>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE covering DevNet Create 2018. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hello everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Cisco's DevNet Create here in Mountain View in the heart of Silicon Valley. I'm John Furrier, my co-cost, Lauren Cooney, our next guest is Susie Wee, is vice president and CTO of Cisco DevNet. This is her event, DevNet is a Cisco's developer team, conference, community, DevNet created a cloud native, much more dev ops oriented. Our second year covering it, it's only a year and a half old. The creator with her team, Susie, great to have you back. >> Great, it's great to be back. >> What a success, again. You guys are learning, we heard from the keynote that you made some changes, heard some feedback, you added more cooler elements. But this is about technology enablement tools, education, and then fun, and having people exchange information. How's it going? What's the upkeep? >> It's going great. So we're really excited to have our second DevNet Create, and what happened was last year, what we've always tried to do with DevNet overall is to make sure that we had hands-on material because people want to code, people want to learn about the newest technologies. We also made sure that the content of the first DevNet Create was from Cisco, but also from the leading players in the community. And so we got feedback from last year on how to improve it for this year, and basically they just wanted more hands on, and so we've actually expanded from having three parallel workshops to eight parallel workshops, where just folks can get hands-on and code. We continued to have both Cisco content as well as community content from leaders in the field. When we got feedback last year, what happened was we were collecting the feedback. The people who responded, we asked a few questions, and we said: Did you feel that this was useful for you? Did you feel that you were learning about modern tools and technologies that would help you in your career? Would you come back again? The strangest thing that happened is like 100% of people said that they were learning about topics that are modern and they need for their careers. And 100% of them said they would come back again. And I'm like, is it still 100%? 'Cause one person says no, it's not 100%. And so to everyone that responded, they wanted to come back, so we just gave them more of what they wanted. >> It's great, it feels great. You've got a good vibe, but I think there's some real interesting things. We talked last time about how the cloud native world connecting with the commercial liability of Cisco. Cisco is not a small company, they invented routing as we know it, they connect the Internet, and you had that kind of ops networking culture with this new programmable Internet kind of coming together, so there's some notable news you guys had here, why I was impressed by. One is these business exchange, or business ecosystem. Talk about some of the things that you guys are doing now as a result of these two worlds coming together. It's not just speeds that feed tech goodness, just like business value. Money making! >> (laughing) Just to go a little bit more into that, what happens is you kind of have your world of infrastructure, and you have developers who are writing cloud apps, it's so easy to deploy, and really get a lot of value out there. But then you have the world of real companies, real data, real existing infrastructure, enterprise data, smart cities that you want to bring online and everything there, and there's a new type of app that's come to play, and there's a new type of app that of course, needs to work in the cloud, but also needs to couple in with the real world and physical things, and enterprise data. And so that brings rise to a whole new set of applications and new ways to do business. So in terms of what we're doing with that, as someone writes this kind of an app, it's not easy, just like download it onto my phone. It's actually, how do I couple that with the location based infrastructure? How do I couple that with enterprise and hybrid cloud data? And so what we have now is a business exchange, an ecosystem exchange where we can bring those applications up, where if someone is using Cisco infrastructure, we have partners around the world who install and manage solutions that they put for their customers. And we want to show them these are the applications that work together with those products. These are the solutions that you can deliver, so we want to take the applications that our developers are writing and make it available to our partners, to let them use our go to market that we have around the world. >> We get the technical developer ecosystem, and you have the business ecosystem, so that's an indicator that there's some movement and growth. Where is it coming from? Where are you seeing the highlights here? >> Yeah, so in terms of the movement and growth, what happens is we're concentrated on technical enablement for the first few years of DevNet. But clearly, the reason to do the technical enablement is to do that business pull through. Where do we see the growth? So, what happens is everyone in the world wants to digitize, right? So people want to take their manufacturing lines, they want to digitize them. People who have cities want to offer newer experiences that are still kind of leveraging the old, but then providing a top-notch experience for that. So we have people that are in cities who want to use our infrastructure, but also have innovative applications to give to their folks. We have partners around the world who want to not only provide infrastructure, but to provide interesting solutions and experiences. So it's really interesting to see the hunger and the desire now for people to use applications in all different ways, and we're trying to really package it up for them. >> So you're actually stitching these applications together and then packaging them up for consumption for the solution? Is that what you're looking at? >> Yeah, because everybody's buying. Everybody needs a network, everybody has something that exists, but they want to go above it. That boundary between applications and infrastructure is kind of blurring, right? And what an application can do when it's really coupled in to an infrastructure with APIs is completely new, and they want to play, they want to innovate. They don't want to just do the same old thing, and they want to kind of unleash the power, get the value from all of the application development that's going on. >> I think that's great. One of the things I saw from the keynote was the numbers in terms of your exponential growth over the past four years and also the number of folks who continuously visit the site. I think that's awesome. Can you kind of give folks that are looking to build communities any tips or tricks? >> Yeah, and actually, Lauren, you were with us early on. You saw when I was begging for Cisco to have a developer community, and so we didn't have any members at that time. But yeah, we've grown to 480,000, actually 485,000 registered developers. We have 60,000 active monthly users. >> Lauren: That's great. >> So they are really doing stuff. But yeah, in terms of what it takes to grow that community, I think really the key is that my incentive, my goals, my mission, which I shared, is that we want to make developers successful. We want to make our partners in that broader ecosystem and our customers successful. It's not actually my job to sell products. Obviously any solution that's written around APIs for a product will sell products, but my job is to make the ecosystem successful. So I think the key is just constantly keeping their best interest at heart, and having a model where obviously it will pull through the right business for Cisco. >> You've got great self-awareness, and I think that's important to understand what they're trying to do, but also you bring a lot to the table. Cisco has massive presence and enterprises in businesses, whether it's service providers, down to the small medium enterprise to large enterprises. As you look across Cisco, you bring the goods to the party, so to speak. How do you balance that, and what's your approach? So you're taking more of the programmable net ops, which I love, by the way, we talked about that in Barcelona at Cisco Live. You can bring a lot to the table, but you don't want to firehose the developers with all this Cisco stuff. How are you blending that together? What's your approach? >> This is a great point. So what we have to do is we have to understand who our audience is, and we need to bring the right material and speak the language for that audience. And to give you an example, is that we've had you at DevNet Create, we've had you at the DevNet Zones at Cisco Live. When we go to Cisco Live and we have our developer conferences, that is the group in the audience that knows Cisco. They're getting certified, they know how to deploy infrastructure, it's a tremendous community. We have millions of people around the world who basically run, deploy, manage these solutions. >> John: Over years of experience, too. >> Oh, decades of experience, yes, and certification, mastery, expertise. >> They're the network nerds. >> They are the network nerds! (laughs) >> Moving packets around, but now it's changed. >> And the way that we talk to them is different, because what we present to them is how can you automate your infrastructure? How can you scale and use the newest tools? How can you get observability and insights from that infrastructure itself? And then, here's the software tools that you need to use, and here's the APIs you need to know about. Let us understand your problems, and let's work on this together. Now, the types of platforms that we expose and the APIs will be for networking, it'll be for security, it will be for compute, it'll be in many of these areas. Then we come over to DevNet Create, and what we had to do was create a separate venue to hit app developers, cloud native developers, they're not going to Cisco Live. They're actually going to developer conferences, they're in the Bay Area, they're all around the world. They don't think of Cisco or even of infrastructure in what they do, necessarily. >> It's a different culture. >> It's a different culture. And we actually had to re-jigger our vocabulary, we had to re-jigger what we present to them, because when they think of IOS, they don't think of a network operating system, Cisco's iOS operating system, they think of a mobile operating system. So we've actually had to even retrain ourselves to show this is the value that we provide to application developers, here's the platforms and the APIs that matter to you. Here's the right level of abstraction of what would be relevant to an app developer, and really speak to them. And DevNet Create is a separate venue created for that reason. >> And timing is everything, as we know. The wind's at your back because you've got Kubernetes, the container madness, the standardization of contains, which is not new, the Google guy was on earlier talking about containers. You've got micro services, you've got Istio, which is where you're partnering with Google, so this is a new, real emerging tech area that's a nice glue layer between the cultures. How are you handling that? Do you agree? >> Oh my goodness. >> What's your focus on? >> Yes, it's so amazing. So the whole world's in containers and micro services, is shifting how applications are developed. We actually used it within our own system, where we wanted to use the newest technologies, we saw the benefits of working in container and microservices based architecture, to not write monolithic apps but to really be able to compose and reuse services. So we had to go through that change, but what we saw is that when you're dealing with enterprise data, confidential data, customer data, and then public cloud data and everything there, there's a lot of thinking about how to write a cloud app that is a hybrid cloud app that uses OnPrim and public cloud and the best of both worlds. And the world of containers is interesting because suddenly it's the performance of your application, it depends even more on the network. Getting security of how your containers are built up, how they're connected, how they're spinning up in different places, you need that consistency. So having the whole tool of how do you now deploy containers on OnPrim resources as well as public cloud based resources is tricky, and you need to build in that security into the infrastructure itself, and then provide the right abstraction for the developers with tools like Istio. So we're partnered up with Google. It's been a fantastic collaboration where we start with Google's leadership in just cloud native development and what they have to do to scale, and then take together the problems and the opportunities of real enterprises, of real cities, and things there. And as Allen said this morning, it's complicated. It's not that easy. There's a whole new set of problems that we need to deal with, and this partnership is amazing at putting that together. >> Makes the network more important. >> Makes the network more important, yes. >> Awesome, so now talk about what you're doing for incentives. Obviously, you've got a great posture to the marketplace, love how you're doing it, you're bringing two worlds together, bringing a lot to the table, but now you've got to keep people motivated and keep them incentives. Couple things you announced on stage, DevNet Solutions Plus, which is much more curated set of approved rockstar developers or apps that can get on a price list. That's like a lottery ticket. It's like the golden ticket for a developer. There's real value there, right? You can't invite everybody, but you got to do some QAing, but talk about some of these incentive programs you have. >> Absolutely. So what happens is once again, a company like Cisco has an entire community and ecosystem of people and places of infrastructure around the world, and they're looking to differentiate, they're looking to have interesting offerings as well. They're very relevant, because an app developer today needs to figure out how can they make money, how can they take all of everything they've invested in software and bring it to a business value. And so what we're doing is actually coupling that app developer with the entire Cisco channel and the Cisco partners that are out there, and then letting their applications come forward. So when you get something onto... The way that it works is that Cisco has its price list, partners around the world can create solutions that they deliver with those products. But in addition to Cisco's products, what we can do is put on a software and ISV's products onto there, and we're adding it on to the Cisco price list. It's a whole new type of app store. (laughs) But it's another way to go to market to get into these places. >> You're seeing some early returns in terms of the types of ISVs that are coming into the tables, or pattern to the match, or see more network-centric? Who are some of the kinds of developers? What's the make up look like? >> Yeah, so it's really a combination. So what happens is there's the set of applications that are built on infrastructure, surprisingly. So it builds on a collaboration, or a unified communication infrastructure, things that are built on a UCS, like a compute infrastructure. Things that need the network in a mission critical way. So like trading applications, right? You need that network to work, the performance of the application needs to be coupled, so then people tend to buy a kit of here's the software, here's the hardware that makes it all work, I'm buying infrastructure, I want to buy these together. And so it's really kind of putting that bundle of value together and then letting that sell. And I talked to our partners around the world, it's an amazing ecosystem. And when they can actually connect to the world of software developers and this ecosystem in a way that it helps them differentiate their business, it helps bring the app developer money and a business opportunity. It's a whole new level of scale. It's incredible. >> You'll be pushing video apps on there, too. >> Susie: Absolutely. >> CUBE videos. >> CUBE videos, there we go. (laughing) Absolutely. >> Interesting times. Awesome. Anything you want to add? >> Yeah, definitely. One of the things I was wondering about is that with this whole app ecosystem and the partners and the things along those lines, what are the apps that you're seeing that you actually never expected to see? >> Well, some are ones that we actually did expect, or we hoped for them, but the fact that they're coming through is another case. There's a set of applications that are built, for example, around contact centers. Contact centers are customer care, it's the way that people are interacting, right? And there's a whole kind of communications infrastructure around that, it's how people are answering phones, offering services, knowing what to do, so how you build those solutions together. There's a set of healthcare applications, so when you're going into healthcare, your patient monitoring devices versus your guest Wi-Fi services are different, so the kinds of solutions that you can provide there are key. There's actually a great thing in terms of indoor location based services. So we have Meraki and CMX where your Wi-Fi infrastructure not only provides wireless connectivity but gives you indoor location proximity. There's actually a company here called Map Wise, which has built kind of a wayfinding application on top. When I was at Web Summit, then they had Cisco infrastructure for putting up the conference, then they had their application to help people navigate throughout the conference, and they came in, and I actually spoke to Matthew, who's here, and he was like yeah, I had to learn because I had to go in early. They had to set up the network, and then I'm a software guy, I had to get my app to work on that network. I hadn't really thought about how to do that before. Right, so you're starting to couple these apps into that. >> Stu: New use cases. >> These are new use cases, and so much value. >> Yeah, and it's good that you get the terminology, it's a language issue, right? So you got to get the languages nailed down. All right, final question for you. What's the bumper sticker here? What's the phrase? I heard you on stage, create, connect, secure. What's the current DevNet Create tagline? >> So it is: Connect to Create. And so in one port, it was about connecting the world, providing that connection, and that's what we've done over the last 25 years. And over the next 25, even more things will be connected, but it's really about the solutions that we can build together as a team, and there's an ecosystem now that you have APIs that are exposed. You can build machine learning, and artificial intelligence together with world leading connectivity, together with world leading cloud companies. And when you bring all those together, you can have entirely new types of experiences that we can do, so it's Connect to Create. Along with that, actually comes the need for security and protection, and so that fabric needs to not only connect to create, but also connect and protect to create. And we think that by building that into the infrastructure as well, we can help app developers to secure their customers' data and to secure their users themselves, access, and all sorts of things. >> I love the concept of co-creation, really great collaboration model, and you guys are doing a great job. Congratulations on driving this developer program, and programs now, from a handful of renegades, now to a big organization, or growing organization. >> We're still lean, but our pack is growing. (laughing) >> You don't got to be a rocket scientist to know they're going to be doubling down on this. Cisco, cracking the code on the developer forum about learning the languages, knowing how to lead into the right cultures and bring them together, and have the right technology, enablement, and Susie, the creator, a part of the team, member of Cisco team for DevNet. Thanks for coming on and sharing, appreciate it. >> Susie: Thank you so much. >> Be right back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)