>> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE! Covering Boomi World 19, brought to you by Boomi. >> Welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin, with John Furrier. We are in Washington D.C. at Boomi 19. This is our second day of coverage and John and I are very excited to welcome one of Boomi's customers, we have Olive Perrins, head of In Home Experience at Sky. Olive, it's great to have you here. >> Hi, lovely to be here, it's a fantastic event. >> It is, we saw you onstage yesterday so we're very pleased to have you join us on theCUBE, so I think a lot of folks know about Sky. Everybody, I shouldn't say everybody on the planet, but most of us have an ISP. We have cable services. So, we're all customers of Sky or some of Sky's peers across the globe, so, we all kind of understand that. You guys have built something very cool with Boomi, ‘Future Assurance View’ tool, and when you taught that, when you showed me this before we went live, (exclaims) bring that to the U.S. because whenever there is a problem with our internet, I mean people, we just stop, right? >> Yeah. >> So, talk to us about what Sky has built with Boomi and some of the great things that it is enabling. >> Sure, so I think we always had amazing diagnostic information and we had lots of data. What we never did was connect at that and did data-driven decisioning. So, for us, Boomi was there to connect all of the sources together with the, over six million routers out in the field, and live on demand for a customer, check everything, all of the, telemetry data from their hubs, from their line and make sure that line is connected, it's fast enough, it compares well to their neighbors, it's stable, it's not retraining, it's as good as the line can be, and the wifi to every device in the home is good. If not, it simply decides which engineer it needs to fix this and dispatches the job. >> And you started this initially in a reactive mode to start, okay, there's faults here. Talk to us about that migration, we'll say transformation, since we're here, the transformation from reactive to proactive and then unveiling what you guys are doing with predictive. >> Yeah so, I think when we started, we set ourselves this big game of getting to 69% digital first. We were around 25% before we lunged, and to be honest, most of that 25%, it was to find the telephone number in digital rather than do anything. We're now at 87% and as you can imagine, the amount of data logs that creates, about 300,000 customers a week running the tool, has now led us to know which outcome is most reliable and really optimize our decisions. So, then we started to think, "Okay, well it's great that we're fixing "these issues, but we probably have "a lot of customers in pain." Who we're not getting to because they're not calling us or visiting the tool. Why don't we go proactive and then go predictive. Find who's going to be faulty tomorrow and intervene before it happens. So, we've taken all of the intelligence in Boomi and codified it into an algorithm, and every night, it runs and predicts who'll be healthy or unhealthy a signal tomorrow, and then, anyone who needs an engineer, we dispatch it and it just fixes it free of charge before the customer even knows it's broken. >> And was this, I'm just envisioning of the recent issues I've had with ISPs, ah, I need this. Was this driven by, you said initially, just a couple of years ago, only a quarter of your customers were, only a quarter of them were starting their search digitally and now it's up to 87% in just a two year period. What you've done to be, to go from reactive to proactive to predictive, was that driven by customer demand saying, we want, I don't even want to have to call in. I want to be able to get to you from any channel, or was it more driven by you guys suddenly having a massive increase in data, and saying, "We've got a lot more information. "If we can connect it together and unlock the value, "the services we deliver can become predictive." >> I think it was a blend of both, truthfully. So, once you ultimately master the cost per consumer, you've got a really good data model that says, given this fault, then send this engineer and we know, we'll fix it and they'll be happy. I think at that point, you start to say well, where are the other costs to the business? And ultimately that comes from churn and attracting new customers. So, it just feels right to spend more upfront on engineers to save churn later and keep a really healthy and happy base. >> You know, one of the great things about In Home Experience is obviously wifi 'cause it goes down whenever you're on screens, calls. So, the operational side to totally get the efficiencies and the savings that probably comes with that, but people are working at home more, you've seen virtual, so, there's a real need for reliability at home, but also it brings up the data and the security questions 'cause now you got wifi light-bulbs, you got, everything's wifi. So, you know, the In Home Experience now has people maybe working at home. >> Yeah. >> Home and pleasure, security, malware, all these things are cutting-edge data problems. How do you guys view that? What's the internal thinking around how to protect the home and. >> So, I guess the first thing that we needed to be really clear on is traditionally, in an ISP world, you are risk averse and you said our demarkation is where the line enters the home. That's no longer acceptable in today's age. Every time Facebook goes down, our help contacts increase by 30% and so, we know that our demarkation isn't the device, it's not the application on the device, it's the consumer themselves. It's their understanding and as an ISP, it's our job to educate, support and handhold. So, everything that we can do to make our hub smart enough that they're plug and play, and everything that we can do to predict what customers need in IOT and security, and build that in its source, it's the right thing to do. You'll have healthier happier customers in the longterm. >> And parents also want to turn the wifi off when the kids aren't doing their homework. You know, these policy kind of user experienced things are kind of, I mean, as an example, we have kids, but you know. >> We just launched a remote control for the internet, so you can control what your kids have access to anywhere, in or out of the home on any device. >> And you guys have just in this last couple of years, where mostly it's been going from reactive to proactive, you said predictive was launched recently, but even in that two years, your NPS Net Promoter score has gone up 20%, so, can you imagine in the next year or probably last, the impact that you're going to have because customers are getting what they want, and they probably, some of them don't even know it, if they don't know they have a problem, but Sky has identified it. I can only imagine that the churn numbers will go down and the NPS will even continue to rise. >> Exactly, and that's precisely what this is about, it's the happier the base is, the more stable. In the end, you're going to spend more on engineers and less on churn. That is the perfect balance, it really is. >> And in terms of spend, let's talk about the cost savings, dramatic cost savings. The first year alone, you saved a six million pounds? And the second year? >> Six million pounds and on track for similar this year. >> That's transformative to the business. >> It absolutely is, yeah. I think what it has allowed us to do is really knuckle down to watch at our budget bate, and get stability around that. So, now we've given the business some controls and dials, and they know what they can pull to control costs. >> What's next? What are you guys working on next 'cause obviously, that's good in return, you're reinvesting, it's more data, it's more things to do, it's got remote control internet. What are other things you guys looking at operationally to get into to innovate on? >> So, I think there's a real need for speed, for us it's about investing in fiber. We're putting all of our customers on a high fiber diet right now (laughs). So, it's dark fiber, faster fiber, one gig connections, and then on the wifi side, it's giving guarantees, so, it's no longer acceptable to have a router squirting out wifi. What we're now doing is guaranteeing you will have wifi of the best quality anywhere in your home to support any device, and we're putting our money where our mouth is and sending wifi heat mapping engineers with pods to get your house up and sorted right first time. Beyond that, I think it's very much going into the world of IOT, smart sensors, cameras and with that, of course, data. It means IP storage, backup for your cameras. >> One of the interesting (mumbles) trends we've been covering is automation. You're saying RPA, for instance, is a hot sector, observability on the data side, so this Cloud has, but you've mentioned the demark has changed to the user, so, you got wearables, I mean, if you've got gamers in the house, they're going to look at ping times. The kids know what ping times are. So, you're going to have all the speed issues. So, what's that going to look like for you guys as you think about more speed, more data, more people wanting custom services. Is there automation involved? I mean, where do you guys see the automation low-hanging fruit and where's the vision go? >> So, for me, it's not necessarily about automation, it's about personalization. We already have that data. We already use that data. Is it relevant to every customer? I'm sure my mum wouldn't want to know about ping, she wants to know if it's broken. So, I think for us, it's matching what's your intent and have we serviced that in an outcome, and right now, that's exactly where we're going with conversational AI, and then, really starting to consider, have we achieved your goal? RPA has a place, but I think right now, it's less about the generic quality of service and more about targeting your individual consumer needs in the home. >> I love that personalization angle because I think we sometimes in this digital age, personalization is lost. Sometimes we do that of our own, if we're going you know, on Door Dash or something to, instead of going to a restaurant. We want, I think we want a mix of both, but that personalization where something like wifi comes into play, like you were saying, when Facebook goes down, 38% spike in people calling and going, "Hey, there's a problem here." Whether or not it's Sky's problem or not. So, when we look at this demand for personalization, peoples' levels of frustration with, if there is an issue, you guys have resolved that, obviously, but in terms of what Boomi and Excentra announced yesterday with conversational AI. >> Yes. >> Really really exciting stuff there. You guys said, you and I were chatting before we went live, that there was a purposeful decision at Sky to not start this digital transformation with AI. Now, you're ready to take this on. Tell us about that decision and how you're now, really have the foundation with which to actually do it, conversationally, and make it personal. >> Yeah, and I think so much time goes into training bots and I really think that it needs to be authentic. You don't need to feel like you're talking to a human. It's okay that you know you're talking to a virtual machine, but that first interaction needs to be meaningful and helpful or you'll quickly stop engaging with it. So, I think for us, it was about define what does good quality look like? What might be the things that go wrong with Broadband? Ultimately, it really is only slow, not working at all or dropping lots outside the home or inside the home, and really it's about saying, what might be the problems we know about? Eliminate those and there's only a finite number of alternative problems left that we can really start to train a model on our learnings to date. So, I think having excluded all of the weird wonderful edge cases and dispatches, there's less there to worry about, but it's higher value for the consumer, and I think on the personalization angle, the key for us is understanding, are you tech-avoidant? Are you tech-savvy? Where are you on that scale? And which channel should we serve you up those steps in and how complicated or handholding should those steps be? And I think that's, for us, where conversational AI comes in. It's personalization, the number of steps, the type of steps and the channel that it's best served in. There is no point having Siri guide you through really complicated hands and knees wiring stuff. That's best done with some images sent through WhatsApp, for example. >> So, you guys will have the data to be able to determine, not just maybe knowing, why is this person calling in or why are they engaging with a chat bot? But to understand, what's that persons' preferred method of communication. There's that whole consumerization effect and that demand of the consumer of, you know, your mom and my mom-- >> And my handholding. >> Exactly, would have different levels. So, you're going to have enough of that quality data to really deliver the personalized experience way beyond knowing what boxes I have installed, what routers I have, what version, but also, my level of technology understanding. That's pretty cool. >> Exactly that. Exactly that, that's the destination for this year, absolutely. >> Well, sign me up. Bring this over to the U.S. And before we go, I want to note that that Sky and Boomi together, your design won the Best Enterprise Project at the UK National Technology Awards recently. >> It did, it did. >> Congratulations. >> What an honor. Thank you, it was a great night. >> Exactly, well, Olive, it's been great having you on theCUBE sharing with us what Sky is doing to really deliver a personalized experience going from reactive to proactive to predictive, awesome stuff, thank you. >> Exactly. Thank you, pleasure. >> Ours, too. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE from Boomi World 19. (electronic upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi everyone welcome back to the theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live! Europe 2019. I'm John Furrier and my co-host Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante is out there as well co-hosting this week. Our next guest is John Apostolopoulos who's the VP and CTO for the Enterprise Networking Business, Unit Lab Director for the Innovation Labs. Here to talk with us about AI and some great innovations. John thanks for coming on theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thank you for inviting me, pleasure to be here. >> So, Cisco has some big announcements, the messages coming together certainly the bridge for the future, bridge for tomorrow, whatever the phrase is. You know, kind of looking at that new world connecting on premise, cloud, ACI anywhere, hyper-flex anywhere, lot of complexity, being mis-tracked the way with software, separate from the V-Comp from the hardware, lot of scale in the cloud and IoT and all around the edge. So software is a big part of this. >> Oh yes. >> So can't help but think, okay complexity, scale, you see Facebook using machine learning. Machine learning and AI operations now, a real conversation for Cisco. >> Yeah. >> Talk about what that is, how are you guys looking at AI, and machine learning in particular, it's been around for a while. What's your thoughts on Cisco's position and opportunity? >> Sure, yeah. Cisco's been investing or using AI for many, many years. What happens to Cisco, like most companies, we haven't really talked about the machine learning as a term because machine learning is a tool used to solve different problems. So you talk about, what are the customer problems we have? And then we saw, no matter how good our solution is, but we haven't really talked about the details about the how but, we've using at Cisco, like myself from past careers and so forth for many many years some machine learning. Security has been using it for multiple decades for example. >> And where's the use case for machine learnering, because it's one of things where there's different versions and flavors of machine learning. Machine learning we know powers AI and data feeds machine learning, so do you have all these dependencies and all these things going on, how do you...how should someone think about sorting through machine learning? >> Well machine learner itself that term is a very broad term, it's almost as big as computer science, right? So that's where a lot of the confusion comes in. But what happens is you can look up what types of problems we want to solve, and when you try to look at what types of problems we want to solve, some of them...for example some problems you can exploit the fact that the laws of physics that apply and if the laws of physics apply, you should use those laws. We can either figure out that if we drop this, this will fall at some speed by measuring it and using a machine learning or we have gravitational force and friction with the air and re-account for that and figure it out. So the many ways to solve these problems and we want to choose the best method for solving each one of them. >> And when the people think about Cisco, the first reaction isn't "Oh machine learning... innovator." What are you guys using machine learning for? Where has it been successful? What are you investing in? Where's the innovation? >> Sure sure, so there's a lot of problems here that come into play. If you look at...if you look at a customer problems, one example is all the digital disruption. We have on the order of a million devices, new devices coming on to the network every hour throughout the world. Now, what are those devices? How should you treat them? With machine learning we're able to identify what the devices are and then figure out what the network caches should be. For instance when IoT device you want to protect it, protect it from others. Another big topic is operations. As you know people spend, I think it was The Gardner identified that people spend about sixty-billion dollars per year on operations costs, why is it so much? Because most of the operations are manual, about 95% manual, which also means that these changes are slow and error-prone. What we do there is we basically use machine learning to do intelligent automation and we get a whole bunch of insights about what's happening and use that to drive intelligent automation. You may have heard about Assurance, which was announced at Cisco Live, one year ago at Barcelona and both in the campus with DNA Center we announced Cisco DNA Center Assurance and the data center went out, network and network analytic engine. And what both of these do is they look at what's happened to the network, they apply machine learning to identify patterns and from those patterns, identify, is there a problem, where's the problem? How can we...what's the root cause and then how can we solve that problem quickly? >> John, can you help us connect where this fits in a multi-cloud environment? Because what we've seen the past couple of years is when we talk about managing the network, a lot of what I might be in charge of managing, is really outside of my purview and therefore I could imagine something like ML is going to be critically important because I'm not going to be touching it but therefore I still need to have data about it and a lot of that needs to happen. >> Yeah, well one of the places ML helps with multi-cloud is the fact you need to figure out which...where to send your packets, and this comes with SD-WAN. So with SD-WAN we often have multiple paths available to us and let's say with the move to Office365, people are using the SaaS service and they want to have very good interactivity. One of the things we realized is that by carefully selecting which path we can use, at the branch and the campus too, we could get a 40% reduction in the latency. So that's a way we choose which colo or which region or which side of Office365 to send the packets to, to dramatically reduce latency. >> What's the role of data? Because when you think about it, you know, moving a packet from point A to point B, that's networking. Storage acts differently 'cause you store data data's got to come back out and be discovered. Now if you have this horizontal scalability for cloud, edge, core coming into the middle, get of the data 'cause machine learning needs the data, good data, not dirty data you need clean data. How do you see that evolving, how should customers then be thinking about preparing for either low-hanging use-cases. Just what's your thoughts and reaction to that? >> Yeah well the example you gave is a very interesting example. You described how you need to get data from one point to another, for instance, for my device to a data center with applications over the cloud. And you also mentioned how the many things between. What we care about, not necessarily the application data, we care about... You know we want to have the best network performance so your applications are working as well as possible. In that case we want to have an understanding of what's happening across a path so we want to pull to telemetry in all kinds of contexts to be able to understand, is there problem, where's the problem, what is it, and how to solve it. And that's what Assurance does. We pull this data from the access points the switches, from the routers, we pour, pull in all kinds of contextual information to get a rich understanding of the situation, and try to identify if there's a problem or not, and then how to solve it. >> Its the classic behavioral, contextual, paradigm of data but now you guys are looking at it from a network perspective and as the patterns changed the applications centric, programmability of the network, the traffic patterns are changing. Hence the announcements here but intent-based networking and hyper-flexed anywhere. This is now a new dynamic. Talk about the impact of that from an AI perspective. How are you guys getting out front on that? It's not just North, South, East, West, it's pretty much everywhere. The patterns are, could be application specific at any given point, on a certain segment of a network, I mean it's complex. >> Yeah, its complex. One of the really nice things about intent-based network and those, it fits in really nicely and that was by design, 'cause what happens with intent-based networking, as you know, a user expresses some intent if it's something they want to do. I want to securely onboard the SIoT device, and then it gets activated in the network, and then we use Assurance to see if it's doing the right thing. But what happens is that Assurance part, that's basically gathering visibility and insight in terms of what's happening. That's using machine learning to understand what's happening in the network across all these different parts that you mentioned. And then, what happens is we take those insights and then we make intelligent actions and that's part of the activation. So this...with intent based network in this feedback loop that we have directly ties with using the data for getting insights and then for activation, for intelligent actions. >> John, always want to get the update on the innovation lab, is there anything particular here at the show or, what's new that you can share? >> So we're looking at extending IBN to the cloud, to multi-cloud, to multiple devices so there's a lot of really fascinating work happening there. I believe you're going to be talking to one of my colleagues later, too, T.K. He's, I think, hopefully going to talk about some of the machine learning that's been done and that's already prioritized as you know in encrypted thread analytics. That's an example of where we use machine learning to identify if there's malware in encrypted traffic. Which is really a fascinating problem. >> That's a hard problem to solve. I'm looking forward to that conversation. >> So some members of Cisco, Dave McGrew, in particular, Cisco Fellow, started working on that problem four and a half years ago. Because of his work with other colleagues, he was able and they were able to come up with a solution. So it was a very complicated problem as you saw but through the use of machine learning and many years of investment, plus the fact that Cisco's access to Talos which has, they know the threats throughout the world. They're a list of data in terms of all kinds of threats that's massive. That's pretty powerful. >> The volume, that's where machine learning shines. I mean you see the amount of volume of data coming in, that's where it could do some heavy lifting. >> Exactly, that's one of Cisco's strengths. The fact that we have this massive view on all the threats throughout the world and we can bring it to bear. >> Network security foundation only just creates so much value for apps. Final question for you, for the folks watching, what's in you opinion the most important story here at Cicso Live Barcelona, that people should be paying attention to? >> I think how we are trying to extend across all these different domains and make it like one network for our customers. This is still a journey and it's going to take time but with intent based networking we can do that. We're going across campus, WAN, data center to multi-cloud. >> How hard is cross domain, just put it in perspective. Cross domains reversal and having visibility into these, from a latency, from a physics standpoint, how hard is it? >> It's quite hard, there's all kinds of technical challenges but there's even other sorts of challenges. This is WiFi, right? IEEE 802.11 defines the QoS standard for wireless and that's completely different than how the internet group ITEF defined it for wired. So even between wireless and wired, there's a lot of work that has to be done and Cisco's leading that effort. >> And having all that data. Great to have you on John, thanks for spending the time and demystifying machine learning and looking forward to this encrypted understanding with machine learning, that's a hard problem, looking forward to digging into that. Again, truly, the breakthroughs are happening with machine learning and adding values with application centric world. It's all about the data, it's theCUBE bringing you the data from Barcelona, I'm John with Stu Mini, stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partnership. (upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back everyone to the live CUBE coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Stu Miniman. Three days days of wall-to-wall live coverage, we have Mandy Whaley, senior director of developer experience at Cisco DevNet and Par Merat, who is the senior director of community and ecosystem for DevNet. Mandy, great to see you, CUBE alumni. Every single time we had theCUBE with DevNet team, Par, great to see you. Congratulations, first of all. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, we're happy to be here. >> Congratulations, so, really kind of a proud moment for you guys, and I want to give you some mad props on the fact that you guys have built a successful developer program, DevNet and DevNet Create for Cloud Native, over a half a million registered, engaged users, of developers using it. Not just people who come to the site. >> Correct. >> Right. >> Real developers. For an infrastructure enterprise company, that's a big deal, congratulations. >> It is, thank you, thank you. We were just chatting this morning about the really early days of DevNet at Cisco Live, and the first year of DevNet Create. And it's been great to see that community grow. And see, early on we had this vision of bringing the application developers and the infrastructure engineers together, and cross-pollinating those teams, and having them learn about each other's fields, and then build these programmable infrastructure enabled apps, and that's really, that synergy is happening within the community, and it's great to see them exchanging ideas here at events like this. >> And so we love to talk about seminal moments, and obviously DevOps drove a lot of the Cloud, and Chuck Robbins, your CEO said, "Without networking, there'd be no Cloud." True statement, absolutely, but Stu and I have always talked about the role of a network engineer, and that the power that they used to have in the enterprise is still due. It used to be the top people running the networks, mission critical, obviously security, but it's not about a retraining. It's about a path, and I think what you guys have done in success is you've shown a path where it's not about pivoting and being relevant and retraining to get a new job, it's been an extension of what they already know, >> An incentive. and I think that's very refreshing, and I think that's the real discovery. >> And we've been able to grow, because I think in our foundational years, we really spent a lot of time providing the content and the skill training, and what Mandy likes to say is, "We met them where they are." So no question was too novice. Likewise, if they were a little more advanced, we could direct them and point them in that same direction. So those early years, where, Mandy, we were just reminiscing about the first DevNet-- >> Coding 101? >> Yes, exactly, she wrote it over the weekend, and we rolled that whole event out, literally, in three months. >> And what year was that, just to kind of, this is an important seminal moment. >> 2014. >> May of 2014. >> 2014. >> 2014, the seeds of we should do something, and you guys have had certifications. We're looking at CCIEs, you go back to 1993 all the way now to 2018, so it's not like you guys are new to certification and training. It's just taking the IQ of network people, and giving them some insight. So what happened in 2014? Take us through the, obviously you bootstrapped it. >> Yes. (laughs) >> What happened, what happened next? >> We did. >> Everyone's like, whoa, >> So-- >> we can't, we're not, we're staying below the stack here. >> Well, we knew there was a lot of buzz around SDN and programmability, and we both actually, I should even back up further. We were both on the DevNet team when the DevNet program was Powerpoints, so we weren't even there yet. >> Right, when we were just planning what it even could be, like the ideas of having a developer program, and like Par was saying, we knew SDN was coming. We knew Network Controllers were coming. We didn't know what they were gonna be called, we didn't know what those APIs looked like, but we said, "The network engineers are gonna need "to know how to make REST API calls. "They're gonna need to know how to operate in Python." And so we started this program building around that vision before the portfolio is where it is today. Like today, now, we have APIs across the whole portfolio, Data Center, service provider, enterprise, and then up and down from the devices, all the way to controllers, up to the analytics level. So the portfolio's really filled out, and we've been able to bring that community along with it, which has been great. >> I want to dig into the north/south, east/west and that whole, kind of the Cloud paradigm, but I got to ask you, on a personal question, although relevant to the DevNet success. Was there a moment where, actually the seminal moments of 2014, was there a moment where you were like, "Wow, this is working." and like the, you know, (laughs) pinch me moment, or was it more of, "We got to get more resources, this is not just, "this thing's flying." >> Well it's always that. That's always the challenge. >> When was the point where >> We are, >> you said, "This is actually >> We are very-- >> "the best path, it's working, double down." When was that happening? >> I mean, I think after we started teaching those very early coding coding classes, I got this, like, flood of email from people who had attended them that said, "I took this task, I automated it, "it saved my team months of work," and getting that flow of information back from the community was early signs to me, from the technical level of, there's value, this is gonna take off, and then I think we just saw that kind of grow and grow. >> Mushroom, just kept it going. >> The other thing that I heard from a network engineer, which really resonated with me, was, you were saying, the network guy or gal likes to be there and solve the problem, and they're sort of at this deep level of control. And what I heard them say about the programmability skills was that that was another tool that they added to their sort of toolbox that let them be that person in the moment, solving that problem. And they could just solve it in a new way, so hearing the network engineers say that they have adopted programmability in that fashion, that let me know that that was gonna work, I think. >> All right, so let's get into some of the meat and potatoes, because you guys have some really good announcements. We saw you have the code ecosystem that you announced at DevNet Create, which is your emerging Cloud Native worlds coming together. That's available now. >> Yes, it's fully released. >> So take a minute to, so give us the update. >> Yes, so DevNet Code Exchange is developer.cisco.com/codeexchange so you can go there, it's live, and the idea behind this was we wanted to make it easy for the community to contribute, and also to discover code written by the community. So it's on GitHub. You can go and search on GitHub, but you get back a ton of hits if you go search Cisco on GitHub, which is great, but what we wanted to have was a curated list that you can filter by product, by language. I sometimes joke that it's like Zappos for sample code cause you can go on and say, "I want black boots, "you know the two inch heel." You can say, "I want, I want code for DNA Center, "or ACI, and I want it in Python," and then see all of the repositories submitted by the community. And then the community can also share their codes. "Hey, I've been working on this project. "I'm gonna add it to Code Exchange, so that other people "can build off of it and find it." So it's really about this community contribution, which is a strategic initiative for DevNet for this year. >> Mandy, how does that tie into other networking initiatives happening in the industry? I think of OpenDaylight, a lot of stuff happening, Docker comes this week, Kubernetes, and networking's a critical piece of all of these environments. >> Yeah, so some of the projects that you'll find in Code Exchange are things that relate. So we have some really good open-source community projects around YANG models and the tooling to help you deal with YANG models. So those might be in Code Exchange, but those are also part of the OpenDaylight community, and being worked in that. So because it is all open-source, because it is freely shared, and it's really just a way to improve discoverability, we can share easily back and forth between those communities. >> The Code Exchange is designed to really help people peer-to-peer work together and reuse code, but in the classic >> Reuse code within >> open-source ethos. >> the community. Exactly. >> Okay, so Par, you have something going on with Ecosystem Exchange. >> We do. >> Okay, so it sounds like Code Exchange, ecosystem partners, matchmaking service. What is it, take a minute to explain. >> It's kinda the next level up, and what I think we have to understand is, when we've got Code Exchange and Ecosystem Exchange under the umbrella of exchange, because within our 500, half a million community of developers, where they work, what we've found is predominately at SIs, at our VARs, at our ISVs. So these are the builders, so Code Exchange will even help that persona because they can come and see what's already been built. "Is there something that can jumpstart my development?" And if there's not, then they can work with each other, right? So if I am looking for a partner, a VAR in Australia to help me roll out my application, my navigation application, which needs to know and get data from the network, I can partner through this exchange because I can go in, see everyone, and be able to make that connection digitally versus organically. And this really started, you asked earlier what was one of the pinnacle moments? Well at these DevNet Zones, what we found is that an ISV would partner and start talking to an SI or to a VAR, and they'd start doing business planning, because what this is all about is driving those business outcomes for our customer base. And we're finding more and more they're trying to work together. >> So you're enabling people to get, do some work together, but not try and be a marketplace where you're actually charging a transaction. It's really kind of a matchmaking-- >> This is all about discovery right now. >> Community-driven discovery around business. Yeah, it's interesting, a heard a story in the hallway about DevNet, cause I love to get the examples of, we love what we're doing by the way, but want to get the examples, overheard a guy saying, "We were basically "cratering a business, jumped into the DevNet program, "and turned it around," because there was deals happening. So the organic nature of the community allowed for him to get his hands dirty and leverage it, but actually build business value. >> That's exactly right. >> That's a huge, >> That's exactly right. >> at the end of the day, people love to play with code, but they're building something for business purposes or open-source projects. >> And that's what this is about. It's really transitioning from the, "I'm gonna build," to now there's business value associated with it, and that's spectacular. >> I think so much of my career you talk, the poor network administrators, like "Help, help, "I'm gonna lock myself for a month, "and I'm gonna do all this scripting," and then three months later their business comes and asks for something that, "I need to go it again," because it's not repeatable. It's what we say is that the challenge has been that undifferentiated heavy lifting that too many companies do. >> Exactly. >> Well, that's exactly it, and the interesting thing, especially around intent-based networking is that's opening up a whole new opportunity of innovation and services. And one of the things that isn't very much different with our Ecosystem Exchange is it's the whole portfolio, so we have SIs in there as well as ISVs. And most marketplaces or catalogs really look at it in a silo version. >> I have one example of kinda the two coming together that's really interesting. So, Meraki, which is the wireless network, has really great indoor location-based services you can get from the WiFi. And then there's been ISVs who have built indoor wave finding on top of it, they're really great applications. But those software companies don't necessarily know how to go install a Meraki network or sell a Meraki network to something like this. And so it's been a great way to see how some of those wave finding companies can get together with the people who actually go sell and install and admin Meraki networks, and, but come together, cause they would have a hard time finding each other otherwise. >> And the example is actually rolled out here at Cisco Live. We've, Cisco Live partnered with an ISV to embed a Cloud-based service in their app, which is navigation. So you can go into the Cisco Live app, tap on the session that you want to see. A map will come up that will navigate you from where you are here to get there, and this is, I think this is the second largest conference center in the United States, so having that map >> So you need it. >> is really important. >> I've gotten lost twice. >> We've all got the steps to prove that that is, but, yeah, and that actually brings, one of the questions I had was, is it typically some new thing, to do wireless rollouts and SD-WAN on discovery, or is it core networking, or is it kind of across the board as to when people get involved? >> It's definitely both. It's definitely both. I mean, from the Code Exchange piece, I've talked to a lot of customers this week who are saying, "We've got our core networking teams. "We want to move towards more automation. "We're trying to figure out how to get started." And so we give them all the resources to get started, like our video series and then now Code Exchange. And then I heard from some people here, they actually coded up some things and submitted it to Code Exchange while they were here because they had an idea for just a simple, quick automation piece that they needed. And they were like, "I bet somebody else "needs it too," so it was definitely in that. >> I noticed you guys also have your Cisco team I was talking to, some of the folks here have patents are being filed. So internally at Cisco, it's kind of a wind of change happening, where, >> It is exciting times. >> IoT cameras, I just saw a solution behind us here where you plug a Rasberry Pi hardware prototype to an AP, makes the camera a video. Now it looks like facial recognition, saves the metadata, never stores video, so this is kind of the new model. >> Pretty remarkable. So final question I want to ask you is, as you guys continue to build community, you're looking for feedback, the role of integrating is critical. You mentioned this Cisco example about going to market together. It used to be, "Hey, I'm an integrator of our solution, "business planning," okay, and then you gotta go to the Cisco rep, and then there's, they're dislocated. More and more it's coming together. >> It is. >> How are you guys bridging that, those two worlds? How are you tying it together? What's the plan? >> So we're, what we're finding is a lot of those partners are also sort of morphing. So they're not just one thing anymore, and so what we're doing is we're working with them, enabling them on our platforms, providing solid APIs that they can leverage, transitioning or expanding the code, the skillsets of their workers, and then we're partnering them up with our business partners and with our ISVs, and doing a lot of that matchmaking. And with Ecosystem Exchange, again, they'll now be able to take that to a digital format, so we're seeing the whole wave of the market taking them. >> So you guys see it coming. You're on that wave. >> Yes. >> All right, real quick, I know we're short on time, but I would, Mandy, if you could just talk about what Susie Wee, you're leader talked about on stage on the keynote, she mentioned DNA Center. Can you just take a quick second, describe what that is, why it's important, and impact to the community. >> Yes, so we're really excited about DNA Center platform. DNA Center is the controller, kind of at the heart of all of our new enterprise networking software. So it sits on top of the devices, and it exposes a whole library of APIs. It'll let you do Assurance, policy, get device information. It would allow you to build a kind of self-service ops models, so you could give more power to your power users to get access to network resources, on-board new devices, things like that. >> So it sets the services. >> So it's APIs, and then you can build the services on top. And part of that is also the Assurance, which Dave Geckeler showed in his keynote, which we're really excited about. So, in DevNet we've been working to build all the resources around those APIs, and we have many code samples in Code Exchange. We actually have a community contribution sprint going on right now, and that's called Code Intent with DevNet, and it's all around DNA Center. It's asking developers to take a business intent and turn it into code, and close the loop with Assurance, and submit that back to DevNet. >> That's great. It's a real business process >> We're real excited about >> improvement with code, >> that, yeah, so you're enabling that, and slinging APIs around, having fun, are you having fun? >> Definitely having fun. >> Par? >> We always have fun >> Absolutely >> on this team. >> We always have fun, yeah. >> It's a great team. >> I can say working with you guys up close has been fun to work, and congratulations. You guys have worked really hard and built a very successful, growing ecosystem of developers and partners, congratulations. >> Thank you. You guys have helped. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for supporting >> We appreciate it. theCUBE, really appreciate, this is crew of the DevNet team talking about, back in the early days, 2014, when it started, now it's booming. One of the successful developer programs in the enterprise here. Cisco's really showing the path. It's all about the community and the ecosystems, theCUBE, of course, doing our share. Broadcasting here live in Orlando at Cisco Live 2018. Stay with us for more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage at Cisco Live 2018 in Orlando, Florida. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman co-hosting with me this week for three days of wall to wall coverage. Our next guest is Todd Nightingale, who is the Senior Vice President, General Manager of the Meraki team in Cisco. Welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you so much. I'm honored to be here. >> So obviously day one, we got three days. The keynote kicked off pretty interesting putting a stake in the ground. It's not a new stake, but really amplified by CEO of Cisco Chuck Robbins said, "Look at the old architecture "is changing to a new architecture." We've been talking about this for multiple years, no perimeter, new things are changing, changing the nature of networks. I asked you in 2017 in May about more devices. He actually said a number, is millions and hundreds of millions of new devices and connections constantly coming on. So obviously you're at Cisco, you see all that data, but you nailed it. The network needs to be stable. They need to be programmable. This is really kinda where your mission is. Talk about what's changed since 2017 and now with the new reinvention of the architecture, how do you fit into that, how does Meraki fit into that? >> Yeah, I think the industry has really started to realize a lot of these trends. IoT was kind of a future back then. Now it feels pervasive. Everything I look at is connected. My door locks, my toaster oven, my refrigerator, and people are starting to see the impact of that. We're not talking about onboarding two or three devices per user, but dozen or more devices and we'll have entire sites with dramatically, dramatically more devices, hundreds of devices for every one person and that IoT world is real and a lot of vendors, I think, are trying to catch up to that, but Cisco really took an early view at this and they were able to like build and work on this intent based network was really designed for this of modern era networking. For years we've been working on that at Cisco and I think it shows, right, that vision that Chuck laid out for us drives home this idea of massively scalable networks that are secure as a foundation and that they have a cloud focus. It's a multi-cloud world. These are gonna be connected networks. Last time I was here we talked a little bit about SD-WAN in particular and routing, I think that that's a lot of change here too is 'cause now that we know that most of our devices, most of our traffic's going in the cloud, SD-WAN when it's so much more important, right? >> It's real too, I mean right now SD-WAN is exploding in growth, use cases are growing. What does that mean? What does that mean for customers? You look back, SD-WAN was the promise, was the holy land. Everyone's talking SD-WAN and then, but now it's really real. It's happening. >> Yeah. >> Big time, your thoughts? >> I think SD-WAN is just the future of routing. It is the way we will, it's the way we'll get on the internet from here on in and really, I'm glad to see that all the vendors are looking at bringing more than one type of WAN offering whether it be LTE or broadband or MPLS, but I believe and I think at Meraki we believe that true SD-WAN should be about the idea that you bring whatever internet connection you can get, MPLS, LTE, broadband, whatever, and the SD-WAN technology should provide to you the absolute best application experience without any intervention, without any assistance, right? It should be intelligent enough, we should have an intelligent enough system for it to take any connection it can and give you the best, the best application performance and I do believe that's the, really the future of SD-WAN, that's how we build our SD-WAN products at Meraki. >> You know, Todd, security of course is hugely important. For those those to travel a lot it seems like I, every, I'm constantly getting warnings, like don't like Log into your hotel WiFi, don't, don't do this. You talk about creating pervasive security everywhere. How are we doing and how do we get better? >> Yeah, people say a lot of security is about training the user. We should do better than that, right? And simplicity is the key. If we can make the systems incredibly simple for users to use securely, then we don't have to spend nearly as much time training them to be secure. And I think that that's what we see as consumers, is constant fraud alerts and best practices and don't open that email and do open this email, but we can expect more from our technology. It can be more intelligent and it can be simpler and it can make it easy for us to stay secure. And that's how we focus, really, the security portfolio at Meraki not just in our MX platform, our security appliance, but across all of our products. I mean, just embedding best in class encryption, best in class mobile device management, policy protection across all our products. The simpler you make it the more likely we are that people are really using all of it, right? And being as secure as they can be. >> Just to follow up on that, in the keynote this morning, Chuck Robbins was talking about how cloud was supposed to be this promise of simple, but now it's multi-apps. And you know how many different SaaS providers, I've got multiple public clouds, it's not getting any simpler. You talk about the vision for the network, I should be able to take all of them and put them together, so will it really be simple or will Cisco be able to just weave together all of these various options? >> Yeah, I think Chuck really has it right here. I remember when everyone talked about the cloud as this thing that would be infinitely simple and now whenever I talk to a startup getting started, the very first thing they have to buy, even before they figure out what CRM they're gonna use or sales force or whatever, the first thing they try to figure out is first we need a single sign on multi-cloud authentication solution. We're like, "That is not simple." That's the first thing that you have to think about and it's not simple. Yeah, we got, I think we got away from that as different cloud solutions became so prolific, there was no real best practice and best standards, and especially as we start to try to connect these enterprise sites into these clouds, that's what really makes them sort of, makes the multi-cloud world complex, and it's that connection where I think Cisco's gonna drive the most value. It's about bringing all of our physical sites to the cloud in the most secure way and the most performant way. >> And the developers who had Greenfield or startups they have to worry about that existing complexity in the cloud, so that's an obvious check for the cloud, but also the developers, their roles are changing I wanna get into that with you because we saw people playing with the Meraki switches at the last DevNet Create, but before we get into that I wanna ask you, just to get it on the record, explain to the folks out there that haven't gotten the update on Meraki, what is the Meraki team doing? What is it? What are you guys focused on? What's your mission for Meraki? Take a minute to say, just put that out there. >> Sure, yeah, our mission at Meraki is to simplify powerful technology so passionate people can focus on their true mission, whether that mission is technology for education or retail or hospitality. They shouldn't spend all their time just building the most sophisticated three tier switching network or whatever. They should spend their time really focused on their true mission and we can we can let them do that by taking this powerful technology at Cisco and making it simple. >> And it's software, hardware, what's the product? >> Exactly, yeah. And so my aspiration is to do that for all IT infrastructure so for IT shops that wanna focus on technology for their mission, I wanna try to make kind of keeping the lights on, making their basic technology work as simple as possible. And so we have WiFi and switching. We have SD-WAN routing and a security appliance. We have mobile device management. And we have actual surveillance and security cameras, which more and more are being used for IoT cameras. And all of this is all managed from Meraki's dashboard from a single native cloud experience. So we sell the hardware, of course, but our flagship product is the cloud itself, Meraki Dashboard and it gives you that true 100% native cloud management experience, single pane of glass, and most importantly, simplicity value proposition. It is the simplest to manage, simplest to monitor IT system in the world. >> And that's the cloud operation, that's the scale that kind of ties into the themes? >> Absolutely. >> Okay, now switching gears I wanna get your thoughts on this vision I've been hearing about, this 80/20. What is this 80/20 rule that you have? Could you just take a minute to explain what it is, why is it important, and where's the relevance and impact for enterprises? >> Sure, yeah the Meraki 80/20 rule if you're a developer at Meraki, software developer, and the day you get to Meraki we tell you our development principles and one of them, a bit of an important one, is our 80/20 rule so we build a pretty broad portfolio at Meraki, wireless switching, routing, all this network stuff and with that we wanna be, in the areas that we compete, we wanna be a complete solution for our customers. But we realized that's impossible, right? So the way we sort of guide our engineers is say, we want you to be a complete solution for 80% of the customers, right? And for a lot of smaller businesses and schools and even government agencies, that's great. That's great. For those customers Meraki is a very complete solution. It has every function they would ever want. But I don't want my engineering team scrambling around trying to build every vertical specific feature in the world this healthcare feature, that retail feature, this hospitality feature. So instead, the Meraki 80/20 rule says, for those last 20% of customers, especially the biggest, most sophisticated customers, for them, the Meraki 80% is probably gonna be only part of the total solution and we open up our platform. We open up all of our APIs using things like Cisco DevNet and we bring in a world, a universe of developers both our customers who actually have developers and can develop to our platform as well as all of our technology partners who build these applications on top and that 80/20 rule, really is how our engineers decide what to build and what to open up through the APIs and how to build this kind of ecosystem of development partners that expand ours. >> So the 20% you're enabling, because what I think I hear you saying is that 20% of those clients, customers are gonna have full stack engineering staffs. They're gonna have maybe complexity that might have to figure out in those APIs is where you guys wanna keep that open, but not predicate certain things, is that right? >> Yeah, well, I think the 20% come in two categories. There's the group that builds so they have like a full stack engineering team and they can build their own custom application for hotel management or for university student enablement or whatever it is, but then there's another group, they buy, right, so they want something very retail specific, but instead of trying to build it, they buy it from a partner. We have tons of application development partners who built on top of the Meraki API and they have awesome solutions. And you can check them all out on DevNet or on Meraki.IO. >> Todd, looking forward a little bit, there's a lot of discussion around 5G and what that will mean for network connectivity. I was joking with you before we started. Some people are like, "Well, hey, we won't even need WiFi "in the future because 5G's just gonna plaster the globe "with infinite bandwidth and will be lovely." So what's your take? >> Oh, I'll tell you. I'm super excited about 5G. So we think about 5G a lot as like the next generation of cellular connectivity, but the standard goes far, far beyond that. In fact, it gives a pretty prescriptive, and I hope, I hope this will really come true, it gives a pretty prescriptive recipe for how WiFi can be part of the 5G network. And finally, we'll be able to get all of these indoor networks unified on a single technology, but bringing all of those service provider, Authentication Service Provider Services, we're starting to see that with service providers who support voice over WiFi, right? But I think we're gonna see a whole universe of far more integration and really far more seamless service provider connectivity once 5G and all of the hooks into the WiFi network really start to work. We used to call this the Hotspot 2.0 and I'll be honest with you, I think they're gonna call it Hotspot 3.0. (laughing) But I think 5G is really gonna be the time when we start to see it really, really in action. >> The conductivity piece is critical for IoT. We're seeing machine learning and AI be critical. What's your vision for how machine learning and artificial intelligence is gonna bring in to impact smart cities, smart homes, because as you get to that next step-- >> Yeah. >> I got the connectivity, got the pervasiveness. Now I need application, I need security. I need to have a clean user experience. What's the thoughts on how Meraki is gonna deliver that? What's your vision? >> Yeah, look, there are times when the machines are gonna do better than the people and I think we all, with varying degrees of comfort, are gonna come to this realization, right? And the network is one great example, like we just released Meraki Wireless Health and Meraki Insight and these are both assurance products that are designed around an AI core. The machines are gonna be better at scrolling through radius logs and SNMP traps and all kinds of different data to find those anomalies to see what's going wrong. And we should expect them to do that. We should not do that stuff anymore. The system, the cloud, the Meraki Dashboard can do the heavy lifting for us, it can help diagnose when we're sick and help prescribe the cure because that type of AI is gonna have a far better understanding of all of that information, that massive amount of data that you have to sort through to come up to the right conclusions, but for smart cities, and I am super excited about that space. I mean, we launched this camera portfolio and we've been driving a ton of machine learning into it right now and I got to watch the cameras like learn how to count human beings using machine learning, and it's amazing. >> Mind blowing. >> It is mind blowing to see machine learning at work, especially in the learning phase, and now that this technology can be put in the hands of Meraki customers which is so easy to deploy and takes like, it just is for everyone now. It's not just for the people with massive data centers, GPU farms, and all that stuff. Anyone can deploy this and we can track people using cameras. I think it's finally gotten to the point where it's like, okay, we can realize maybe human beings shouldn't be staring at camera feeds all day. The machines will be better at that for us and that's I really think just the beginning, counting people, understanding where your traffic is, where there's congestion, having the cities start to become smarter over time I think the only gonna, It's only gonna make us all-- >> It augments the reality of having a human do it, but humans still might be involved. Todd, thanks for spending the time. I know you're super busy here at the conference. Thanks for coming on. I wanna get final question for you, kinda end the segment. Take a step back and kinda think about the customer interactions you've had with your customers. Share some anecdotes. People watch say, "Hey, this Meraki thing, "I wanna get to know more of it. "This sounds cool." They might be, wanna kick the tires, might wanna jump headfirst into the deep end and explore. Share some anecdotal feedback you've heard. What are people saying? What our customers saying? "Man that's the best thing since sliced bread." I mean what are some of the things that you've heard from customers? Share a few sound bites of customer reactions after using Meraki. >> It's funny I met with a Fortune 500 company this morning and they deployed Meraki at all their branches, like a full stack Meraki site, and he said in his entire time at that company, he's only been hugged after one project and it was for bringing Meraki to the company. And I think people are really reacting to this idea that powerful technology can be simple. And if you do that, your team can be freed up to do what they really want and your users can be cared for actually at a higher level, right? And simplicity unlocks that. We've had customers who are shocked at how wide the SD-WAN deployments are in Meraki, how dense the auditorium and even stadium WiFi is. I was just talking to a customer right out here who's really blown away by how much of the portfolio, how much the technology's opened up using the APIs that we're teaching folks about a DevNet right now. And I guess my only, just thinking back to when we spoke last which is like a year and two months ago, I can't believe it's only been that short of time. It's only been a year because where Meraki's come in the last year, I guess the only thing I'd ask for your audience is, hey, give it give it a look. >> And you're giving away free switches here too. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Gotta get your hands on Todd. Thanks and congratulations on your success, making things easy, reducing the steps it takes to do stuff and it's really good business model. >> Yeah, thank you. Simplicity is great, guys. >> Alright, Todd. He's the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Meraki team. Really changing the game. Cloud scale, cloud simplicity, running workloads and data across the cloud native and on-site on-premise activity. It's theCUBE here, bringing all the action in Orlando. We've got a bit more, stay with us after this short break. (techno music)