>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, It's the Cube covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live in San Francisco for the Cube's exclusive two day coverage of Cisco's inaugural event: DevNet Create. An extension of the core DevNet community founded three years ago by our next guest. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. Our next guest, Rick Tywoniak, Senior Director of Cisco DevNet, also the co founder with Susie Wee who was on yesterday. Congratulations on creating DevNet three years ago. >> Rick: Thanks John. >> Very successful. I said it's blowing up, I mean in a good way, doing great robust community and also creator of DevNet Create, Congratulations. >> Thanks, thanks John, appreciate it. >> So why DevNet Create? I mean just give us the quick why DevNet Create vs. DevNet, What's the difference? How should people look at those two events? >> So, DevNet Create is our event to reach out to a new community of developers. Typically an audience that may not have thought about Cisco in the past. may have thought of us as a hardware company doing routers and switching and we want to try to reach out to that new community to help them understand that Cisco has a great platform for them to develop on and there's great opportunity to work with Cisco. And so we want to get to that new audience. That's what the inaugural vision of DevNet Create is all about. >> Before we came on camera Peter asked you a question, you were getting rolling and we decide to wait. Go ahead ask the question. >> Why Cisco? >> Rick: Why Cisco? (John laughs) >> You know we were talking about, so there's a subset of developers; let's call them ISV, Independent Software Vendors, and when you think about the plethora of platforms out there, there's a lot of people that they can develop on. And so you've got to think about why Cisco. When I talk to developers a couple things: first of all you start with the platforms right? So is the technology cool and are the API's cool, and can you do something innovative with them, right? So you have Meraki location API's, you have Spark Collaboration API's, you have the networking API's right? And so the first thing we do is we start off with the technology and, you know, to be fair a lot of the developers, when you start talking about the technology that Cisco brings to market they weren't even aware. They just thought it was routering and switches, hardware. They weren't even aware that the network had API's that they can use, especially in the area of IOT. So educating the developers on what the technology is, is extremely important but it doesn't stop there. Because, okay it's cool technology but if I'm an ISV, eventually I need to make money so what can Cisco offer me that's unique and different and there's a couple of things that we do with inside DevNet which takes you sort of the partnership area. So if you're out there developing a software product and you integrate with our platforms and you develop some API's, the second thing that we also bring to our developers, who have companies usually, is introduction to the field and the channel, okay? So how do you ... >> John: So monetize? >> Yeah monetize this. We have one of this, so we help them monetize their app. And obviously it has to be a good app, it's got to be tested and certified and it has to have some customer traction but once you get customer traction, my group is also responsible for introducing them to the field and our channel organization to help them get out to market. And then we also have thirteen innovation centers throughout the world where you can do co-creation and get, even if you're early stage, get introduced to customers. Cisco's got a lot of customers in the enterprise, right? >> John: Right. >> We help, depending on where you are in the world, if you're in Latin America you can go to Brazil, if you're in Europe you can go to France and then England. You can get involved in these innovation centers and get out to the customer base and get opportunities. If you go from there, they get a lot of traction. Many times we'll put applications on the general price list, so our field and channel can actually sell those applications and get compensated. So now you're opening up, say if you're a small start up, and you want to take advantage of... You have to have a good application right? >> John: Right. It has to have the customers want it, but then you can start to leverage some of the field and the channel out there to get your application out to get bigger. >> Great, great explanation. Thanks for taking the time to lay that out there. My question for you is, we talked about this in our opening and today and in our wrap-up yesterday is: Cisco is a huge opportunity, I mean, you have network guys who are really great. They know the operations cold and it's known that not everyone has the operations skills >> Rick: Right! >> And DevOps has an ops piece, so this is a great direction for you, so we're both very complementary of that. Question is: what value does Cisco bring to the table because certainly, yeah, you've got monetization that's going to be great for the start ups. What value providing up the stack? Because you've got the networks, that's the crown jewel of the operations. Making it programmable. How is that valuable to the developer? >> Well, so, applications that are developed inside the enterprise have to run on the network. So everything you have or all the devices you have in an area of IOT, all have to run on the network so you start with that core sort of functionality that we provide and then you start adding the API's because all of the intelligence that works in the stuff that runs the network is now as exposed in an API layer. So now if you're a software developer inside an enterprise, taking advantage of those API's to have your application run more efficiently is the key, sort of sauce, that DevNet or Cisco provides through DevNet. You know, if you go back to the original vision of what we had: "So why did you start this thing" "And what was the vision?" So this idea of taking two groups that may have never talked to each other in the past. The networking professionals who really understood the network, software professionals inside an enterprise who really understand and build software. How do you bring them together and sort of create a community where those two are starting to understand what each other does, understand the skill levels that they have, work together, break down the silos, get out of their tribes, >> John: Um, Hmm >> Come together and in a DevOps environment how do you run software more efficiently? >> The Innovations there, you've got open source, you've got ... dominating the app developer market big time. >> Rick: Yup >> So you bring network guys who know ops to the application guys who don't want to now ops. >> Rick: They don't. >> And they can share. >> But increasingly, it's the, we talked about this yesterday with Susie, the network, the evolution of a lot of IT componentry, especially if you look at, for example: hardware, server, storage, there is a regular cadence of how it's improved. The network has always been a step function. We go from IPv4 to IPv5, whatever else it might be. There's always a step function and developers have always looked at the networks and it's too big and we don't know when the next big change is going to happen. As a stable, unchanging thing and it never impacted their vision of architecture or how they did things. And we're not too far off from another big step function that Cisco is going to be right in the middle of and having those two groups talk about how to do things today but also how to do things in a plan-full way to anticipate some of the big changes that are going to happen in network technology is going to be really crucial for developers to build stuff that's got more than a 3 month life to it. Do you agree with that? >> Absolutely, and all that came when we took that intelligence and moved it into a software layer. Because you have the opportunity to make it unstable which is not what you want to do, so you have to plan it out, you have to figure it out but you have to, once it's in software, you have to be able to leverage it and that's what it's all about. You know, the other component of DevNet is an educational component. So what we want to do is teach software developers the value the network and a little bit about networking and more importantly what those API's are but we're not trying to turn the software people into networking guys. And then for the networking guys, we're teaching them basic coding skills, so we're not going to necessarily making them a coder unless they want to do that, they could. It gives an appreciation for what the other group does and so we have a big educational component. >> Peter: And how each impacts the other. >> How each impacts the other cuz they can start talking to each other and working together. And when you start looking at a DevOps environment it is crossing the hallway to go talk to this other guy in another department and if we can educate these guys on how to work with each other I think it's kind of that pie level vision. >> The ops sharing is happening, you're seeing people share in the operational roles and you need to be people who know the network to do that. >> Rick: Yup. >> Okay, the question for you is: How are you going to get the folks who are watching or in the DevOps world, Cloud-Native world, on board? Is there a strategy or is it is going to be a loose affiliation, is it going to be a formal program? Obviously developer.cisco.com is the site but this great tag line: "Infrastructure meets applications" is interesting, or "applications meets infrastructure" is a really good vision. How do I get involved if I'm not a part of DevNet? >> Well obviously come to developer.cisco.com and get involved. Not everybody can hear ... >> Do I raise my hand and say, "I'm an app developer" or is there like a profiling kind of thing? >> Yeah there is, yeah! you come in and if you come into our learning area there is a learning track. I'm an app developer, I want to learn about networking; there. If I'm a networking guy and I want to learn about app development we have learning tracks that will take you through either. >> John: That's cool. >> Yeah. >> So just declare everything. I could say it and get it. >> Rick: Yup. We have events. DevNet Create is big but we actually have events all throughout the year and around the world. We call them DevNet express events, we're at Cisco Live, we're also going to be at various DevOps conferences so sometimes we just have to go to where the developer is. So you'll see us there with our developer evangelists. So yeah, no, there is definitely a plan to get the word out there and you're going to see a lot more Cisco. You know we've only been 3 years old. If you think about what we've accomplished in 3 years, pretty significant but we still have a long way to go. >> What's the big learnings you could share with the folks, it could be anecdotal, personal, business, from the process of 3 years, I mean, DevNet again, you guys were entrepreneurs, you weren't sure, the action was overwhelming, and congratulations for that. And now you've got DevNet Create. As I said, "Middle of the Fairway for you guys!" Did a good job here. What'd you learn? What's the learnings? >> It's risk taking, you know. You've got to take risks, you've got to fail, and you've got to mistake and you've got to learn from them. A lot of us that are in DevNet, including myself, came from the start up world, okay. And so you just know about that. You know: fail fast, fail often. >> John: Don't be afraid to take a risk. >> Don't be afraid to take a risk. When we had our first, when we started DevNet we had our first even at Cisco Live. We invested a lot of money to put a developer conference together in five months as a brand new organization. Literally I remember walking into that event at the Mochone thinking this could be empty, it could fall on the floor and I'm out of a job. (John laughs) Luckily when I came up that escalator at 10:00 the place was packed and we knew we had something. >> But in a classic strategy you doubled down! >> We doubled down yeah, now here we are again. Now we're getting out of Cisco Live, doing DevNet Create which is kind of separate from cisco by design. >> How do you feel about this event? When you walked in here did you feel like it's working? I mean, What's the vibe, what's your take on it? >> Yeah, and I think the cool thing is we are getting people that would not necessarily come to Cisco Live. Some of them do, you know we still have some of our loyal audience here. But yeah, we're talking about new topics and so we see this definitely as the future. We're going to do more of these events and we're going to do them in Europe in places like that. >> We certainly want you to come into our studio and talk more about this. It's something we're passionate about, as you know. Glad to support you guys here, think it's a great direction for Cisco and we love DevOps, We love Cloud-Native, we love Big Data, so you guys are on the right track, congratulations. >> Thank you very much. Rick, thanks for coming on the Cube, we really appreciate it, congratulations. The inaugural event for Cisco DevNet Create, exclusive coverage from the Cube and of course DevNet, check it out. Go to developer.cisco.com We'll be right back with more exclusive coverage after this short break. (techno music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell and I'm the senior director of strategy