>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's The Cube, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Net App and The Cube's ecosystem partnership. >> Welcome back, we're here live at The Cube here in Orlando, Florida, for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman have been co-hosts all week here for three days live coverage. Day one and I'm winding down. Great keynotes, CEO of Cisco laying out the next generation network and it's not just the old networking, it's a whole nother thing. Our next guest is Salman Asadullah, who is the CTO and VP in Engineering at Netnology.io. Like technology, Netnology.io, former Cisco fellow been twenty- >> Distinguished engineer. >> Distinguished engineer, sorry, fellow engineer, well you look distinguished today. So how many years have you been at Cisco? >> 22 years. >> 22 years, welcome to The Cube. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for the invitation. >> So I got to ask you, before I get into the company, which we were talking before we came on camera, you doing really, I think you're on the front end of a big wave we see, certainly in The Cube, but you've been at Cisco 20 years and I've been working with Cisco since the beginning of time, 1993, in some capacity or another in the industry and I've had friends that have sold companies to Cisco. There's always been a debate within Cisco's engineering organization as to how to move up the stack. One team, yes no. So there's been but now it's time. Can you add some color and reaction to that because I think that's kind of where it is now. So all those conversations, even go back 15 years ago, where in the stack should we go? What's the right time? How about some of the history of Cisco and now they're moving up the stack. >> Yeah so I think first of all just to start with, our company name is Netnology.io but our tagline is full stack system integrator because we call ourselves a full stack system integrator because we know end networking, we know Cisco but we know how to move up in the stack as well. With the APIs and the STKs and what not. So the thing what is happened when you kind of look into this from Cisco's perspective, and I was there for 22 years, I am what I am because of Cisco, like when people say in Cisco when they work in Cisco I am Cisco but I still say I am Cisco because all of our business, 70% of our business is around Cisco. But the thing is when people are in Cisco, from Cisco's perspective when they say okay we are a software company and all of that good stuff, they look at the software from a networking perspective but the world, the industry when they say software, they are kind of talking about up in the stack from the application perspective. This is what you see even in Cisco they are sort of trying to pivot and all of the requisitions which are happening is around that. That they are acquiring companies which are basically up in the stack. There are more application based companies and also they are building organically some stuff in there as well. >> What's interesting is that the trend is their friend right now because they are getting to have their cake and eat it too. They are going to have best of both worlds. The networking is becoming more and more important with something to find and then you've got Kubernetes which Google Cloud is out there on the stage today. You've got Kubernetes and containers and Service Mesh is coming on that all look like networking. It's got words like policy, QOS, I mean this is networking world moving it up the stack. What does that mean for a customer? Is that the path in your mind? >> Yeah and I'm a big believer of that. I'm a big believer of that even before leaving Cisco for last five years of Cisco, I was basically working around all of these SDN, NFE, APIs and making sure in organizations I was leading or I was part of that how do I enable our engineering force to do some of that, to gain those capabilities. This is what we are trying to mimic on a much smaller scale in our company. That the way we sort of call it we are a bunch of hybrid engineers. The people who are CCIs but they can also code as well. This is our sort of a focus because just like what you said John, five years ago or three years ago when people talked about this stuff it was only about if you are a data center, cloud these things matter. But now, if you really see all Cisco's solutions are around APIs, around STKs, around SDN and NFE concepts. So let's say if you look into Cisco enterprise solution like SDA or SDVAN it's all around that. If you look into collaboration, Spark, Intropo it's all around that. So the point is that for any network, for any engineer or any organization to get to the next level they have to go through this evolution. >> And that's scaling too then. The network's got to scale and the new software environment. >> You bet. >> So there has been a big debate in the networking world, Salman, for many years, okay I ran networks, wait I have to be a coder. Maybe there's not that skillset. Will my solution providers and my software providers and the platforms I build on take care of some of that or is the traditional role of the network dead? You're saying your company's got a hybrid role but what percentage of people that are the CCIEs and the network admins today, how many of them need to be coding, developing, working with APIs and everything in the future? >> Yeah I think the way I sort of look at it that there's some push back. There is some push back but mainly more in the younger generation. They get it, they get it because if I give you an example of our company, we have 15 to 20 people company, the last two hires we had these were fresh grads, computer science grads and what I asked them to do, first six months go get your CCNA so then they start to understand some of the basics of the networking so they can work with our senior CCI engineers who know how to write 50 lines of five tone script but they can work with the coders to get bigger things developed. >> That's the new strategy from millennials. Throw them in CIE training, get them up to speed. Okay I got to ask you the question, because I want Netnology, the company that you're the co-founder of, is small but you're doing a unique thing. You're taking and SIE approach, obviously Cisco DNA is in your blood, you in the Cisco family if you will, but you still got to work with other platforms like Amazon and what not, as you guys go out there is a trend towards automation and we're seeing that professional services, whether they are from global SIs, the trend is towards accelerating down the cycle of deployment, faster, faster, faster, it's almost like the old days was eight months to roll out an SAP deployment, now that's eight weeks, now is it going to be eight minutes. This is the trend, it requires automation, what is your vision on how this is going to pan out going forward because this is the beginning of a new kind of Cloud scale at a service level. What's your vision? >> So if you really see from the compute world guys they were already doing that stuff for the longest time and they always asked us, the networking people, how come if my CAPEX is 30% but my OPPEX is 70% when it comes to the networking because we were lacking all of those capabilities. And the reason was that all the vendors they had these closed systems but now with this whole trend of SDN, NFE, people want to have more control. Cisco, and a lot of the vendors, they have all opened up their APIs and given the SD case so now you have the capability to go and take this talk to the compute guys. Say you are ahead of the game but we are catching up as well. By using all of these different tools what we are using in our deployments day in and day out. So if I give you an example, recently we did a project for a customer which was a multi-vendor fabric, VXLAN fabric, for data center, and we automated that whole deployment using Ansible Tower. So the thing is that if you would have done that manually, my God it would have taken a long time but now you can do it in minutes. >> Sal, talk about the Devnet explosion, because obviously we've reported all day today it came out in the keynote, over half a million developers are on Devnet, Susie Wee who's heading up Devnet and now Devnet Create which is the Cloud version of Devnet. Those two worlds are coming together and you're seeing network guys, even old school folks, adopting Cloud Navis. A natural migration and the younger guys are going and get networking as you pointed out. Devnet's been popular, you're seeing some great demos here. You can get a free Meraki Switch if you can code a little bit, take it home with you and play with it. A lot of tools, a lot of APIs as you're talking about, this is the new software development environment. What are you guys doing with Devnet? Can you share some insight into some of the things that you're doing that's relevant? Things that you're kicking the tires on? What's up? >> So first of all, to start with, we do a lot of work with Cisco Devnet and we are so humbled and honored by that because we get to learn while we are working on a lot of cool stuff. Then we can go sell that to our customers. Just to kind of tell you tomorrow, Susie Wee is announcing Devnet's cord exchange you might have heard about. So we are among those few partners who have contributed to that cord exchange. So we have put our code for everybody go get it, play with it, like we couple of use cases we have shared on that cord exchange, free for everybody. Think about you have Cisco VNFs running on AWFs how would you use cisco Cloud Center to model and deploy that service on AWFs? Using the APIs and then in the back end we have done scripting using Python and Shell and Ansible. These sort of things. And also we have a booth over here at the Devnet zone partner village and we are demonstrating some of these demos over there as well. >> That's really the standard now, people are getting the scale up in multiple clouds then deploying. That seems to be the big trend, automation there. >> Oh yeah, because as I said, the way we are partnered with Cisco we are also partnering with AWS and GCP so we have close to 35 certifications in our team including 13 CCIs. >> You're a veteran at Cisco, obviously to work at Cisco that long it's very entrepreneurial inside so it's always kind of been there. It's still a big company even when you were there but not you're an entrepreneur. What's it like on the other side? >> Oh my god, I'm living someone's dream. I'm blessed to be afford to do this. It's an awesome time for us. Of course it's a little stressful. >> Heavy lift there huh? It's not easy right? >> Me being in the silicon valley and I wanted to kind of do this but I tell you I recently Cisco included me in the Cisco designated VIP, which is a very selected group of people and worldwide, so I'm one of those people and I wrote a blog about that and I said something in there that although I have left Cisco but I don't feel like I've left Cisco because I'm still you know- >> Extended family. >> Yeah extended family. >> So what's up for the company, what's next? What's you're mission? Are you hiring? What are you working on? Share some insight into what's next for you guys? What's on your road map? >> So it's the growing pains. It's the growing pains, we are growing, our work is expanding. We are basically hiring some good talent. But more exciting something that we are also building a platform. So hopefully in the next six months we are going to be releasing something around that as well. Because again, think about we are recently named as a top 10 SDN providers by Enterprise Networking Magazine, so we are focusing on three Cisco SDN solutions. SDI in data center, SDA in branch and campus, and SDVAN on the VAN side. Now think about that you have segmentation in all of these solutions. How you can simplify this whole thing. How you can map these different perimeters between these three different solutions. So we are working on some cool ideas and some product as well so that's something really exciting for us. >> Are you guys self funded? >> Until now we are all privately funded. >> Sal, I'll put the hard question to you. As a startup, congratulations by the way, we know all about startups, we started a startup ourselves, it's growing pains but it's fun. It's hard work but it's a whole different joy. What problem are you solving? When you look at hiring an engineer what's the tough problem that you guys are trying to tackle? If you could boil it down into, the full stack great mission, what's the hard problem that you guys are trying to solve? >> So we just want to further simplify the Cisco story. As a matter of fact, in some of these SDN NFE based environments, that's our goal. How we can further simplify it. We are small enough that we can tackle some of these things. >> So tackle the complexity, that's where your mission is? >> Yes. >> Salman, thanks for coming on The Cube. Great to meet you, great to have you here. Thanks for sharing your insight here on The Cube with us live here- >> Very good, I appreciate the opportunity. >> Yeah let's follow up, love what you do. I think the future is going to be changing the game on how professional services are built, deployed and leveraged. Certainly code sharing. Collaboration is the new competitive behavior. You don't have to beat the other guy to win, you can work together. This is the new normal. This is what's going on at Cisco Live. Here in The Cube we're bringing you all the content. Stay with us, we'll see you tomorrow for day two of coverage. Thanks for watching.