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud, as they're growing in new areas, as we're dealing with security, as everyone's dealing with the pandemic, there's so many things going on, but what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking. It has security. It has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be able to, you know, really satisfy everything that businesses need. And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable. The infrastructure is programmable and you don't need just apps riding on top, but now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation. You can rise to higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the stack by leveraging automation. >> You know, I remember a few years ago when DevNet Create first started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we were talking about Meraki, you know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about then, this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was Cisco Europe in Barcelona before all the COVID hit. And you had this massive cloud surge and scale happening going on right when the pandemic hit. And even now more than ever, the cloud scale, the modern apps, the momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing more innovation at scale because the pressure to do that because the businesses need >> Absolutely. >> to stay alive. I just want to get your thoughts on what's going on in your world, because you were there in person now we're six months in scale is huge. >> We are. Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is, as all of our customers, as businesses around the world, as we ourselves all dealt with, how do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because you have to go home and then figure out how from home, can I make sure that my IT infrastructure is automated? How from home can I make sure that every employee is out there and working safely and securely, you know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and be in kind of, you know, just, you know, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. So we had to extend business applications to people's homes in countries like, you know, well around the world, but also in India where it was actually not, you know, not, they wouldn't let, they didn't have rules to let people work from home in these areas. So then what we had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer, you know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home. So that put extra stress on automation. It put extra stress on our customer's digital transformation and it just forced them to, you know, automate, digitally transform quicker. And they had to, because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers, you had to figure out how to automate all of that. And we're still all in that environment today. >> You know one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, Kubernetes microservices. So those things, again, all DevOps and you know, you guys got some acquisitions, you bought ThousandEyes, you got a new one. You just bought recently PortShift to raise the game in security, Kuber and all these microservices. So observability is super hot, but then people go work at home as you mentioned. How do you observe, what are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's Zooms and Web Ex's and education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this in the app side? How are you guys looking at the, what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this programmability challenge and observability challenges? It's a huge deal. >> Yeah, absolutely. And you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right? You know, back when we talked to Todd before he had Meraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use, this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place. And now he has Cisco's entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that bigger scale for Cisco and for our customers and he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation and the APIs into all of it. But when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. They had to build in. And what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people to work from home and how well you could reach customers. All of that used to be an IT conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually, you know, calling on the heads of IT and the CIO and saying, you know, how's our VPN connectivity? Is everybody working from home. How many people are you know, connected and able to work and what's their productivity? So all of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure IT stuff became a board level conversation. And, you know once again, at first everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people working. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they are now building in automation and digital transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observability, you know, looking for those events, the dashboards, you know, so it really has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. >> Susie, I know you got to go, but real quick, describe what Accelerating Automation with DevNet means. >> (laughs) Well, you know, we've been working together on DevNet in the vision of the infrastructure programmability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that and you need the right skill sets and the programmability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people and it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people run things. Our DevNet community has risen to this challenge. People have jumped in, they've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. You know, we have, you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals, we have partners, you know, they're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerating automation, while it is about going digital, it's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications, of you know, cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people just as much as it is about automation and technology. >> And we got DevNet Create right around the corner virtual, unfortunately won't be in person, but will be virtual. Susie, thank you for your time. We're going to dig into those people challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know got to go, but stay with us. We're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric. Thanks. >> Thank you so much. Have fun. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, John. >> Okay, Mandy, you heard Susie, it's about people. And one of the things that's close to your heart you've been driving is, as senior director of DevNet Certifications is getting people leveled up. I mean the demand for skills, cybersecurity, network programmability, automation, network design, solution architect, cloud multicloud design. These are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >> Oh yes, absolutely. You know, what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning. Those are what's accelerating a lot of the technology changes and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like DevSecOps engineer, network automation engineer, network automation developer which Susie mentioned, and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current scope and broaden out and take on new challenges. And this is why we created the DevNet certification. Several years ago, our DevNet community, who's been some of those engineers who have been coming into that software and infrastructure side and meeting. They ask us to help create a more defined pathway to create resources, training, all the things they would need to take all those steps to go after those new jobs. >> Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this piece of getting the certifications. First, before we get started, describe what your role is as Director of Developer Advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving. What's the state of it now because with COVID people are working at home, they have more time to contact Switch, and get some certifications and yet they can code more. What's your role >> Absolutely. So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our, historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the DevNet Creates, the Cisco Lives and helping the community connect and to help share technical information with them, doing hands-on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? So that's had to pivot quite a bit. Obviously Cisco Live US, we pivoted very quickly to a virtual event when conditions changed and we were able to actually connect as we found out with a much larger audience. So, you know, as opposed to in-person where you're bound by the parameters of you know, how big the convention center is. We were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with our DevNet Day that was kind of attached onto Cisco Live. And we got great feedback from the audience that now we were actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it, but to your broader question of, you know, what my team does. So that's one piece of it is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out build new sandboxes new learning labs, things like that, that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the DevNet site. And then my team also looks after communities such as the Cisco Learning Network where there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. And we've seen a huge shift now in that group that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the DevNet certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with programmability, they're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up the community with, you know, helping answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the DevNet space as well, and are helping people with that set of certifications. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that. >> Yeah, I mean, it's awesome, and first of all, you guys done a great job. I'm always impressed when we were at physical events in the DevNet Zone, just the learning, the outreach. Again, very open, collaborative, inclusive, and also, you know, you had one-on-one classes and talks to full blown advanced, (sneezes)Had to sneeze there >> Yeah, and that's the point. >> (laughs)That was coming out, got to cut that out. I love prerecords. >> Absolutely. >> That's never happened to me to live by the way. I've never sneezed live on a thousand--. (Eric laughs) >> You're allergic to me. >> We'll pick up. >> It happens. >> So Eric, so I got to ask you on the trends around automation, what skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Is there anything in particular? Obviously network automation has been around for a long time. Cisco has been a leader in that, but as you move up the stack, as modern applications are building, do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What are people learning? >> Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned observability was big before COVID and we actually really saw that amplified during COVID. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observability now that we need it while we're virtual. So that's actually been a huge uptick. And we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that are now figuring out how can I do this at scale? And I think one good example that Susie was talking about the VPN example. And we actually had a number of SEs in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up. And one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that IT departments might care about, about their firewalls, things that you didn't normally look at in the old days, you would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. And when that number went to 100%, things like licensing started coming into play, where they needed to make sure they had the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the SEs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, used some open source tooling to monitor and alert on these things and then published it, so the whole community could go out and get a copy of it, try it out in their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that in trying to figure out, okay, now I can take that and I can adapt it to what I need to see for my observability. >> That's huge and you know, you brought up this sharing concept. I mean, one of the things that's interesting is you've got more sharing going on. >> Controller: John, let's pause right here. Let's pause right here. I'm going to try and bring Eric and Mandy and everybody out. And then just start right from here to bring Eric and Mandy back in and close up. Stand by Eric just hold tight. >> All right, hold on >> Controller: just for one moment. Hold tight, we got Mandy back >> Controller: Standby. Standby. Standby. Standby, standby, standby. Hold hold hold.

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2020 brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hi, everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage, it's our fourth day of four days of coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live 2020. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Stu Miniman and two great guests here in the DevNet studio where the theCUBE is sitting all week long, been packed with action, Mandy Whaley, Senior Director Developer Experience, Cisco DevNet and Par Merat, Senior Director welcome back to this CUBE. Good to see you guys. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Glad to be here. >> So, we have had a lot of history with you guys from day one. >> Mandy: Yes. >> Watching DevNet from an idea of "Hey, we should do developer thing." And you also have DevNet Create which is a separate, more developer focused. DevNet and Cisco's developer environment. We've been there from the beginning, what a progression! Congratulations on the success. >> Thank you. Thank you so much, it's great to be here in Barcelona with everybody here, you know, learning in the workshops, and we just love these times to connect with our community at Cisco Live, and At DevNet Create, which you mentioned, which is coming up in March. So its right on the corner. >> DevNet Zone which we're in has been really robust, it's been the talk of the show every year, and it gets bigger and the sessions are packed, because people are learning developers, new developers as well as Cisco engineers who are certified, are coming getting new skills as the modern cloud hybrid environments require new skills. It's a technology shift. >> Yeah, exactly and what we have in the DevNet Zone are different ways that the engineers and developers can engage with that technology shifts. So, we have demos around IoT and security, and showing how, you know, to prevent threats from attacking the industrial routers and things like that. We have coding workshops from beginning, intro to Python, intro to Gets, all the way up through advanced, like, Kubernetes topics and things like that. So, people can really dive in with what they're looking for. And this year, we are really excited because we have the new DevNet certifications with those exams coming out right around the corner in February. So, a lot of people are here saying, "I am ready to skill up for those exams, "I am starting to dive into these topics." >> Well, Susie Wee was on, she's the chief of DevNet, among other things, and she said, there's going to be a DevNet 500. The first 500 certifications of DevNet are going to be, kind of, like, the hall of fame or, you know, inaugural or founder certifications. So, can you explain what does it mean? It's not a DevNet certification badge. It's a series of different, can go deeper than that? >> Yeah, just like we have our, you know, existing Network Certifications which are so respected and loved around the world, people get CCIE tattoos and things. Just like there is an associate and professional and expert level on the networking track, there's now a DevNet Associate, a DevNet Professional and coming soon DevNet Expert. And then there's also Specialist badges which help you add specific skills like data center automation, IoT web access. So, it's a whole new set of certifications that are more focused on the software. So they're about 80% software skills, 20% knowledge of networking, and then how you really connect up and down the stack. >> So these are new certifications, they're not replacing anything else >> No, no, no they're all the same stuff? >> They are new, they are part of the same program, they have the same rigor, the same kind of test. They actually have ways to interweave with the existing networking certifications, because we want people to do both skill path, right, to build this new IT team of the future. And so, it's a completely new set of exams. The exams are going to be available to take February 24th, and you can start signing up now. So, with the DevNet 500, you know, that's going to be a special recognition for the first 500 people who get DevNet certifications. It'll be life-time achievement, they'll always be in a DevNet 500, right? And I've had people coming up and telling me, you know "I'm signed up for the first day, "I'm taking my exams on the first day, "I'm trying to get into that." >> Stu and I always want to be on the list, so I think we might be on the 500 study up there (laughs). >> Of course, yeah, And what's really great is with the certifications, we've heard from people in the Zone that, they have been coming and taking classes and learning the skills, but they didn't have a specific way to map that to their career path to get rewarded at work, you know, to have that sort of progression. And so with the certifications they will really will have that. And it's also really important for our partners and Par Merat is doing lot of work with certifications and partners. >> Yeah, Par, definitely, I would love to hear a little bit, we've interviewed on theCUBE over the years some of the DevNet partners from a technology standpoint, of course the channel ecosystem hugely important to Cisco's business. Give us the update as to, you know, DevNet partnering as well as, what will these certifications mean to about the technology and go-to-market partners? >> Yeah, the wonderful thing about this is, it really demonstrates Cisco's embracement of software, and making sure that we are providing that common language for software developers and networkers to bring the two together. And what we've found is that our partners are at different levels of maturity along that progression of programmability. And this new DevNet specialization, which is anchored in the individuals that are now certified at that partner, allow them to demonstrate from a go-to-market standpoint, from a recognition standpoint, that as a practice they have these skills. And look, at the end of the day, it's all about delivering what our customers need. And our customers are asking us for significant help in automation, digital transformation, they're trying to drive new business outcomes. And this will provide that recognition on who to partner with in the market. >> Yeah, this is so important I remember when Cisco helped a lot of the the partner ecosystem build data center practices. Went from the silos and now embracing, you've got the hardware the software, we're talking multicloud. It's the practice that is needed today going forward to help customers with with where they are going. >> It really is. And another benefit that we are finding in talking to our partners is where packaging this up and rolling it out, is not only will it help them from a recognition standpoint, from a practice stand point and from a competitive differentiation standpoint. But it will also help them attract talent. I mean, it's no secret, there is a talent shortage right now. If you talk to any CEO that's top of mind, and how these partners are able to attract these new skills and attract smart people. Smart people like working on smart things, right? And so this has really been a big traction point for them as well. >> It's also giving ways to really specifically train for new job roles. So some of the ways that you can combine the new DevNet certifications with the network engineering certifications. We've looked at it and said, you know, there's a role of network automation developer. That's a new role. Everyone we ask in one of our sessions, "Who needs that person on their team?" So many customers, partners raise their hands saying, "We want the Network Automation Developers on our team." And you can combine your CCNP Enterprise with a DevNet certification and build up the skills to be that Network Automation Developers >> Certainly it's been great buzz. I've got to get your guys' thoughts because certainly it's great for careers and you guys are betting on the people, and the people are betting on Cisco. This is what's going on, it's a maturity of DevNet, almost. It's like a pinch-me moment for you guys, but you continue to grow. I've got to ask you, what are some of the cool things that you're showing here? As you mature, you still have the start here session, which is intro to Python and other things, pretty elementary, and then there's more advanced things. What are some of the new things that's going on that you could share? >> So some of the new things we've got going on, one of my favorites is the IoT and security demonstration. There's an industrial robot arm that's picking and placing things, and you can see how it's connected to the network and then something goes wrong with that robot arm. And then you can actually show how you can use the software and security tools to see was there code trying to access, you know, something that that robot was using, that's getting in the way of it working? So you could detect threats and move forward on that. We also have a whole automation journey that starts from modeling your network to testing, to how you would deploy automation, to a deep dive on telemetry and then ends with multi-domain automation. So really helping engineers, like, look at that whole progression, that's been really popular. >> Par, talk about the specialization, which ones are more, I'd say popular or entry level, which ones are people coming into getting certified first, network engineering, automation first? Or what's the-- >> Yeah, so the program's going to to roll out with three different levels. One is a specialized level, the second is an advanced level, and then we'll look to that third level. Again, they're anchored in the individual certs. And so as we look for that entry level, it's really all about automation, right? I mean, some things you take for granted, but you still need these new skills to be able to automate and scale, and have repeatable, scalable benefits from that. The second tier will be more cross-domain and that's where we're really thinking that additional skill set is needed to deliver dashboard experience, compliance experiences, and then that next level, again, will anchor towards the expert level that's coming out. But one thing I want to point out is, in addition to just having the certified people on staff, they also have to demonstrate that they have a practice around it. So it's not just enough to say, "I passed an exam." As we work with them to roll out the practice and they earn the badge, they're demonstrating that they have the full methodology in place so that it really, there's a lot behind it. >> So that means we can't be in the 500 list then even if we pass (laughs). >> Well, you might be able to be in the 500 list, but I don't know that theCUBE would end up being specialized. >> It's good banner advertising. No, seriously all fun, it's all fun. Cisco Live in Europe. Is there a difference between European and U.S.? Are you seeing any differences in geographic talent? >> You know what, the first couple of years that we did it, I think there was a bigger difference. It felt like there were different topics that were very popular in the U.S., slightly different in Europe. Last year and this year I feel, like they have converged. It's the same focus on DevOps, automation, security is a huge focus in both places. And it also feels like the interest and level of the people attending has also converged. It's really similar. Congratulations, it's been fun to watch the rise and success of DevNet, continues to be strong, obviously in the hub here, and the DevNet zone behind us, packed sessions. >> Mandy: Yes, yes. >> What's the biggest surprise for you guys in terms of things that you didn't expect or some of the success, what's jumped out? >> Yeah, I think, you know, one of the points that I want to make sure we also cover and it has been an added benefit. We were hoping it would happen, we just didn't realize it would happen this soon. We're attracting new companies, new partners, so the specialization won't just be available for our traditional VARs. This is also available for our non resellers and we are finding different companies accessing DevNet resources and learning these skills. So that's been a really great benefit of DevNet overall. >> Definitely, my favorite surprises are when I show up at the community events and I hear from someone I met last year what they went back and did, and the change that they drove in their company. And I think we're seeing those across the board of people who start a grassroots movement, take back some new ideas, really create change, and then they come back and we get to hear about that from them. Those are my favorite surprises. >> And I tell you, we've known for years how important the developer is, but I think the timing on this has been perfect because it is no longer just, Oh, the developer has some tools that they'd liked in the corner. The developer connected to the business and driving things forward. >> Mandy: Exactly. So perfect timing, congratulations on the certification-- >> The other thing that's been great is that Cisco itself, we now have APIs across the whole portfolio and up and down the stack. So that's been a wonderful thing to see come together because it opens up possibilities for all these developers. >> So Cisco is API first company? >> We are building APIs everywhere we can, and the community is taking them and finding creative things to build. >> Well, it's been fun to watch you guys change Cisco, but also impact customers has been great to watch. Par many thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Yeah, thank you. >> theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona for Cisco Live 2020 I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman. Be right back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2020 brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hi, everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage, it's our fourth day of four days of coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live 2020. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Stu Miniman and two great guests here in the DevNet studio where the theCUBE is sitting all week long, been packed with action, Mandy Whaley, Senior Director Developer Experience, Cisco DevNet and Par Merat, Senior Director welcome back to this CUBE. Good to see you guys. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Glad to be here. >> So, we have had a lot of history with you guys from day one. >> Mandy: Yes. >> Watching DevNet from an idea of "Hey, we should do developer thing." And you also have DevNet Create which is a separate, more developer focused. DevNet and Cisco's developer environment. We've been there from the beginning, what a progression! Congratulations on the success. >> Thank you. Thank you so much, it's great to be here in Barcelona with everybody here, you know, learning in the workshops, and we just love these times to connect with our community at Cisco Live, and At DevNet Create, which you mentioned, which is coming up in March. So its right on the corner. >> DevNet Zone which we're in has been really robust, it's been the talk of the show every year, and it gets bigger and the sessions are packed, because people are learning developers, new developers as well as Cisco engineers who are certified, are coming getting new skills as the modern cloud hybrid environments require new skills. It's a technology shift. >> Yeah, exactly and what we have in the DevNet Zone are different ways that the engineers and developers can engage with that technology shifts. So, we have demos around IoT and security, and showing how, you know, to prevent threats from attacking the industrial routers and things like that. We have coding workshops from beginning, intro to Python, intro to Gets, all the way up through advanced, like, Kubernetes topics and things like that. So, people can really dive in with what they're looking for. And this year, we are really excited because we have the new DevNet certifications with those exams coming out right around the corner in February. So, a lot of people are here saying, "I am ready to skill up for those exams, "I am starting to dive into these topics." >> Well, Susie Wee was on, she's the chief of DevNet, among other things, and she said, there's going to be a DevNet 500. The first 500 certifications of DevNet are going to be, kind of, like, the hall of fame or, you know, inaugural or founder certifications. So, can you explain what does it mean? It's not a DevNet certification badge. It's a series of different, can go deeper than that? >> Yeah, just like we have our, you know, existing Network Certifications which are so respected and loved around the world, people get CCIE tattoos and things. Just like there is an associate and professional and expert level on the networking track, there's now a DevNet Associate, a DevNet Professional and coming soon DevNet Expert. And then there's also Specialist badges which help you add specific skills like data center automation, IoT web access. So, it's a whole new set of certifications that are more focused on the software. So they're about 80% software skills, 20% knowledge of networking, and then how you really connect up and down the stack. >> So these are new certifications, they're not replacing anything else >> No, no, no they're all the same stuff? >> They are new, they are part of the same program, they have the same rigor, the same kind of test. They actually have ways to interweave with the existing networking certifications, because we want people to do both skill path, right, to build this new IT team of the future. And so, it's a completely new set of exams. The exams are going to be available to take February 24th, and you can start signing up now. So, with the DevNet 500, you know, that's going to be a special recognition for the first 500 people who get DevNet certifications. It'll be life-time achievement, they'll always be in a DevNet 500, right? And I've had people coming up and telling me, you know "I'm signed up for the first day, "I'm taking my exams on the first day, "I'm trying to get into that." >> Stu and I always want to be on the list, so I think we might be on the 500 study up there (laughs). >> Of course, yeah, And what's really great is with the certifications, we've heard from people in the Zone that, they have been coming and taking classes and learning the skills, but they didn't have a specific way to map that to their career path to get rewarded at work, you know, to have that sort of progression. And so with the certifications they will really will have that. And it's also really important for our partners and Par Merat is doing lot of work with certifications and partners. >> Yeah, Par, definitely, I would love to hear a little bit, we've interviewed on theCUBE over the years some of the DevNet partners from a technology standpoint, of course the channel ecosystem hugely important to Cisco's business. Give us the update as to, you know, DevNet partnering as well as, what will these certifications mean to about the technology and go-to-market partners? >> Yeah, the wonderful thing about this is, it really demonstrates Cisco's embracement of software, and making sure that we are providing that common language for software developers and networkers to bring the two together. And what we've found is that our partners are at different levels of maturity along that progression of programmability. And this new DevNet specialization, which is anchored in the individuals that are now certified at that partner, allow them to demonstrate from a go-to-market standpoint, from a recognition standpoint, that as a practice they have these skills. And look, at the end of the day, it's all about delivering what our customers need. And our customers are asking us for significant help in automation, digital transformation, they're trying to drive new business outcomes. And this will provide that recognition on who to partner with in the market. >> Yeah, this is so important I remember when Cisco helped a lot of the the partner ecosystem build data center practices. Went from the silos and now embracing, you've got the hardware the software, we're talking multicloud. It's the practice that is needed today going forward to help customers with with where they are going. >> It really is. And another benefit that we are finding in talking to our partners is where packaging this up and rolling it out, is not only will it help them from a recognition standpoint, from a practice stand point and from a competitive differentiation standpoint. But it will also help them attract talent. I mean, it's no secret, there is a talent shortage right now. If you talk to any CEO that's top of mind, and how these partners are able to attract these new skills and attract smart people. Smart people like working on smart things, right? And so this has really been a big traction point for them as well. >> It's also giving ways to really specifically train for new job roles. So some of the ways that you can combine the new DevNet certifications with the network engineering certifications. We've looked at it and said, you know, there's a role of network automation developer. That's a new role. Everyone we ask in one of our sessions, "Who needs that person on their team?" So many customers, partners raise their hands saying, "We want the Network Automation Developers on our team." And you can combine your CCNP Enterprise with a DevNet certification and build up the skills to be that Network Automation Developers >> Certainly it's been great buzz. I've got to get your guys' thoughts because certainly it's great for careers and you guys are betting on the people, and the people are betting on Cisco. This is what's going on, it's a maturity of DevNet, almost. It's like a pinch-me moment for you guys, but you continue to grow. I've got to ask you, what are some of the cool things that you're showing here? As you mature, you still have the start here session, which is intro to Python and other things, pretty elementary, and then there's more advanced things. What are some of the new things that's going on that you could share? >> So some of the new things we've got going on, one of my favorites is the IoT and security demonstration. There's an industrial robot arm that's picking and placing things, and you can see how it's connected to the network and then something goes wrong with that robot arm. And then you can actually show how you can use the software and security tools to see was there code trying to access, you know, something that that robot was using, that's getting in the way of it working? So you could detect threats and move forward on that. We also have a whole automation journey that starts from modeling your network to testing, to how you would deploy automation, to a deep dive on telemetry and then ends with multi-domain automation. So really helping engineers, like, look at that whole progression, that's been really popular. >> Par, talk about the specialization, which ones are more, I'd say popular or entry level, which ones are people coming into getting certified first, network engineering, automation first? Or what's the-- >> Yeah, so the program's going to to roll out with three different levels. One is a specialized level, the second is an advanced level, and then we'll look to that third level. Again, they're anchored in the individual certs. And so as we look for that entry level, it's really all about automation, right? I mean, some things you take for granted, but you still need these new skills to be able to automate and scale, and have repeatable, scalable benefits from that. The second tier will be more cross-domain and that's where we're really thinking that additional skill set is needed to deliver dashboard experience, compliance experiences, and then that next level, again, will anchor towards the expert level that's coming out. But one thing I want to point out is, in addition to just having the certified people on staff, they also have to demonstrate that they have a practice around it. So it's not just enough to say, "I passed an exam." As we work with them to roll out the practice and they earn the badge, they're demonstrating that they have the full methodology in place so that it really, there's a lot behind it. >> So that means we can't be in the 500 list then even if we pass (laughs). >> Well, you might be able to be in the 500 list, but I don't know that theCUBE would end up being specialized. >> It's good banner advertising. No, seriously all fun, it's all fun. Cisco Live in Europe. Is there a difference between European and U.S.? Are you seeing any differences in geographic talent? >> You know what, the first couple of years that we did it, I think there was a bigger difference. It felt like there were different topics that were very popular in the U.S., slightly different in Europe. Last year and this year I feel, like they have converged. It's the same focus on DevOps, automation, security is a huge focus in both places. And it also feels like the interest and level of the people attending has also converged. It's really similar. Congratulations, it's been fun to watch the rise and success of DevNet, continues to be strong, obviously in the hub here, and the DevNet zone behind us, packed sessions. >> Mandy: Yes, yes. >> What's the biggest surprise for you guys in terms of things that you didn't expect or some of the success, what's jumped out? >> Yeah, I think, you know, one of the points that I want to make sure we also cover and it has been an added benefit. We were hoping it would happen, we just didn't realize it would happen this soon. We're attracting new companies, new partners, so the specialization won't just be available for our traditional VARs. This is also available for our non resellers and we are finding different companies accessing DevNet resources and learning these skills. So that's been a really great benefit of DevNet overall. >> Definitely, my favorite surprises are when I show up at the community events and I hear from someone I met last year what they went back and did, and the change that they drove in their company. And I think we're seeing those across the board of people who start a grassroots movement, take back some new ideas, really create change, and then they come back and we get to hear about that from them. Those are my favorite surprises. >> And I tell you, we've known for years how important the developer is, but I think the timing on this has been perfect because it is no longer just, Oh, the developer has some tools that they'd liked in the corner. The developer connected to the business and driving things forward. >> Mandy: Exactly. So perfect timing, congratulations on the certification-- >> The other thing that's been great is that Cisco itself, we now have APIs across the whole portfolio and up and down the stack. So that's been a wonderful thing to see come together because it opens up possibilities for all these developers. >> So Cisco is API first company? >> We are building APIs everywhere we can, and the community is taking them and finding creative things to build. >> Well, it's been fun to watch you guys change Cisco, but also impact customers has been great to watch. Par many thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Yeah, thank you. >> theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona for Cisco Live 2020 I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman. Be right back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>>Live from Washington, D C it's the cube covering Boomi world 19 how to buy bullying. >>Welcome back to the cube Lisa Martin with John furrier. We are wrapping up two days of Boomi world 19 and I think boom is a really good word to set up. Our final segment of the show, John and I are pleased to be joined by a couple of guests. To my right is Sam choy cadley, the founder and CEO of manual labor. Sam, welcome to the cube. Thank you. Happy to be here. And one of our distinguished alumni, we have Mandy Dolly while the CMO of Boomi. Mandy, first of all, congratulations on an awesome event. This was our area here in the expo center was buzzing nonstop the last few days. We've heard from your C-suite, we've heard from partners, from customers, the Boomi fandom, as I said to you yesterday is legit, too legit to quit, but one of the cool things is that you have a new brand identity that we really want to kind of dig into because it wasn't in your face. >>It was really celebrate very strong. So talk to us about that. And then we'll get into what Sam helped you create. Absolutely. That was one of the most exciting aspects of the show, frankly, and we deliberately decided that we were going to show, not tell because we wanted to anchor the community. We wanted to anchor our customers and partners in the new Boomi. We're on a growth trajectory. Right. That's not a secret anymore. We're no longer a secret. When they brought me in, my goal was to make us a household name. We're well on our way. First thing we had to do was go refresh the look and feel to really get us to a point where we could start to connect with the Mark market in a modern way. We're a modern mill middleware platform where as John likes to say, cloud to Datto company, which I love. >>I've adopted. Thank you, and we also went to the oil card baseball game. The Washington nationals versus the walking brewers, which was dramatic, were down close. We were wearing the Boomi shirts with, I think we're the first ones out in the wild. Yes, you were five of us blue with the white letters and a sea of red. People love the shirt. They loved the look. They love the brand. So it worked. It did bottle compliments. It did. They loved it. Great to hear you're the genius behind this. Give us the motivation. Where'd it come from? What was the design principles, boys, you're thinking? Sure. Ah, you know, it's funny, it started with just a very casual conversation with Mandy. You know, when we start our work, we always ask about the brand itself and we try and personify it so that we get a true understanding of who or what the brand would be. >>And so we asked Mandy, you know, if you can explain the personality of Boomi two or three. Dot. Oh, how would you describe the personality and quit just as quickly. She came up with two words and she said bad-ass and swagger. And so that told us, right, because it's, it's a lot about, as Boomi evolves, you know, they have so much to be proud of. There's so much innovation and solutions that they're providing. It was like you don't need to overcomplicate the identity itself because the work and what you do is go into speak for it. And so we immediately thought about the different iterations and what the logo itself can look like. Because when you think about a logo, it's more than just an image or what it looks like. It's typically the first impression that people have. And and a lot of times you want to try and describe what you do or who you are through something that's visual. >>And so when you have swagger, when you were a bad ass, you don't have to overcomplicate what you're doing or saying. So we wanted to focus just on the name itself, especially as we're taking this new step of dropping the Dell name. You know, what is, how memorable can we make the Boomi name look? So taking this idea of badass and swagger, we also injected a lot of the key benefits. So you heard a lot about the up into the right. And so that's where if you look at the top of the B, which is called the Ascender, there is that beautiful angle. And so that's there. Our goal of staying in the upper right corner and you know there's a very specific degree so it's 30 degrees of, of that angle. And so 45 felt too in a lot of ways, like too harsh 30 felt like it was something that was achievable and attainable and you can stay up there. And so that's sort of why that you'll see that 30 degree not only in the logo but in a lot of their designs. Even the direction of the sprites. There's continuity and repetitiveness in that. And so hopefully people will start looking at that angle and the shapes and you'll recognize Boomi for it. >>Oh sure. The sales guys, man, you're going to take that shape and turn it into straight up cause they aspirational, want to get more sales, a hundred percent growth. But it's a little things though. Those are the little things. And also the eye has got the dot on there. Talk about that. That seems to be a D ingredient Mark that pops around and other places is what, what's going on with the eye. >>So a lot of, um, the equity that Boomi has in the, at Adam's sphere was really important and it was something that we wanted to carry through what we asked ourselves and the manual labor team was if we deconstructed the alum, how can we bring it back and introduce it in a new fresh way? And so we literally deconstructed it and came back with what is sort of the nucleus changing with a pop of color, let's it sort of shine bright. Um, and we talked a lot about the different meanings as it's a contrast and color that almost looks like a light, but it's also this sort of beacon. You know, when we think about the growth of Boomi burrs and the importance of the community sort of all coming together and lighting up all of what Boomi is and how continues to be successful. >>So the two words, I love bandy that you chose, that you wanted Boomie's brand to become badass and swagger. Sam, I'd love to get your opinions on the, the first logo that you saw that Mandy says, we want to revolutionize us. The. What was your, what were the two words that you would use to describe it? I'm just curious how your mind works and sees that and goes wow. Simple one I think about the animal was very scientific and it was very technical and I think that that speaks so much to all the solution and how in depth they go with both their products and the solutions. And so it was very obvious and it was very clear and I think it communicated really well as we looked to sort of modernize the brand and also sort of bring a new generation of developers and, and customers along. >>This was a great way for us to sort of re-introduce it. And then there's even other elements like we are, we call it the macro Adam, but you'll see there's, there's a coral and then it almost looks like there's rings around it. And it was our way of showing the energy behind the team. Um, Adam's fear the community. And so it almost vibrates if you look at it, especially against the Navy. And that was our way of sort of bringing in the life and the Adam at work. Mandy, you're beaming. This is so cool. It's very, first of all I'm like, this is data-driven. That is so incredible. All of the thoughts that went into designing this, I think this exceeded looking at her face and does bars. I'm so proud. And this partnership has been incredible. Has exceeded your expectations. I mean just going through this process of it's not just about changing a logo. No, not at all. It is not at all. This is incredibly strategic to our future. Right? Right. This is more than colors and fonts. >>So you guys are also wearing the buttons that had the B for bad-ass, but the dot. I noticed that boom, bad ass boom. Um, you know, we hear a lot and there's lots of the conversational AI thing. Just to kind of weave in some topic, I want to get your reaction is that data's should be a living thing. So you know, the classic brand consciousness, the brand should be a living thing. Sam, should it grow and nurture the brand >>we do. We say that a lot. I mean, because where's the vision going? I mean in a lot of ways a brand is a promise to the people that support it, right? It, we, Boomi can say we're, this is our brand, this is our meeting, this is everything. But if, if they don't fulfill that promise and if the community and the members and the customers and partners don't embrace that, it's just like you're standing in the woods by yourself, it will. The trust isn't there. Exactly. And so that's why we talk. We always say you have to nurture it. You have to keep it as alive in three years, five years as it is today during Boomi world. So how many different iterations did you go through? Like different, Oh, we're white. We're going to go there. There were nine 10 that we paired. We w met multiple conversations across the organization. >>This was not done an event? No, not at. We shared across broadly, I'm not a secret keeper and a even within the company, this was obviously internal confidential, but we were bringing people in to a to get opinion and make sure that there were shared ownership. What was the original response to Mandy when you came in to Boomi saying we, I mean, I imagine that's part of why they brought you in. Was it just yes time? Yes. Can you please hurry up? But some people can be really passionately tied. It's like when you're selling a house to someone doesn't like good wrestler, right? Let it go. Right, but that's hard to do. Especially if somebody has been around long time and they've nurtured this and they put so much heart and soul into it. But this sounded like they were receptive. Knowing that we need to evolve as our customers are evolving and as our technology is evolving. >>Well, here's the backstory on the former logo, Chris port, our COO who you've met and spoken to when he ran the acquisition of Boomi way back when is when he decided in PowerPoint probably, sorry Chris, to put a Dell logo, which no longer a really actually is no longer even follows Dell technologies branding guidelines and a Boomi font together. And that was how Dell Boomi logo was born. So it was put into place and we ran with it and nobody questioned it. We were too busy building and iPads business and so income's Mandy and says, here, we're going to go do this and really up our game in the market. And one thing we should know, John mentioned brand representation at the national scan the other night. There was a a Boomi store right over by our sat here that's been full. Every time I've gone over there, and I don't know what this gentleman was trying to buy yesterday, but whatever it is, you guys were already sold out of it. >>So this has been a suddenly, well there's a revenue source over here, but people want to embrace this. The proud customers, vendors, partners, they're proud to wear this brand. It's been the parent that we've seen and just in two and a half days has been really interesting. Well that's part number two. That's the Boomi verse. You're seeing them in action, right? They're wearing it loud and proud. Yeah. Right there. They're tremendously proud of the accomplishments and the business that we're driving for them. We partner with our customers. Right. And that's, that's the manifestation of, of what's happening. >>Well, Sam, congratulations to you and the team, Mandy. It takes courage to take a branding challenge like this in a big company. Certainly Dell's involved the other mothership, so he works very closely with Dell technologies as well. Congratulations. We have a Dell technologies bad-ass and swagger. Also the cubes here. We're bringing them bad ass sweater as well. Brand alignment. Good job. Different logos saying congratulations. Thank >>you Sam. We have, I have to before we go, we have to understand the name of your company is a very intriguing manual labor, which a lot of Boomi solves, you know, aims to solve in terms of automation about the name of Iranian will labor. Exactly as in irony. Um, so we, I am a family of immigrants. We moved over when I was four. My mom was one obsessed as Jackie Onassis and, and America and, and my dad, um, was a teacher in Korea, so when I was four, and I have two older sisters who are seven and nine. And she decided she wanted all of us to grow up here. And um, so we moved to America. And it's funny, I was, I think I survived on brands alone because it was, she wanted us to be immerse into everything. American culture. So it was chef Boyardee wonder bread. >>I mean literally it was only American, like iconic brands. But fast forward to that, we got here and none of us spoke English. And so my dad and did whatever work he had to, to support us. And so it was literal manual labor. It was washing dishes, it was, you know, working in a stock room, just, you know, doing whatever work he needed to do to support us. And so that's where the name manual labor comes from. It's an homage to my parents who did everything they needed to do, um, to support us, to give us the opportunity to be educated here and everything, all the benefits of it. Um, and then also just in that, we learned a lot around about just rolling up your sleeves and doing the work. Um, being proud of the work you do, whether you are a teacher or a dishwasher, um, immigrant or someone who grew up here. >>It was more about just owning that pride, um, doing what you need to do to, to be successful. So, wow, what a great backstory and a wonderful tribute to your past and your family and congratulations on what you've done for Boomi. Thank you Andy. A continued. Congratulations. I'll echo what John said. This is really been out. I can't wait for next year. Gosh, but it's really been an awesome event. We've had just had nothing but positivity from customers, partners, your execs, everybody there. You have even more fans than when you walked in here two and a half days ago. So thank you for spending two days with us. This has been incredible. Awesome. We'd love it. Learned a ton. All right. Well, we promised you a chatty conversation. I hope we delivered for John furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the cube from Boomi world 19 thanks for watching.

>>live from Washington, D. C. It's the Cube covering Bumi World >>19 Do you buy movie? >>Welcome to the Cube of Leader in live tech coverage on Lisa Martin John for years with me were a Bumi World in d. C this year Excited to have there could be four really chatty people in this segment warning you now we've got Mandy Dollar while the cmo abou me Anibal Corker s V p of sales guys welcome thistles been in Austin. This is day one of the main event partner event started yesterday Partner Summit One of the things that is always very resonant with Bhumi events as you get this sense of collaboration with your partners with your customers and it's very symbiotic. So some of the numbers that came out today I wanted to kind of geek out on numbers because last boom, the world was on the 11 months ago, and I think the numbers we were talking about where 7500 customers adding five new a day. Now it's over 9000 in over 80 countries. Your partner program is blowing up 580 partners, incredible growth. And Chris McNab told Jonah me earlier today. This event? Actually, no, he said in the keynote five x What? It was the first event. Wow. You guys all look very refreshed for being this busy facade. Mandy, talk to us about what's going on. Abou me from your perspective. The new branding is really cool to have that represent what booby is delivering. We're at a >>growth trajectory and we had to refresh our brand to put a new face on this business so we could accelerate our growth. This is a whole new boo me to the world. When I stood up, it sails kick off earlier this year. In February, we reposition the company and focused ourselves on selling solutions. And as a part of that strategy, to start to amplify this brand to really become more of a known entity in the market, it was time for us to polish the brand up. You know, we had tremendous product market fit for many years. We just forgot to tell the world. So when I came on board, I can't keep a secret. Here I am Brandy. Look and feel. Lots of new customer stories. We're accelerating outcomes. >>Very clean. Logo queen branding. What's the brand promise. Where do you want to take the brand? What's next? Where's this going? Take us through the vision. >>Great question. The vision for the business Is that why we exist? We went through and, you know, we deliver a connected business experience that the real reason why we exist is to accelerate business outcomes for our customers. That is our vision, all right. We're connecting and unifying everything in a ditch. Digital ecosystem. The world has gone digital. No longer is software eating the world digital. Is the new game in town gloomy as well. Poised to go do that? That is the vision. And it's all about the customer and sharing their stories and the winds that they have worthy, enabling technology that drives that outcome faster and better than anybody else >>we had on earlier the founder of Bumi sharing early successes, Lisa asked him the background behind all started, and he said, we made a big bet and self aware Founder said We got lucky and he got lucky. Made a big bet on cloud. Now you guys have 9000 customers. Last year, your number one number one priority was customer success equation then the keynote again this year. You guys are crazy about customer outcomes. What >>is >>that mean? You hear customer success equation? What is the equation? Because the math equation isn't like, is it? What? What is the formula? >>Well, I think it entails a couple of key things. It starts with the product right, and it doing exactly what people are looking for it to do. And the reality is most people come in and they have an idea that they want to do X, and they really end up doing X plus y Times E. And and that becomes that's a big part of it. So getting to understand the platform and then showing them, you know that we really care about their success, that in fact it's either win, win relationship or lose lose, we have to make them successful. We have a tremendous muscle when it comes to customer success and our support efforts and those types of things. So just making sure that they're on the right journey, that they're leveraging the platform that's doing what they wanted to do. And again, we're seeing so many customers come back in now because of that and thinking that they can solve so many more problems than what they originally anticipate >>talking on our opening around. Um, you're successful business model like you talk more about that. But in contrast to what we've been reporting on our sites and silken angle in the Cube is Wall Street sees we work pulled their I p o uber, all these big companies, they buy market share, get a position, and then they try to crank the monetization. They're not being looked upon favorably right now, because that entails extracts from the customer. You guys are more on the other side, the Cloud SAS model, which is provide value if you need more, buy more, lower price fits increased. That's an Amazon like flywheel. Yeah, So you guys are on the positive side of the SAS formula as you have that first you guys agree with that's happening. But what do you say to customers who is booming? Because now you're you have leverage software business. Yeah, we have the professional service is what does this mean for customers? >>We'll get I would say that what it means is that they can come in and solve a problem so much faster than they ever thought they could solve it before. They're thinking they want to go on a journey. Everyone talks about the journey right, and it all. It comes in about 1000 different shapes and sizes. And with Bumi having a layer like this to be able to connect, what you need to connect when you need to connect it, how you need to connect it, that's and doing that in such in a fashion that no one ever really thought. And again. You said you had Rick Nucci and in the Founder where they thought I just talked to a minute ago. And I always say he was talking about how he was listening to some of the customers success stories. And I looked at him. I said You didn't think they were ever going to do all this stuff, that they could do all these things And he said, You know what? We didn't anticipate. It really didn't and so getting them to do that. But the key, to be honest, a big part of our growth, although we're acquiring lots of new logo. Certainly, as you mentioned, let's new customers a huge part of our growth is that again people are going, man. OK, I I brought in a new SAS application service now, or something like that. Okay, that's good. But I've got all these FTP problems and I've got this database issue and I need to be able to leverage this existing on Premiere P. And now I'm going to work Day and I have to be able to, and it's just it's just we see them just starting to get very creative about how they're leveraging the fact >>it's opening up. You say, you know, from a marketing perspective, unlocking potential. But it's really true. I I saw yesterday first and the manifestation of the Bumi fandom. That's rial. I was talking to one of your customers who integrated use integration for a particular opportunity. I thought there might be some, you know? Wow, there's gonna be a lot of data coming out. What can we do with this? And all of the, um, kind of side benefits that came from that they couldn't have predicted. Neither could have Rick Nucci, but how they're able to become even, you know, as a transportation logistics provider, trusted advisors to the carriers and the shippers that work with them. And then they're realizing, Oh, actually what we're doing, you know, under the hood with Bhumi is making a carrier more productive because the workload is less less clicks, etcetera. So it's really it shows the transformation doesn't just stay within your customer, their customers as well. The sort of this snowball effect. It really got that resoundingly yesterday from summer combo, >>where we see the people, the customers figure out if this becomes a common data layer for their monetization journey, right. So now they have control of all this data, no matter where it is and how it's going out in public cloud private clouds, public's ask, whatever it is, and then they now they've got control. They can become creative with the data. Now they can provide new service is to customers and suppliers and partners and internal stakeholders, whatever it might be. And I think that's that's it. Haven't clicked for us a couple years ago, and Mandy has been great about making that really how we send the message and it's really seen takeoff. >>We really speak about transformation, right? That's business processes. That's customer experience. How do you take that data and build upon it using our flow capabilities and take thes wrote processes and start to have them automated in a way that you're driving new customer experiences. Right? Employees on boarding is one that we use internally. We talked about it before our MPs went from a negative. I don't know, two incredibly positive, right? That's what this technology can do. Once you have that data layer in, we become that enabling technology to to go drive these additional >>out. And he has net promoter score for the folks at the jargon that this piece of a good point with the new branding we saw, it resonates. Well, it's gonna create a lot of brand impressions. I know you've done a great job of getting it out there. It's only gonna get better. But you get the brain of pressure. Then I want to know who is booming. If they know Bhumi, who what's the new room? We're gonna be like, What's the plan? How we're going to scale up the messaging? How you gonna take it? The market with the brand, There >>s O. Our core strategic initiatives are really what's on top of mind for Cee Io's right connection is important. That the stuff that will talked about in terms of on Prem and multi hybrid cloud scenarios right modernization, right? Getting stuff off of legacy Fed has a massive opportunity in terms of modernization. We're seeing that already. You know, we were Fed RAM certified in August. We've already got her for stealing the door. Congratulations. A fantastic opportunity on modernization, transformation. The stuff I spoke about customer experience, the one I'm particularly excited about. This is the marketing strategy coming through the innovation layer. We have a quick serve retailer that is now taking facial recognition. When I go through a drive thru triangulating my data with Maya vehicle license plate, making me on the spot loyalty offers and also saying, Oh, Mandy, would you like your regular breath breakfast sandwich Order That is the artist >>or not, you're in a good mood or Rolls Express. Oh, >>yes, >>minutes late today she's going to storm through here, right? Like that level of sentiment analysis based on my voice. The other stuff we heard this morning, right? We're triangulating all of that to go Dr whole new ways of doing business. So that's what I find hard. Your >>ecosystem is a key part of any growth strategy. I have to get the customer equation I loved. Loved the business model. You know, a big fan Disclose that everyone knows that. But be successful. You guys have a challenge. You have to grow the brand. You had to build the ecosystem, build the community with education pieces again. They're these >>air >>real blocking and tackling things. What? You guys, what's your opinion? What do you guys gonna do with that? Give us the playbook. >>We've brought it all together under one brand now, right Community saw this morning the boom Evers. The >>asked 1000 people in that community manager. >>Absolutely. And now we are ready for exponential growth, right? We have a way to game. If I We have a way to certify and train more people are partners. Demand it. There's a skills gap in the market in technology. That's a known fact for many years. So how do we quickly enable intelligence around the Bumi platform and mind trust and share? So that's something that's gonna happen. So we're creating this in waves were creating a viral ality component to our community right, all under the Bumi brand. So it all becomes additive. And that was important for us, as far as a growing up as a business is. Well, we're We're on this fast growth trajectory and everybody's off doing their thing. So I came in and said, All right, guys, let's let's build some cohesion here and that is going to help us as we scale this business >>will. On the sales side, you're gonna get a lot of pull now from the marketing Digital's. A lot of organic stuff goes on digital. We know we do a lot of cubes that we see the data. You guys still get the lead. You got too close sale cycles. This is kind of the business side of it. How's that going? What's that? What's an engagement looked like? How fast do Customs committees that word of mouth they talk to each other? What if some of the dynamics in the field? >>Well, we're seeing some of those times shrink. It's weird. I've been here seven years, so it's, you know, my team then was like 10. Now it's 470 or something, and so we've grown very fast, but it's on. We came in before. It was kind of like a connection deal. Last minute I thought, you know Oh gosh, I got an immigration problem. But now, a couple years later, it started really extending because it became a little more strategic. But now we're starting to see it shrink because people realize they're bringing it in, and they know that it's something that's key to what they have to do. What we're seeing is, is it's it's It's something that all of our partners are partners air so critical to helping us with the journey because we're really still just talking about one little piece of that larger pie. And so they come in and become with Come in with us every single time and we're globalizing as you mentioned all the countries that we're doing this in. But you know, France and Germany, or big efforts for Japan, the Fed those were like four areas. If I could pick that partners and how we're going to those markets >>are credible. Follow up on that. Just as you guys are getting these deals. Whats When does a customer know they have a Bumi opportunity? What is their problems? or a moment Is that a certain use cases? It like, Wow, I got integration problem. Is it integration? Problem called Boo me. What's that? What's the success pattern that you're seeing for the winds? >>You know, I'm gonna go back to the four that we talked about because, you know, part of part of my challenges, the sales leader for seven years was I've said this is the most organic technology I've ever I've ever dealt with. Representative. Because when we walked in, it could go anywhere. People wanted to do Data Analytics. They wanted to solve that TP problem. They wanted to do front. And you heard Olive from Sky. And she's thinking front end customer support stuff. So it really could go anywhere now is always always about managing data and collecting it. But, I mean, it really was. It comes from so many places, and the sale cycle has been, you know, has changed because of it. >>So as the marketing and the brand have evolved since Mandy spent on board, how much are you time? Are you still spending describing? Okay. So Bumi is how much more brand awareness and recognition do you have now? And how is that making the job easier? Because the attention the renewal rate is really high. 97%. >>Yeah, what's actually almost 99% from our field customers, and then we get over AM customers as well, about 97%. So how do we How do we keep the customers >>in terms of brand awareness, all the recognition? How much if you compared to seven years ago, when you were having to say, Well, buoy is now with Chris, McNall said, Hey, there's gonna be 100 different mentions of customer stories at this event alone. How much easier is your job? Enough sense? Because people are now much more aware of Bloomie's capability. >>I think people realize they need. This is what I say to all of our partners and even we're talking Deltek people. Every single customer will invest in this type of technology over the next several years. It might be a very tactical thing to do, but but call it a night pass. Call it a simpler way to connect and manage and access your data. So, yes, we're proud we're over that bridge to say OK, this is what was legitimate I think we're still having conversations about how strategic it is. But again, that's typically an interpretive process. We weigh very rarely come in and say Someone says, Oh, I'm going to replace all of this So it is. It's I'm going to solve this problem And then they go, Oh, all right now And its architects and leaders are going, Oh, well, we could solve all of these other problems that we've had >>Well, and if I may, they say, normally it would have taken me months to do this and you did it in days. Yes, we're interested. So that's that's the value. Proper >>the equation. Accelerate, right? >>Well, they were. The thing that we're observing is that the projects are increasing, not decreasing, and the number of project because they could be little things. That's right. That time to value is the proof points versus the long monolith proposal. It's up and running, and the jet states for months and months. >>Well, you talk about the integrators that we have so many integrators that we work with. We were worried at first years ago. Are we taking their business from them a little bit right? Because they have a lot of folks who are focused on that. But what they found is they're solving problems faster. But they're just doing the time. More problems, right? There's that there's this. Projects are growing. >>What I love about your business model is that the trend that we're covering is it's not I t setting the pace of projects. It's the projects themselves that then dictate to the cloud scale. And so I think you guys are tipping on this new we call Cloud to point out, which is it's completely flipped around anyone. If it's a mission based organization or for profit, there's a project to do something valid. You That's right. I t is just has to support it, not dictate terms. So this is a whole different level of thinking. Having the SAS business model >>well and layer in the usability of the product, right? The interface We go after citizen integrators lines of business. I can go build something for my marketing text back that's powerful, >>and the veterans examples of great one of the key No. Two people have to get done and they make a difference. They create value, >>absolutely speaking of value, this event is five x bigger then it was two years ago. Mandy, congratulations on everything that you guys have done. The voices of your customers are couldn't be stronger. That's the best friend validation that you can get. We're excited to be here. We've had a great day. One can't wait for day two tomorrow. >>Yeah. What are you doing? The product. >>Yes, I do. And more customers as well. We could all live on from sky, for example. Jillian is on. I think candy dot com hopefully is gonna bring in some candy. >>Yes, they well, two ton can. Absolutely. There's candy right back >>here. Awesome, guys. Thank you, Will and Mandy. So much for having the cube here and joining with us today. >>Thank you for your support. It's always great to chat with you about >>our pleasure. See, I told you it's gonna be chatty. John Ferrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from Bhumi World 2019. Thanks for watching

>> 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)

>> live from Mountain View, California It's the queue covering definite create twenty nineteen. Brought to You by Cisco >> Hi, Lisa Martin With the Cube. We're live at the Computer History Museum for Cisco. Definite Create twenty nineteen John for years my co host, and we're pleased to welcome back to the Cube. Mandy Whaley, senior director of developer experience for Definite Mandy. This event is bursting at the seams. This is the third definite create, but you've been involved for the last five years or so from the beginning, when this was really groundswell talk. Before we're going to talk about a history of Devon, tell our audience what definite is. What definite create is as well, >> Absolutely definite is Cisco's developer community so anywhere that Cisco has a P iis rst case anywhere that people can build on top of our platforms. Definite is the community that enables those developers. So we do. You know a lot of connecting of people within the community way also do a lot of developer enablement Sample code Documentation Blog's Learning Resource is in person workshops, online workshops. I lead our developer experienced team, which is our developer advocates who are you know being the voice of developer, helping the developers get inspired in buildings also are definite. Sandbox teams hosted labs. If you want to use some networking FBI's you may not have extra network playing around that you can program against an experiment. So we offer reserved hosted labs that anyone can use free by becoming a definite remember and then the other part is our our developer content and support. So really getting the information out there and supporting the developers so definite is our community that enables everyone to build on top of Cisco. >> And this community is now sorry, John. We're both very excited, Assistant Suzy was announcing this morning over five hundred eighty five thousand members strong and the energy and the excitement in the room this morning with the Kino people are jumping at the bid. When you guys talked about WiFi six, I loved the examples that you gave this community is it is engaged. That is one of >> the things that's really exciting. Teo, about working with the definite community is that I feel like the energy that we put in, we get back multiple fold from the community, right, and it's great to see people who started with us maybe five years ago who have, you know, made their first AP I call started down this path, and now they're building full applications and they're here sharing that information by presenting with the community and giving back and that excitement that engagement is really one of the funnest parts of my job. >> Man, you talk about the evolution of definite create definite, pretty good background on that. Tell the story. I know I've been there with you guys since the beginning of the Cube. I know little about, but I want you to tell the story because it was a genesis that came out of what you guys we're seeing in the definite community where Cloud was really becoming part of it. Tell the where the definite created portion came on. And what it means for the definite community and developers at large. >> Yes, absolutely. So I started working with Emmet before Devon. It had a name so before it was actually definite. That was five years ago and way started building the community. We have a developer event within Sisqo live. So we have the definite zone, and it's we offer a lot of our constant and classes and workshops. Their way started getting requests from that audience, saying WAY would like a smaller events with more ability, tohave, you know, deeper conversations more, one on one and just focused on the developer community. And this was when multi Cloud was really starting to become a big piece of the Cisco strategy. Are developers were trying to figure out howto work in that space. Cloud native was taking King off, and that was the first definite create on, which was three years ago. It was a very small venue in San Francisco, and it was our very closest and, you know, deepest engage set of members that came to that first year and then. But we had such great engagement. Some of that energy that you mentioned and everyone who helped build it towards the second year, which we had last year at the Computer History Museum, says same same than you. And what special, definite create. As we really try to get the two parts of our definite community together, the application developers and our infrastructure automation Dev ops teams right, and we try to bring them together. This one event where they can really exchange ideas, you know, get to be talking the same language. This morning we had conversations around WiFi six from the application Developer side Like what does that enable for the application developers and new things you could build? And then, you know, how is that also interesting? Teo, the networking site >> of any demos, are a big part of it. You got the hack a thon camp. Get the camp experience. You can create great tools, but the the events, not your classic event. It's not like that's Get the numbers up. Let's get tennis. Let's make some money. It's not about that vibe. This is a different vibe. It's more of let's make it intimate, somewhat structured, but disorganized enough to be collaborative. >> Yes, it's definitely collaborative, and it's definitely a community focused event over. I think over seventy five percent of the content this year came from the community, so they're here giving back and presenting their workshops. It's also very hands on. Hands on is actually kind of a core definite value. We, like Teo, always give people the ability Teo code something. Try something, build something So you mentioned can't create that is our it's >> it's We call it a build a thon because it's a little more structure >> than a free form hackathon. We start with some use cases. We make the technology available, and they actually started yesterday before the conference even began. Those teams started building solutions, and they'LL be presenting them on Thursday and then >> in the >> conference. We have hands on workshops in small groups with eight people, so you can really, you know, take the time to actually get in, run the code, do the work, ask questions right to the presenter on. And we really want that collaborative. You know, sharing ideas feels very intentional part of building this conference. >> So I'd love to ask you some probing questions around the future of where you see this going because you have the key ingredients are coming together. You mentioned them, so scaling this up it's going to be a challenge because you have definite. You have Definite Zone and Sisqo live, which is the Cisco proper. Then you kind of have this elite community as my words. I guess it's, you know, the best of the best, but it's really a cross section of unique profile of persona is the intention to have these guys then go back to their communities are within the communities. Is that the scale point? Because how do you run these intimate events right and not lose the spirit of the ethos. >> So that's something we're, you know, putting specific thought into because we do want to keep the spirit. We've actually heard that from some of our, you know, kind of core community members that they really want to keep that aspect. So couple of things that we are planning tto help with that one is you may have seen this morning we gave the definite Creator awards. So those air awards for people who contribute to the community and a lot of those are people who have come and learn skills, taken aback to their organizations and been able to scale that out to their organizations. That's something that we're really actively working with people to do and do that in a very organic and community lead way. Um, the other thing that we have been working with is a program called Definite Express. So this is actually where we take a small part of our definite content. We kind of package it up and make it available for anyone to run in their region. Jin so they can have it. You know, in a different country they can have some of the same feeling that we have here some of these same workshops we've had those in. It was about two hundred fifty of those events in forty nine countries. >> So wait, man kind of thing. Yes, it's a physical events. It's not just sass on site services. >> That's right. >> Portable portal >> event and they do workshops just like they are here way. Inject some of the fun, same fun kind of activities. And then we provide all the infrastructure. There are sandbox, >> you hologram in there. I mean, you're so popular you can't attend all of them. >> No, I cannot. >> But I love >> to see on Twitter you can look up definite express and see one's happening, you know, all over the world at the same time, which is really fun. >> And how did those folks that are doing these definite expressed events How are they able to collaborate with you guys provide feedback from what they're experiencing in the field to help create Maur no pun intended helped create more. Definitely more, exactly more opportunities, you know, and really help you guys with this larger event so that they feel like they were in this community. And five hundred eighty five thousand. There's only about four hundred here that can fit in Russian. What's that somebody else? It's like So one of the things >> we do is while we're here at definite create, we do live stream a lot of the content. So it was really fun today. When we finished the keynote, I heard from some people that told me I was in the keynote. I was watching and I started texting my friends. Hey, you got to get on the live stream And that's a great thing to hear from the community because you're giving away for this people to join in. We also have on definite our community chat room. It's on every page, chat with us definite. It gets you right into a room with the developer advocates on our team and other community members, and we see the community there, you know, answering each other's questions, giving us feedback, letting us know what they need to move ahead in their careers and their projects. So that community chat room is really key. >> Give some highlights on what change since just go live Barcelona. What? Some of the important notable successes and work areas that you guys are doing a definite and definite create. >> Right. So we, as we mentioned in the Kino, our community growth, we've reached five hundred eighty five thousand. So that registered Dove nut members, that is, it's great to see that growing. And then we also see those members you know, growing their engagement with them, not going deeper into the material, building, more content, taking it back to their organizations and things like that. Right now we are building up to Cisco Live Us, which is coming up in San Diego in June, will have our full definite zone there. So a lot of exciting activities that were planning for their We hope everybody can come and see us there, and then another thing is, could exchange. So could exchange. We actually announced it a definite create last year and launched it a little bit after definite create code exchanges the place for the community to share their projects so they can anything that is open source. They can share it by sending us there. Have link way curate that end Tio Francisco relevant sort of catalog. If you're looking for a sample to use DNA center and you want to see it in Python, you Khun, go search for exactly that. Get back some projects that the community have submitted. So we're excited to announce this week that we've reached over four hundred projects in code exchange of those curated, you know, projects that have gone to the process and been posted there. That was a really exciting milestone, looking back to create from LA >> So it's working. Yeah. So what's the vibe in? Certainly Cisco. I know Suzy has and Team have been kind of getting a lot of press and praise press externally, praise internally it Cisco, as the big battleship of Cisco, kind of gets on that cloud wave coming multi cloud hot area. >> It is so one of the things that is really exciting as we are seeing a p, I be available across our whole portfolio. So in every area that Cisco has products and up and down the stack at the device layer at the controller layer at the cloud layer. So that's very exciting from a definite perspective, because it gives us more for our community to work with more opportunity for developers. And that changes Ciscos very palpable. It's very exciting. And we're, you know, bringing the definite community into that as much as >> it's from creativity to we saw the demo for a fish about the virtual realities cable first peek in Barcelona. But here, amplifying that with with five six to you could just with virtual reality look at a devices. They see all the staff see with network coverage. Yeah, WeII to do work. >> Yeah, exactly. And >> me, that demo is a great you know, example of this applications meaning infrastructure message, which is really what definite create is about. We wrote an augmented reality application running on a mobile device, but you can check literally seeing the signal strength from all your access points on. So that's just a great example of those two things coming together. >> Speaking of coming together, one of the things that you touched on this a minute ago. But what in the keynote this morning, when I was looking at in the Mirror Rocky demo of the other things that you guys were doing and the evolution of Cisco. I just thought, What CART horse which ones, which was It has definite been really kind of fueling Cisco's evolution. Looking at all of the available, as you mentioned across the product portfolio has been around a long time. Is it is it fair to say that definite has kind of been a fuel for that? And Cisco's going Wow, we've got this phenomenal community were evolving because our customers are we need Teo. Yeah, I think it is. It is very much >> hand in hand. We worked really closely with our product teams and we worked hard to be that voice of the developer with our product teams and Cisco. And it's been a journey that started, you know, five years ago where we knew that the guys were going to come, we knew that there would be a prize across the portfolio and within definite. We really believed in that and are definite community believed in it. And you know, we've been building it very step wise and very intentionally since then. So it's really been a great partnership and a really exciting time to be it Cisco and being a part of that transition. >> Well, I just signed up to chat with you guys since you brought it up earlier. Developer dot cisco dot com That little chat with us on every page signing I signed with my get hub handles >> you can log in with. You're having >> your chair stealing the code and check it into the >> codex scene. >> We're gonna blow something for one. So many exciting has been great to watch. You guys, you got the Moroccan green jacket off. >> It's very Rocky demo today. >> Meraki has been a big part of definite success, and within the community's been the reaction's been very positive. It's not in the classic portfolio of collaboration. It's really going to a different What is muraki mean for the development? What? What has it done? What has enabled Why is it important? >> Yeah, so, um, a Rocky has been great because it's one. As Todd mentioned today, they really have this mission of simplifying their experience, and they've done that in there. You I and they've brought that to their developer experience as well, which is really exciting for me. Rocky is Cloud Managed Network Club managed WiFi, and then they have a very happy I'd driven approach where you can automate almost everything you could do through the eyes. And then there's additional services that you could get from Iraqi, like indoor location data and things like that. So it really opens up opportunities for both of our parts of our definite audience application developers who might be writing an indoor location based application or doing something with the cameras that we saw today on DH, then the infrastructure automation side who can very, very efficiently, you know, manage and deploy their networks. >> It's nice connective tissue for the developers kind of gives you best table two worlds, wireless on the front end, back and network connections. So it really becomes a big part than seems like >> it is. It is. And that's another reason why we were so excited about the new MURAKI developer hub that Todd adults today on Definite because it really is a place where we can show that connective aspect of it. I have all the code and use cases that really connects this to audience. >> We'LL talk will be very excited to know that some of your community members actually have Iraqi devices at their house. They way, they're running their cameras at their homes and everything's >> that's right. >> So being I think it's on the Web, one of the, if not the on ly conference community that brings together the APP developers, those girls and guys thie infrastructure, folks, What's one of your favorite stories that really shows thes two worlds coming together, understanding each other, communicating anything that really sticks out of the last few years for you? Gosh, there's >> many and a lot of them are just hallway conversations that I might stop by and hear people connecting and kind of learning about. You know what each person works on and learning to kind of speak the same language and get together. One story that I think really stands out as a big success is around a partner that we work with who does indoor location applications. And there's pure software company right. They write mobile applications that do indoor location, and but they they need a network underneath that, and so we have had a great coming together of some of our main Cisco loyal people who go out and stall the network's connecting with partners like that who come from the pier software side. We've written applications on DSO. That's that's a great one. And that is really something that we see replicating in many places. And I feel like some of the hallway conversations here are, you know, starting the next stories that happened like that. >> This is one of some of the best cause they're natural. Organic conversations are not scripted. It's not reading slides. Well, I wish we had more time, but we'll have to see you back at dusk alive. All right? What about six weeks or so? Yes, it's coming out coming, kid. And Oh, Mandy, congratulations on this success bursting at the seams. And we appreciate you taking some time to talk with John and me today. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Our pleasure for John, for your I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live from Cisco. Definite. Create twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching. >> Yeah,

>> 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 Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Boomi World 2018. Brought to you by Dell Boomi. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live at Boomi World 2018 at the Encore Las Vegas. I am Lisa Martin with my co-host John Furrier, and we're excited to welcome the CMO, the new CMO of Dell Boomi, Mandy Dhaliwal. Mandy, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you Lisa, it's great to be here. >> And thanks for having us here. >> Oh my gosh. >> Second annual Boomi World >> Yes >> Doubled in size from last year, moved it from San Francisco to Las Vegas. This morning's keynote was action-packed, standing room only, and some of the stats that really struck out at me: five new customers are being added to Dell Boomi everyday, over 7500 customers to date, your Dell Boomi community is over 64,000 strong, there's a lot of momentum. Talk to us about, you're new, been seven weeks, what are some of the things that excited you about coming to lead marketing for Dell Boomi? >> Oh my gosh, hard to pinpoint one thing. So many wonderful things about this company. Market leading technology, Gartner Magic Quadrant leader five years in a row, right? Just fantastic reputation in the technology landscape. Everybody has very positive things to say about Boomi. The company culture, right? Companies like this don't come around everyday. It's fantastic, everybody is very collaborative, we have a winning culture, we put customers first. We don't just talk to the talk, we walk the walk, and it's fantastic to be a part of it. Outstanding sales team, outstanding leadership team, I could go on. >> Michael Dell said 80%, sales are booming at Boomi. But, as far as a marketer, or CMO, you have a challenge. You have a successful company that was acquired by Dell eight years ago, incubated, and is part of the puzzle pieces of the Micheal Dell strategy. You have all of Dell Technologies' portfolio, but Boomi seems to be one of the key ingredients. You got VMware, everyone knows what's going on there, Pivotal, and now Dell Boomi, born in the cloud. So you got product market fit, check. >> Absolutely, yes. >> Now you got to get the word out, you got to drive value, be part of that flagship trio that's Dell Technologies. >> Right, right. >> That's a big task, how are you going to attack that? What's your plan, what's the vision? >> First and foremost, it's awareness, right? We've got to get the word out. We've got so many wonderful customer stories, that we just need to share with the world. Our own company, amongst Dell Technologies, day one, Dell EMC merger, sales force was integrated, day one. And guess who did that, what technology was behind the scenes? We drink our own champagne. >> That's impressive considering I can't even imagine the sheer number of sales force instances that came together in a single day >> Absolutely, customer service. We're our own best proof point. Dell Technologies is our largest enterprise case study. Customer service, across RSA, Secureworks, and Dell Boomi, one point of contact, one phone call. We get notes and if there's an issue with any one of our customers, we're able to pass through that customer request directly to the company that needs to be dealing with the customer. We don't make the customer hang up and call another number. >> So cloud scale certainly gives you an advantage, we heard that. Product is strong, data now is becoming much more instrumental across horizontal data sets. So it's not just the silo data and do some integration, you got cloud native, you got VMware and the enterprise, you've got Pivotal, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, cloud native stuff. How are you guys going to take that data explosion and make it trustable? Is that part of the plan, is that going to be a key part of that? >> Trustable in terms in privacy and data governance? >> Just leveraging the data, being data driven. You mention integrating sales, that's a tough job that has to be done, check. But now how do you get value out of the app and the workloads that run with that data? >> Well it's a complex ecosystem that we're a part of, right? And that's Boomi's job, we radically simplify that whole ecosystem, so the value is starting to show. We're about to unleash next week a Forrester TEI study. So we took a conglomerate with five of our top enterprise customers and built this 300 billion dollar business as a scenario, and started to look at the value that Boomi was able to derive in terms of cost reduction, in terms of savings on infrastructure costs, in terms of innovation potential, as far as speeding up their routes to market, in the ROI, which came back conservative from an innovation potential perspective, because you really can't quantify what you don't know, 300% was the number in terms of the ROI that we're able to deliver as a Boomi-empowered business. >> Which is huge, there were, besides that, a number of other really eye-popping quantitative stats, business outcomes, that that Forrester Total Economic Impact study covered, one of them being, incremental revenue is the biggest benefit that Dell Boomi customers get, 3.4 million of incremental revenue. Here's some other stats that I saw here that I thought were really transformative are, cutting development times by 70%, freeing up IT resources, being able to reallocate them, helping, ultimately, accelerate the pace of innovation, which we know is critical to transforming and continuing to use data, and to John's point, establish that trust, not just with customers and partners, but also internally. >> Absolutely. Every company's a software company, right? We've been hearing that now for years. We practice it, we live it every day, we're empowering these brands to go out and do what they do best and re-imagine their businesses from their customers' perspectives. It's incredibly powerful, it's exciting. >> And you, sorry John, I was going to say you've got, speaking of customers, over 92% of the breakout sessions here have customers and partners, and I know as a marketer how challenging it is to get. And you said about 68 customers here speaking on your behalf. >> Absolutely. >> That's huge. >> Our community is tremendous. We truly partner with our customers, and it shows. You heard Chris Port on stage, recognizing customers for innovation in various categories. We take our customers and partner with them for them to be successful. The company culture extends beyond the employees, and it's been the secret to our success. We're able to help them unlock the value of their businesses. It starts with the data and the applications, but at the end of the day, we're an enterprise transformation company. And you're going to start to see a lot more of that in the coming months, as far as messaging, and the value that we deliver as a platform. >> I want to give you thoughts, Mandy, on a couple things. One is the technology partner program, and the ecosystem, you mentioned that, but also you're starting to see the messaging change around Boomi, Dell Boomi. Integration, certainly we know how hard it is, as a glue layer, to put stuff together, but you guys are talking about connecting businesses. So you're now moving up the value proposition, the more holistic kind of perspective. By design, is there a rationale for it? Can you explain why this is happening, what's the evolution? >> The market is taking us there, right? The customer need is where we're focused. Digital transformation, right now, today, the stats that we have, only 26% of digital transformations succeed. We've got an awful lot of customers saying, "Hey, we got to get this figured out." It's on the C-suite agenda, it's on the boardroom agenda. It has to succeed, it's innovate or die. There's stats out there in terms of how many of the Fortune 500 are going to be around 10 years from now, five years from now, right? Boomi is that company that will solve those problems. Michael said it this morning. >> And speed's important too, they got to get there faster. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> And that's not what they're used to. (chuckles) >> We have a very simple UI, very plug-and-play, drag-and-drop platform that helps our customers go deliver. Not to mention the power of the analytics and the AI that we've got behind us. We've got the pattern recognition down. >> Talking about the partner program, I'll say (mumbles) some of the announcements. Yesterday was a partner day. What happened yesterday, what's going on today, what's the vibe of the show, ecosystem, partner program, what are the new things? >> You know, bottom line for the partners, we're here to help them extend their businesses. There's tremendous momentum in the market as far as, we're pulling through demand on the integration scenarios. You know, we've got Deloitte and TCS, Accenture, some of our top sponsors here, our sponsorships are sold out, right? Our partners are here in this ecosystem. Dell Technologies, right behind us. It's a tremendous show of force, it's fantastic. And it just shows you the market potential and the need out there. Customers are clamoring for these types of solutions. >> As the CMO, I want to get your take on some of the messaging breakdown. One of them that came out today, left bold messaging is, not only, as you mentioned a minute ago, Dell Boomi is the transformation partner, but also that, "Hey we're re-imagining the 'i' in iPass." iPass is a competitive, well-established market. You guys are using your own, upwards of 30 terabytes of anonymous metadata to make the Boomi unified platform smarter, more responsive. As you look to help that 76% of customers who are failing in their digital transformations, how is the "re-imagined" 'i' in iPass going to be a facilitator of that? >> It's putting the user at the center of the experience. Steve Wood, our Chief Product Officer, is going to be on stage tomorrow, doing a demo of this re-imagined user experience. It's driven by the data that we've got, It's driven by the patterns that we've been able to look at as far as business processes and integrations, and be able to provide a user experience where the customer's at the center, I go with a problem, not a list of technologies that I need to connect. Mandy wants to build EDI for a couple of trading partners, right? I don't need to tell Boomi that, I need to tell them, "I need this outcome, "and I need data to be transferred from here to here," and at the end of the day, I, from my cell phone, want to be able to figure out what's going on as far as my supply chain. I want to know where that boat is, coming for Black Friday. Is my inventory hitting the port when it needs to? I should be able to see that from my phone. That's what we're doing, we're giving the power back to the users, and enabling them to go power their businesses. >> As a new person to Dell, we've known each other, at the last (mumbles) you were at a born in the cloud, Amazon sets the agenda for a lot of the cloud computing market, you guys are cloud native as a startup, really kind of nailed that stats formula with Boomi. Dell is not restrictive in the sense, but it's got a lot of muscle behind you. Boomi seems to be standing on its own and flying out, like VMware, while it's still 100% owned by Dell. Those trends are big, that's a big wave that you're on. How are you thinking about it as you look at your assignment as the CMO, how are you going to ride that wave, are you going to hang 10 early, are you going to build it out slowly? What's going on? >> Oh, we're going. We're going for it. We're going to go ride that wave, it's here. If anything, we've got to work better with our Dell Technologies partners, right? We're getting in deeper from a go-to-market standpoint, with a lot of the enterprise reps already in the ecosystem. We're looking at driving customer value. As Michael said, there's always a need for Boomi. We haven't found a single opportunity yet that Boomi isn't needed. >> So you're on a growth curve? >> We're absolutely on a growth curve. It's just, we can't get there fast enough. We're hiring like crazy, we're, you know, we're just doing it. >> What kind of jobs you guys looking for, what's the hiring, what are your needs? Take a minute to share. >> Technical talent is always priority number one for a company like ours. On the go-to-market side as well, we need sales people, you know I've got marketing recs out already, check our website. There's lots of opportunity from a VD standpoint partner as well, so tremendous opportunity on the go-to-market side as well as on the R&D side. >> Looks like Boomi is going to be one of those flagships for Dell Technologies. >> I certainly hope so, that's my vision. >> I mean, you've got good company. VMware didn't skip a beat, Pivotal's growing like a weed, Dell Boomi's exploding in a big way, you guys are doing great, congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you. >> And another thing, before we wrap up here, that is impressive, all those companies, those Dell companies that John just mentioned, including Dell Boomi as a business unit, all of them have women at the executive level. There are six CMOs, including yourself, female CMOs in that position, and that's something that theCUBE has always long been a supporter of women in technology, and I always admire that. It's great, congratulations on your appointment. It's great seeing a strong female leader in a role. And your energy is contagious, so. It's a good thing that they got you on that growth trajectory, 'cause I can feel it. >> It's happening, it's going to be amazing. And thank you for being a part of this journey with us. >> Thanks so much, Mandy, for having us, we appreciate your time, and have a great time at the rest of the event, we'll see you next year. >> Thank you, thank you. >> For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Boomi World 2018, John and I will be right back with our next guest. (digital music)