(upbeat music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's the CUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and the CUBE's ecosystem partnership. >> Hello there, and welcome back to the CUBE's exclusive live coverage of Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with cohost Stu Miniman. This is the third day of three days of live interviews. Go to thecube.net, siliconangle.com for all the great stories. Of course it'll be on YouTube after as well. Our next guest is Christine Heckart, head of global marketing for all Cisco's business units in a really great role, focusing on the outcomes. Christine, great to see you again. >> Thank you. >> You're wearing the DevNet hat that says DevNet Social Club which is very interesting, because they had a huge party last night celebrating with 500,000 developers. Quite a social party. >> Right. >> And they had the hats, looking good. >> Unbelievable, unbelievable milestone. Really changes the nature of the industry, you know. The network is becoming an open platform for business innovation. It's time. It's high-impact. We're very excited. >> It's a new Cisco you're seeing. You have a new role. You're trying to get a holistic view across all the business units which have marketing, but the interesting thing about the DevNet success is in only four years, the success on the numbers is really kind of amazing to see that kind of growth of, you know, real, active developers. This points to the digital transformation. Cloud native companies like Airbnb, these are proven case studies. Now the enterprise is moving there. What's your view of that? How do you look at the digital transformation? >> Everybody's talking digital transformation. You know, it's like, I've been in the industry 30 years. To me, the digital transformation happened in the '90's when we truly went from analog to digital. This is wave two, maybe three, and it's not so much that we are digitally transforming. It's more that we are now learning to harness networks in new ways. And I don't just mean like technology networks, but networks of customers and partners and developers and allowing them to co-create value for each other. And when that happens, you know, more usage creates more value, creates more usage. You get this virtuous cycle, this network effect that's happening. That's the big network. And of course, if you're going to do that as a business, you need a different kind of architecture, small n. You need a new business architecture to build that new business model on. And that to me is the really big transformation that's happening. It's what makes it fun to be in this industry again. Very exciting. >> Yeah, Christine, I love that. I say most of my career is like I talk about networks of networks because I'm a networking guy by back ground, but, you know, at the CUBE, we're about community. Talking about that network effect, we've had on some of the research from MIT talk about this second machine age and how you're gonna be able to leverage some of these things, so just speak a little more of some of the cultural changes we see, and, you know, how the different networking and networking play together. >> Yes, I love the network of networks, 'cause that's another way to say network effect. There's a guy in MIT, in the MIT media lab, named David Rose. He wrote this book called Enchanted Objects, and I just love that concept of, you know, living in an enchanted world. That sounds amazing. But he talks about kind of a ladder of enchantment or a ladder of connected value, and the way I internalize it is when you connect an object, you change its nature. But we're not just connecting things back to a central data center anymore. David Goeckeler kinda talked about this. Chuck in his keynote referenced it. The whole world has changed. It's now about connecting things to each other, and it's creating the context and the socializing of things, the network of networks. And then how do you let those things and let people interacting with those things co-create value for each other? And DevNet comes in there, opening up the API's, opening up the data, allowing people to create new applications that have never been thought of before. But this, to me, is the big opportunity that we all have together, and we're. This is the age of networks. Joshua Cooper Ramo wrote that book Seventh Sense, which I think should be the bible of everybody in this industry, and it says we are truly in the golden age of networks and probably just at the beginning of it. There's a lot of change to happen. >> We love network effect, so we totally love where you're going with this because our business has got a network effect dynamic in how we do our media, but I think, more importantly, you're talking about value creation with networks. This is a fundamental, new trend that's now taking the connected world to another level. So we're all connected. >> Right. >> Audiences are out there. People are out there. So people who are building the networks are the ones that are creating the value. >> Right. >> The question that we're looking at and trying to understand is where is the value capture? We see open source as a great example of co-creation. How do you view that in your mind? Is network effect capture, is it collaboration? What's your thoughts and what's your reaction to the notion of if we're connected, how do we come together and how do we capture it? >> So, the way I've been thinking about it recently. I don't know if this is the right way, but companies are at different stages of this. You've got companies that are very traditional. You've got companies like Cisco and Microsoft that are transitional, and then you've got companies that have transformed. And for any of those companies, you can create. You can harness that value of network effect. You can do it at the infrastructure level. So we talked about that a lot in the keynotes, like with security, where one person gets sick, everybody gets inoculated because of what we did with Talos, and that's a network effect, but it's captured inside your infrastructure. When you're using AINML or you're automating things, that's a network effect inside your business infrastructure. You can do it at the product and service level. Just a single product. You can do it at the internal people level. How do I get my people collaborating in new ways and creating better value, co-creation of value, network effects among the people? You can transform the company, and your business model can be based on that. Or you can transform the whole industry. You know, if you look at what all the normal examples, Airbnb and Uber, they didn't digitize. They created network effects by having a network of drivers and riders or a network of people who own houses and people who want to rent houses. It's the capital N, right, that's at the business level, and ultimately it's transforming whole industries. >> I got to get your thoughts 'cause this is right in line with Chuck Robbins's keynote around an open new, modern era. >> Right. >> He put the classic network architecture slide up. Hey, firewall, old way. Let's go look at the new way. This is really kind of a thought leadership point that's super important because as we engage with intent networking changes, the outcomes are driving a lot of the architectures. It used to be the other way around. >> Right, exactly. >> Here's what you've got and here's what you can do with it. Now it's what do you want to do? >> Right. >> How does that affecting change? Obviously DevNet is a great example. That's a freight train. It's gonna go another inflection point, we believe, but this new mindset is changing how people are organizing, and the future of work is involved. Your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, you know, it's so many layers, but ultimately it's about harnessing the wonder and taming the chaos of this hyper-connected world, and I don't think you can build a new business on an old architecture. If your business infrastructure was built 30, 20, even 10 years ago, it's just not built for the modern age. And it's about mindset shifts and architectural shifts, but going from hardware to software because you need that realtime agility. Going from closed to open. Going from CLI to API, right? The DevNet orientation. There are these big shifts that we have to make in the way we fundamentally think about architecture, and then there are shifts we have to make in the way we architect networks, in the way we build applications, and all of that is what we have to do together as an industry. >> So Christine, you know, we've been in the networking world for awhile. One of the challenges we saw for businesses many times is the network was slow to change, and, you know, enterprises would be like, oh no, I can't do that because, you know, it's a bottleneck for innovation. So we've been excited to see Cisco moving up the stack. The DevNet momentum here, explain how we can flip that bit and make sure that, you know, networking is now a driver for innovation rather than an anchor? >> Right, it should be the driver. We say the network is now open for business. The network needs to be the platform for business innovation so I could answer in a technical level, but where I'm gonna go is higher level. You think about Cisco's logo as a bridge, and what bridges do in the physical world, is bridges collapse space and time. Right? If I live in the bay area, to get from San Francisco to Pleasanton, you used to have to go all the way around the bay. And you built a bridge, and you gain time. You collapse space, and you accelerate things. And that's what technical bridges do, too. It doesn't matter if we're collaborating with people around the world, we're collapsing space. It doesn't matter if we're trying to accelerate the pace at which we bring something to market, we're accelerating time, time to market. Technology bridges collapse space and time, and you get that acceleration effect, that small world effect, as a result. Now ultimately, that's what these technologies have to do. We do it through automation. We've gotta simplify things. We've gotta make it possible to program a network in the language of business, which is what intent-based networking is about. And you take an API, and you say what you want to do, and it automatically calls up those resources from the network and makes it happen. >> Talk about Cisco's role in that vision. By the way, it's a beautiful vision. We see it the same way, but the language of business is changing. You mentioned outcomes. These are new things. You mentioned API's, intent-based. What are some of the things Cisco's playing in the role of that future innovation? What's the role for Cisco? >> Well, Cisco has to play a couple of roles. Well, two of them at the same time. One, we're transforming our own business, and while we do that, we have to help all of our customers transform their businesses. And to me, we play two really important roles. One is as technology leaders and visionaries and evangelists. That's what this whole show is about. Like, the smartest people in the world are doing this stuff. How do you bring them all together, and how do you collectively move forward, collectively make each other smarter? We've got a network effect just here, right? Because we all make each other smarter. We learn from each other, and we learn how to take things forward. So Cisco with its R&D engine, and, you know, everything we do to automate and automate business and kind of create that hidden magic that makes the modern world possible, we gotta be doing that. But at the same time, companies and cities and governments look to Cisco as somebody to help show the way at the business level, at the human level, at the impact on the world, and, you know, that's where all of our social responsibility stuff comes in. We talk about everything from connected rhinos that help to preserve the ecosystem in Africa and make sure that there's not as much poaching going on with the rhinos, all the way to how we change education or change health care, and we have to play a role in all of that. >> It's interesting you bring that up, because, you know, the statistics we look at, certainly it's been well-documented that millennials want to work for a mission-driven organization, but you're bringing up something where a mission-driven organization actually impacts network effect. >> Yes. >> So it's more than ever now having a mission. Not only do you attract people who want to work for a mission-driven company, there's actually a benefit and impact through that. Can you expand on that? Because I think you're really off to something with network effect. I think network effect is a new dynamic that isn't just a paper exercise to think about, and looking at it as a formula or gamification kind of growth hack. It's actually a real business dynamic. Talk about that. >> It is. Well first of all, network effects are timeless, and frankly, they don't even need people. Bees and flowers create a network effect. It just means more usage creates more value for all users. It's been cities, language. Network effects tend towards kind of natural monopolies. You tend to get oligopolies, smaller numbers with big impact, and, you know, it does go to mission, because what I see happening is every industry right now is being transformed. Just like we saw back in the 90's, the Internet kind of went through every industry, and it changed it drastically and ultimately changed the whole world. And we see that happening now, but where we see it is at the whole ecosystem level because you're seeing network effects happening in entire industries. And our mission is to help every company in the world find its relevance, and really every person in the world, certainly every person in our industry, find their relevance. People are searching for how to become relevant in this very hyper-connected, changing time, and Cisco can help people in this industry find their relevance. We can help each company and each industry find their way and find their relevance, and when you do that, goodness is created. And when you fail to do that, a lot of people, jobs get impacted, companies get impacted, communities get impacted. And we want to see the positive impact, not the negative. >> It's so interesting. Cisco's core competency. I'm just seeing some of the signs around here, 25 years of CCIE. It's a networking company, but you're bringing network effects at a whole nother level. It's a business architecture. >> It's a capital N, not just a small n. >> You're bridging the network effects of technical with business network effects, and that's where the secret sauce is. >> That's where the magic happens. >> Christine, great to have you on. Great to see you. >> Thank you for having me. >> See you supporting DevNet with the hat there. Thanks for coming on the CUBE. Good to see you. Great stuff here. Network effect is a business dynamic influenced by actual technical network. Cisco's at the center of it. So CUBE with our network effect is bringing the data to you in realtime. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Be back with more after this short break. Stay with us. (upbeat music)