>> Live from the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California. It's the Cube! Covering DevNet Create 2018. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is the Cube's live coverage here in Mountain View, California, heart of Silicon Valley, at the Computer History Museum for Cisco's DevNet Create. This is their developer eco-system for cloud natives, an extension to their popular and successful DevNet developer programs. A special event, really getting down and dirty on Kubernetes cloud native, and how to create real-time applications on the cloud. I'm John Furrier, my cohost Lauren Cooney, our next guest is Raj Krishna, who's the VP of Product Management with Cisco Meraki, doing some great things here, made a big announcement on stage. Welcome to the Cube, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me, it's a pleasure to be here. >> So, before we jump into the speeds and feeds of some of the real impactful things that you've been doing, with this cool area in cloud, you just had some news on stage, you announced it. You guys are giving away a lot of Benjamins in product. Share the news. Yeah, we're going to be giving away 1.4 million dollars worth of our products, our cloud managed switches. And the reason why we're doing that is because we want to see the ecosystem, we want people to have access to our technology, because they're going to build all kinds of cool and interesting applications that we may not have thought of. So, by giving this gear away, we want to help evangelize, and help promote the ecosystem. >> You guys are creating a nice culture here, I got to say. I give you guys props, the second event you guys have done with DevNet create, where you're really looking at, and aligning with the cloud native developers. You've got things, you've got some hackathons, you've got some team-oriented camps here, but really it's about giving them the enablement, and the tooling to do things. You're not telling people "you need to develop this." You're not jamming stuff down their throat. Talk about the role of that, and what you guys are doing with your product, and how does that fit in? Because IoT comes right to mind for me. You know, new sensors, new things are happening, talk about specifically the things that you guys are offering from a tech standpoint, tools that you offer, and some of the things you expect that might happen. >> Most definitely. So, throughout the years as we've kind of built out a very large-scale cloud management platform, we've realized that the need for external orchestration tools, external monitoring tools, data aggregation tools, is paramount because people want to build not just interesting and cool applications, but they want to build security applications. They want to build data logging applications, analytics applications where they can take data from the infrastructure and then take data from their CRM, their customer resource management systems, and mix and match that data to be able to understand "hey, is there a pattern here, in terms of network traffic and foot traffic in my stores." So, as we've come to terms with this trend, we've been building out a very rich set of API's, that can help you aggregate data, that can help you visualize data, and we realized that that's not enough. So, that's why we've been investing heavily in the ecosystem play. That's why we've actually set up dedicated teams at Meraki. We have a brand new solutions architecture team that is hyperfocused and their sole mission in life is to enable developers. It's to go out and evangelize the technology, but then also have whiteboarding conversations with those developers, give them sample code, show them other sample applications. They've also stood up a brand new application app store where third party developers can have their apps featured, and they can have their apps purchased on their store. >> Take a minute to explain Meraki's role in this ecosystem, because it's a product, it's a switch, but it's not just hardware. Can you just take a minute just to lay it out, what is it, what does it do, and what does it enable? >> Yeah, so the reason why Meraki was so successful and acquired by Cisco was the cloud management aspect of it. The ability to roll out and provision and monitor, manage and scale a network, whether it's wireless, whether it's routing, whether it's switching, whether it's security, and to do that at a gargantuan scale where you have 10,000 sites or 20,000 sites, that was Meraki's bread and butter, but almost by accident what we realized was that would give you a large scale programmable platform, so we built these API's on top, and what we've learned through the years is that this is a massively programmable orchestration layer, right? For being able to program things, being able to extract data at scale-- >> Like what, like program what? >> So, let me give you an example. We have a service provider that we work with in Europe that services a million end customers. And what they do, is they're offering their services, their broadband connectivity services, their VoIP services, and they're also offering Meraki hardware in their web stores. I can go to their web store, and I can click "I want to buy a three year broadband contract, and I want to buy these widgets that come with it, one of those widgets is a Meraki widget." When they click Buy, it makes a series of API calls to the Meraki backend and everything gets provisioned automatically. Not just the Meraki services, but also the service providers own portfolio services, so it's enabled a seamless ordering experience where someone take Meraki, just as one part of the solution, and wrap a bunch of other services around it, and enable provisioning of that, at scale. >> Versus the alternative is ship a box, unpack it, connect to it-- >> Ship a box to a warehouse, unpack it, plug it in-- >> Login command line interface I mean, it's a nightmare, compared to what is is automated. >> Right >> Turnkey. >> Right, exactly. And the way that we really see ourselves fostering this ecosystem and our role in the ecosystem is we're just the platform, we are enabling the platform we want to make the platform easy to use, we want there to be rich documentation, we want there to be a set of API's, we want there to be scripts that we can make available, but really the creativity is going to come from those developers who come on board and solve unique customer problems that we may not have even thought of, so it's about working with those people, and making sure that they have the tools, the knowledge, the expertise and just enabling them. >> So, what would a traditional, kind of, Meraki developer look like? What kind of skills do they need? Do they have to have experience in networking, or app development, or what are you really looking at? >> Yeah, we're getting experience with an entire range of different types of application engineers, you know. People who are more mobile app centric, so we've seen mobile apps that are crafted, that integrate with Meraki beacons to trigger some kind of an action when I walk into a store, so very mobile app centric developers. We've seen a lot of interesting web-centric applications, you know, developers who are proficient in Java script, things like Ruby on Rails, building very rich, front-end visualizations of Meraki data, and then we've seen some even more hardcore networking engineers who really understand bits and bytes and the flows of data coming out of the network to, for example, take a NetFlow feed from our security appliance, and say "hey, this is a threat and I want to create, using this API call that tells me this is a threat, I want to have a tie-in with something like a lightbulb so that lightbulb goes off any time I see a network threat in my environment." So, what's kind of cool and interesting here is I have a range of different types of developers with different types of skillsets, and they're able to enable use cases and applications based off of their area of domain expertise. >> All right, I got to ask the hard question. This is the tough one. Increased surface area increases more potential security threats, malware, I mean there's lightbulbs out that that have, you know, connect to your WiFi, I mean they're basically a PC, you've got a processor in there, so great for malware, to attach to, sit there dormant, get inside the network, this is a huge concern. How do you guys look at the security paradigm for this? >> Yeah, absolutely. And that's why building a large scale network means having security first and foremost in your mind. So, we actually have a very rich set of security products that can help you secure your endpoints, and help you secure your network. So, just giving you an example here: We have a security appliance that actually integrates with Cisco's Talos threat engine. Cisco Talos is a team of hundreds of security researchers, and they're constantly staying up to date with the latest security vulnerabilities, security patches, trojans, malware, etc, etc. If you're running a Meraki security appliance, you have visibility into these real-time threats, and also you can extract that data and visualize it in a third party portal, or you can save it for logging. So, making sure that people are aware of the security threats, making rich tools available to our developer ecosystem that can help protect them against these threats, and then also having a privacy by design mindset when we're building and constructing API's. Let me give you an example. The upcoming laws in Europe, the GDPR laws, going into effect May 25th, we're actually building API's that will help you abide to these laws by letting you delete personally identifying information for a specific client. So, we want to help our customers and our developers be compliant with GDPR for their end users, so if their end users come to them and say "hey, I was connected to this network, but I want to be forgotten now, I want you to delete all my data," they can do that programmatically using an API. So, it's the kind of entire spectrum, right? It's building the awareness, building the product suite, as well as building the tools to help developers build privacy applications as well. >> That's definitely enabling the developer ecosystem, like we were talking about before. Now, what do you think is, when you talk about the industries that you're in, you know, I can see enterprises, retail, and manufacturing, and lots of different areas there, and there's probably service providers examples where they can make a lot of money, working with you guys and adding services to what they deliver to their customers. Where do you see kind of the most growth coming from, or the most interest? >> Yeah, we see the most growth coming from, kind of, a range of customers across the board, to be honest with you. Some of our traditional sweet spot verticals, that we were very strong in were distributed enterprise, retail and education because in these kinds of environments, you often have lean IT teams that want to do a lot more with a lot less. But what we've found is, our historic sweet spot was that kind of mid-market customer, you know, between 100 and 1000 employees, but over time we've been moving more and more up market, because we've been adding enterprise features, we've been really hardening and stabilizing the platform, so that can deliver enterprise networking at scale, and what we're finding now is increasingly more and more interest from that very high end premium segment of customer, you know, the Fortune 1000 companies who are saying "this is interesting for all my branch sites," or "hey, this is interesting for all my distribution centers or all my warehouses," so we're seeing growth across the board, which is why it's such an exciting time to be at Meraki. >> Raj, good luck with everything. Thanks for coming on the Cube, really appreciate it. What's next for you guys as this things evolves? More programmability, more automation? >> More of everything. We're going to be launching more products, we're going to be crafting more API's, we very recently released a new series of HD video surveillance cameras, and we're seeing a ton of very interesting IoT type of applications where those are being used in manufacturing or farming, we're getting interesting API requests for that. So, we're going to be continuing to invest heavily in our portfolio, build out more hybrid products, more software features, as well as more API calls. >> You guys are targeting the developers at the edge, on the cutting edge, pun intended-- [Raj] We hope so. >> Great stuff. IoT certainly a great opportunity for developers, you know, stuff that you couldn't do years ago are possible, certainly with the cloud and IoT, and Cisco's DevNet Create. I'm John Furrier. More live coverage here in Mountain View after this short break. (techno music)