>>The Cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Welcome back to Vegas, guys and girls, it's great to have you with us. The Cube Live. Si finishing our second day of coverage of Palo Alto Ignite. 22 from MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. Dave Cybersecurity is one of my favorite topics to talk about because it is so interesting. It is so dynamic. My other favorite thing is to hear the voice of our vendors' customers. And we could to >>Do that. I always love to have the customer on you get you get right to the heart of the matter. Yeah. Really understand. You know, what I like to do is sort of when I listen to the keynotes, try to see how well it aligns with what the customers are actually doing. Yeah. So let's >>Do it. We're gonna unpack that now. Michael Fagan joins us, the Chief Transformation Officer at Village Roadshow. Welcome Michael. It's great to have you >>And thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. >>So this is a really interesting entertainment company. I find the name interesting, but talk to us a little bit about Village Roadshow so the audience gets an understanding of all of the things that you guys do cuz theme parks is part of >>This. Yeah, so Village Road show's Australia's largest cinema exhibitor in conjunction with our partners at event. We also own and operate Australia's largest theme parks. We have Warner Brothers movie World, wet and Wild. SeaWorld Top Golf in Australia is, is operated by us plus more. We also do studio, we also own movie studios, so Aquaman, parts of the Caribbean. We're, we're filming our movie studios Elvis last year. And we also distribute and produce movies and TV shows. Quite diverse group. >>Yeah, you guys have won a lot of awards. I mean, I don't know, academy Awards, golden Globe, all that stuff, you know, and so it's good. Congratulations. Yeah. >>Thank you. >>Cool stuff. I wanna also, before we dig into the use case here, talk to us about the role of a chief transformation officer. How long have you been in that role? What does it encompass and what do you get to drive from a transformation perspective? Yeah, >>So the, the, the nature and pace of disruption is accelerating and on, on one side. And then on the other side, the running business as usual is becoming increasingly complex and, and more difficult to do. So running both simultaneously and at pace can put organizations at risk, both financially and and other ways. So in my role as Chief Transformation officer, I support the rest of the executive team by giving them additional capacity and also bring capability to the team that wasn't there before. So I do a lot of strategic and thought leadership. There's some executive coaching in there, a lot of financial modeling and analysis. And I believe that when a transformation role in particularly a chief transformation role is done correctly, it's a very hands-on role. So there's certain things where I, I dive right down and I'm actually hands in, hands-on leading teams or leading pieces of work. So I might be leading particular projects. I tried to drive profit revenue and profitability across the divisions and does any multi or cross-divisional opportunities or initiative, then I will, I will lead those. >>The transformation, you know, a while ago was cloud, right? Okay, hey, cloud and transformation officers, whether or not they had that title, we'll tell you, look, you gotta change the operating model. You can't just, you know, lift and shift in the cloud. That's, you know, that's pennies. We want, you know, big bucks. That's the operating. Now it's, I'm my question is, is did the pandemic just accelerate your transformation or, or was it, you know, deeper than that? >>Yeah, so what in my role have both digital and business transformation, some of it has been organizational. I think the pandemic has had a, a significant and long lasting effect on society, not just on, on business. So I think if you think about how work work used to be a, a place you went to and how it was done beforehand, before the, before COVID versus now where, you know, previously, you know, within the enterprise you had all of the users, you had all of the applications, you had all of the data, you had all of the people. And then since March, 2020, just overnight, that kind of inverted and, you know, you had people working from home and a person working from home as a branch office of one. So, so we ended up with another thousand branches literally overnight. A lot of the applications that we use are now SASS or cloud-based, whether that's timekeeping with Kronos or communica employee communication or work Jam. So they're not sitting within our data center, they're not sitting within, within our enterprise. It's all external. >>So from a security perspective, you obviously had to respond to that and we heard a lot about endpoint and cloud security and refactoring the network and identity. These guys aren't really an identity. They partner for that, but still a lot of change in focus that the CISO had to deal with. How, how did you guys respond to that? And, and you had a rush to do it. Yeah. And so as you sit back now, where do you go from here? >>Well we had, we had two major triggers for our, our network and security transformation. The first being COVID itself, and then the second beam, we had a, a major MPLS telco renewal that came up. So that gave you an opportunity to look at what we were doing and essentially our network was designed for a near, that no longer exists for when, for when p like I said, when people, when people were from home, all the applications were inside. So, and we had aging infrastructure, our firewalls were end of life. So initially we started off with an SD WAN at the SD WAN layer and an SD WAN implementation. But when we investigated and saw the security capabilities that are available now, we that to a full sassy WAN implementation. >>Why Palo Alto Networks? Because you, you had, you said you had an aging infrastructure designed for an era that doesn't exist anymore, but you also had a number of tools. We've been talking about a consolidation a lot the last couple days. Yeah. How did, what did you consolidate and why with Palo Alto? >>So we had a great partner in Australia, incidentally also called Cube. Cube Networks. Yeah. That we worked with great >>Names. Yeah, right. >>So we, so we, we worked for Cube. We ran a, a form of tender process. And Palo Alto with, you know, Prisma access and Global Global Protect was the only, the only solution that gave us everything that we needed in terms of network modernization, the agility that we required. So for example, in our theme part, we want to send out a hotdog cart or an ice cream cart, and that becomes, all of a sudden you got a new branch that I want to spin up this branch in 10 minutes and then I wanna spin it back down again. So from agility perspective, from a flexibility perspective, the security that, that we wanted, you know, from a zero trust perspective, and they were the only, certainly from a zero trust perspective, they're probably the only vendor that, that exists that, that actually provided the, the, all those capabilities. >>And did you consolidate tools or you were in the process of consolidating tools now? >>Yeah, so we actually, we actually consolidated down to, to, to a, to a single vendor. And in my previous role I had, I had implemented SD WAN before and you know, interoperability is a, is a major issue in the IT industry. I think there's, it's probably the only industry in the, the only industry I can think of certainly that where we, we ship products that aren't ready. They're not of all the features, they, they don't have all the features that they should have. They're their plans. They were releasing patches, releasing additional features every, every couple of months. So, you know, if you, if if Ford sold the card, I said, Hey, you're gonna give you backseats in a couple of months, they'd be uproar. But, but we do that all the time in, in it. So I had, when I previously implemented an Sdwan transformation, I had products from two tier one vendors that just didn't talk to one another. And so when I went and spoke to those vendors, they just went, well, it's not me. It's clearly, clearly those guys. So, so there's a lot to be said for having a, you know, a champion team rather than a team of champions. And Palo Alto have got that full stack fully integrated that was, you know, exactly meant what we were looking for. >>They've been talking a lot the last couple days about integration and it, and I've talked with some of their executives and some analysts as well, including Dave about that seems to be a differentiator for them because they really focus on that. Their m and a strategy is very, it seems to be very clear and there's purpose on that backend integration instead of leaving it to the customer, like Village Road show to do it. They also talked a lot about the consolidation. I'm just curious, Michael, in terms of like what you've heard at the show in the last couple of days. >>Yeah, I mean I've been hearing to same mess, but actually we've, we've lived in a >>You're living it. That's what I wanted to >>Know. So, so, you know, we had a choice of, you know, do you try and purchase so-called best of breed products and then put a lot of effort into integrating them and trying to get them to work, which is not really what we want to spend time doing. I don't, I don't wanna be famous for, you know, integration and, you know, great infrastructure. I want to be, I want Village to be famous for delivering great experiences to our customers. Memories that last a lifetime. And you know, when kids grow up in Australia, they, everybody remembers going to the theme parks. That's what, that's what I want our team to be doing and to be delivering those great experiences, not to be trying to plug together bits of software and it may or may not work and have vendors pointing at one another and then we are left carrying the cannon and holding the >>Baby. So what was the before and after, can you give us a sense as to how life changed, you know, pre that consolidation versus post? >>Yeah, so our, our, our infrastructure, say our infrastructure was designed for, you know, the, you know, old ways of working where we had you knowm routers that were, you know, not designed for cloud, for modern traffic, including cloud Destin traffic, an old MPLS network. We used to back haul all the traffic from, from our branches back to central location run where we've got, you know, firewall walls, we've got a dmz, we could run advanced inspection services on that. So if you had a branch that wanted to access a website that was housed next door, even if it was across the country, then it would, we would pull that all the way back to Melbourne. We would apply advanced inspection services to it, send it up to the cloud out back across the country. Traffic would come back, come down to us, back out to our branch. >>So you talk about crossing the country four times, even at the website is, is situated next door now with, with our sasi sdwan transformation just pops out to the cloud now straight away. And the, the difference in performance for our, for our team and for our customers, it, it's phenomenal. So you'll talk about saving minutes, you know, on a log on and, and seconds then and on, on an average transaction and second zone sound like a lot. But when you, it's every click up, they're saving a second and add up. You're talking about thousands of man hours every month that we've saved. >>If near Zuke were sitting right here and said, what could we do better? You know, what do you need from us that we're not delivering today that you want to, you want us to deliver that would change your life. Yeah, >>There's two things. One, one of which I think they're all, they're already doing, but I actually haven't experienced myself. It's around the autonomous digital experience management. So I've now got a thousand users who are sitting at home and they've got, when they've got a problem, I don't know, is it, is it my problem or is it their problem? So I know that p were working on a, an A solution that digital experience solution, which can actually tell, well actually know you're sitting in your kitchen and your routes in your front room, maybe you should move closer to the route. So there, there they, that's one thing. And the second thing is using AI to tell me things that I wouldn't be able to figure out with a human training. A lot of time sifting through data. So things like where I've potentially overcompensated and, you know, overdelivered on the network and security side or of potentially underdelivered on a security side. So having AI to, you know, assess all of those millions and probably billions of, you know, transactions and packets that are moving around our network and say, Hey, you could optimize it more if you, if you dial this down or dial this up. >>So you said earlier we, this industry has a habit of shipping products before, you know they're ready. So based on your experience, seems like, first of all, it sounds like you got a at least decent technical background as well. When do you expect to have that capability? Realistically? When can we expect that as an industry? >>I think I, I think, like I said, the the rate and nature of change is, is, I think it's accelerating. The halflife of degree is short. I think when I left university, what I, what I learned in first year was, was obsolete within five years, I'd say now it's probably obsolete of you. What'd you learn in first year? It's probably obsolete by the time you finish your degree. >>Six months. Yeah, >>It's true. So I think the, the, the rate of change and the, the partnership that I see Palo building with the likes of AWS and Google and that and how they're coming together to, to solve, to jointly solve these problems is I think we will see this within 12 months. >>Who, who are your clouds? You got multiple clouds >>Or We got multiple clouds. Mostly aws, but there are certain things that we run that run in run in Azure as well. We, we don't really have much in GCP or, or, or some of the other >>Azure for collaboration and teams, stuff like that. >>Ah, we, we run, we run SAP that's we hosted in, in Azure and our cinema ticketing system is, is was run in Azure. It's, it was only available in, in in Azure the time we're mo we are mostly an AWS >>Shop. And what do you do with aws? I mean, pretty much everything else is >>Much every, everything else, anything that's customer facing our websites, they give us great stability. Great, great availability, great performance, you know, we've had and, and, and, and a very variable as well. So, we'll, you know, our, our pattern of selling movie tickets is typically, you know, fairly flat except when, you know, there's a launch of a, of a new movie. So all of a sudden we might say you might sell, you know, at 9:00 AM when, you know, spider-Man went on sale last year, I think we sold 100 times the amount of tickets in the forest, 10 minutes. So our website didn't just scale look beautifully, just took in all of that extra traffic scale up. We're at only any intervention and then scale back down >>Taylor Swift needs that she does need that. So yeah. And so is your vision to have Palo Alto networks security infrastructure have be a common sort of layer across those clouds and maybe even some on-prem? Is it, are you, are you working toward that? Yeah, >>We, yeah, we, yeah, we, we'd love to have, you know, our end, our end customers don't really care about the infrastructure that we run. They won't be >>Able to unless it breaks. >>Unless it breaks. Yeah. They wanna be able to go to see a movie. Do you wanna be able to get on a rollercoaster? They wanna be able to go, you know, play around around a top golf. So having that convergence and that seamless integration of working across cloud network security now for most of our team, they, they don't know and they don't need to know. In fact, I, I frankly don't want them to know and be, be thinking about networks and clouds. I kind of want them thinking about how do we sell more cinema tickets? How do we give a great experience to our guests? How do we give long lasting lifetime memories to, to the people who come visit our parks? >>That's what they want. They want that experience. Right. I'd love to get your final thoughts on, we, we had you give a great overview of the ch the role that you play as Chief transformation officer. You own digital transformation, you want business transformation. What advice would you give to either other treat chief transformation officers, CISOs, CSOs, CEOs about partnering, what's the right partner to really improve your security posture? >>I think there's, there's two things. One is if you haven't looked at this in the last two years and made some changes, you're outta date. Yeah. Because the world has changed. We've seen, I mean, I've heard somebody say it was two decades worth of, I actually think it's probably five 50 years worth of change in, in Australia in terms of working habits. So one, you need to do something. Yeah. Need to, you need to have a look at this. The second thing I think is to try and partner with someone that has similar values to your organization. So Village is a, it's a wonderful, innovative company. Very agile. So the, like the, the concept of gold class cinema, so, you know, big proceeds, recliners, waiter service, elevated foods concept that, that was invented by village in 1997. Thank you. And we had thanks finally came to the states so decade later, I mean we would've had the CEO of every major cinema chain in the world come to come to Melbourne and have a look at what Village is doing and go, yeah, we're gonna export that back around around the world. It's probably one of, one of Australia's unknown exports. Yeah. So it's, yeah, so, so partnering. So we've got a great innovation history and we'd like to think of ourselves as pretty agile. So working with partners who are, have a similar thought process and, and managed to an outcome and not to a contract Yeah. Is, is important for us. >>It's all about outcomes. And you've had some great outcomes, Michael, thank you for joining us on the program, walking us through Village Roadshow, the challenges that you had, how you tackled them, and, and next time I think I'm in a movie theater and I'm in reclining chair, I'm gonna think about you and village. So thank you. We appreciate your insights, your time. Thank you. Thanks Michael. For Michael Fagan and Dave Valante. I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube. Our live coverage of Palo Alto Networks. Ignite comes to an end. We thank you so much for watching. We appreciate you. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging emerging tech coverage next year. >>Yeah.

(upbeat music) >> We're here on theCube covering AWS Storage Day 2022. Kevin Miller joins us. He's the vice president and general manager of Amazon S3. Hello, Kevin, good to see you again. >> Hey Dave, it's great to see you as always. >> It seems like just yesterday we were celebrating the 15th anniversary of S3, and of course the launch of the modern public cloud, which started there. You know, when you think back Kevin, over the past year, what are some of the trends that you're seeing and hearing from customers? What do they want to see AWS focus more on? What's the direction that you're setting? >> Yeah, well Dave, really I think there's probably three trends that we're seeing really pop this year. I think one just given the kind of macroeconomic situation right now is cost optimization. That's not a surprise. Everyone's just taking a closer look at what they're using, and where they might be able to pair back. And you know, I think that's a place that obviously S3 has a long history of helping customers save money. Whether it's through our new storage classes, things like our Glacier Instant Retrieval, storage class that we launched to reinvent last year. Or things like our S3 storage lens capability to really dig in and help customers identify where their costs are are being spent. But so certainly every, you know, a lot of customers are focused on that right now, and for obvious reasons. I think the second thing that we're seeing is, just a real focus on simplicity. And it kind of goes hand in hand with cost optimization, because what a lot of customers are looking for is, how do I take the staff that I have, and do more this year. Right, continue to innovate, continue to bring new applications or top line generating revenue applications to the market, but not have to add a lot of extra headcount to do that. And so, what they're looking for is management and simplicity. How do I have all of this IT infrastructure, and not have to have people spending a lot of their time going into kind of routine maintenance and operations. And so that's an area that we're spending a lot of time. We think we have a lot of capability today, but looking at ways that we can continue to simplify, make it easier for customers to manage their infrastructure. Things like our S3 intelligent tiering storage class, which just automatically gives cost savings for data that's not routinely accessed. And so that's a big focus for us this year as well. And then I think the last and probably third thing I would highlight is an emerging theme or it's been a theme, but really continuing to increase in volume, is all around sustainability. And you know, our customers are looking for us to give them the data and the assurances for them, for their own reports and their own understanding of how sustainable is my infrastructure. And so within AWS, of course, you know we're on a path towards operating with 100% renewable energy by 2025. As well as helping the overall Amazon goal of achieving net zero carbon by 2040. So those are some big lofty goals. We've been giving customers greater insights with our carbon footprint tool. And we think that, you know the cloud continues to be just a great place to run and reduce customer's carbon footprint for the similar you know, storage capacity or similar compute capacity. But that's just going to continue to be a trend and a theme that we're looking at ways that we can continue to help customers do more to aggressively drive down their carbon footprint. >> I mean, it makes sense. It's like you're partnering up with the cloud, you know, you did same thing on security, you know, there's that shared responsibility model, same thing now with ESG. And on the macro it's interesting Kevin, this is the first time I can remember where, you know it used to be, if there's a downturn it's cost optimization, you go to simplicity. But at the same time with digital, you know, the rush to digital, people still are thinking about, okay how do I invest in the future? So but let's focus on cost for a moment then we'll come back to sort of the data value. Can you tell us how AWS helps customers save on storage, you know, beyond just the price per terabyte actions that you could take. I mean I love that, you guys should keep doing that. >> Absolutely. >> But what other knobs are you turning? >> Yeah, right and we've had obviously something like 15 cost reductions or price reductions over the years, and we're just going to continue to use that lever where we can, but it's things like the launch of our Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class that we did last year at Reinvent, where that's now you know, 4/10ths of a cent per gigabyte month. For data that customers access pretty infrequently maybe a few times a year, but they can now access that data immediately and just pay a small retrieval fee when they access that data. And so that's an example of a new capability that reduces customer's total cost of ownership, but is not just a straight up price reduction. I mentioned S3 Intelligent-Tiering, that's another case where, you know, when we launch Glacier Instant Retrieval, we integrated that with Intelligent-Tiering as well. So we have the archive instant access tier within Intelligent-Tiering. And so now data that's not accessed for 90 days is just automatically put into AIA and and then results in a reduced storage cost to customers. So again, leaning into this idea that customers are telling us, "Just do, you know what should be done "for my data to help me reduce cost, can you just do it, "and sort of give me the right defaults." And that's what we're trying to do with things like Intelligent-Tiering. We've also, you know, outside of the S3 part of our portfolio, we've been adding similar kinds of capabilities within some of our file services. So things like our, you know elastic file service launched a one zone storage class as well as an intelligent tiering capability to just automatically help customers save money. I think in some cases up to 92% on their their EFS storage costs with this automatic intelligent tiering capability. And then the last thing I would say is that we also are just continuing to help customers in other ways, like I said, our storage lens is a great way for customers to really dig in and figure out. 'Cause you know, often customers will find that they may have, you know, certain data sets that someone's forgotten about or, they're capturing more data than they expected perhaps in a logging application or something that ends up generating a lot more data than they expected. And so storage lens helps them really zoom in very quickly on, you know this is the data, here's how frequently it's being accessed and then they can make decisions about use that data I keep, how long do I keep it? Maybe that's good candidates to move down into one of our very cold storage classes like Glacier Deep Archive, where they they still have the data, but they don't expect to need to actively retrieve it on a regular basis. >> SDL bromide, if you can measure it, you can manage it. So if I can see it, visualize it, that I can take actions. When you think about S3- >> That's right. it's always been great for archival workloads but you made some updates to Glacier that changed the way that we maybe think about archive data. Can you talk about those changes specifically, what it means for how customers should leverage AWS services going forward? >> Yeah, and actually, you know, Glacier's coming up on its 10 year anniversary in August, so we're pretty excited about that. And you know, but there's just been a real increase in the pace of innovation, I think over the last three or four years there. So we launched the Glacier Deep Archive capability in 2019, 2018, I guess it was. And then we launched Glacier Instant Retrieval of course last year. So really what we're seeing is we now have three storage classes that cover are part of the Glacier family. So everything from millisecond retrieval for that data, that needs to be accessed quickly when it is accessed, but isn't being accessed, you know, regularly. So maybe a few times a year. And there's a lot of use cases that we're seeing really quickly emerge for that. Everything from, you know, user generated content like photos and videos, to big broadcaster archives and particularly in media and entertainment segment. Seeing a lot of interest in Glaciers Instant Retrieval because that data is pretty cold on a regular basis. But when they want to access it, they want a huge amount of data, petabytes of data potentially back within seconds, and that's the capability we can provide with Glacier Instant Retrieval. And then on the other end of the spectrum, with Glacier Deep Archive, again we have customers that have huge archives of data that they be looking to have that 3-AZ durability that we provide with Glacier, and make sure that data is protected. But really, you know expect to access it once a year if ever. Now it could be a backup copy of data or secondary or tertiary copy of data, could be data that they just don't have an active use for it. And I think that's one of the things we're starting to see grow a lot, is customers that have shared data sets where they may not need that data right now but they do want to keep it because as they think about, again these like new applications that can drive top line growth, they're finding that they may go back to that data six months or nine months from now and start to really actively use it. So if they want that option value to keep that data so they can use it down the road, Glacier Deep Archive, or Glacier Flexible Retrieval, which is kind of our storage class right in the middle of the road. Those are great options for customers to keep the data, keep it safe and secure, but then have it, you know pretty accessible when they're ready to get it back. >> Got it, thank you for that. So, okay, so customers have choices. I want to get into some of the competitive differentiators. And of course we were talking earlier about cost optimization, which is obviously an important topic given the macro environment you know, but there's more. And so help us understand what's different about AWS in terms of helping customers get value from their data, cost reduction as a component of value, part of the TCO, for sure. But just beyond being a cloud bit bucket, you know just a storage container in the cloud, what are some of the differentiators that you can talk to? >> Yeah, well Dave, I mean, I think that when it comes to value, I think there's tremendous benefits in AWS, well beyond just cost reduction. I think, you know, part of it is S3 now has built, I think, an earned reputation for being resilient, for storing, you know, at massive scale giving customers that confidence that they will be able to scale up. You know, we store more than 200 trillion objects. We regularly peak at over 100 million requests per second. So customers can build on S3 and Glacier with the confidence that we're going to be there to help their applications grow and scale over time. And then I think that in all of the applications both first party and third party, the customers can use, and services that they can use to build modern applications is an incredible benefit. So whether it's all of our serverless offerings, things like Lambda or containers and everything we have to manage that. Or whether it's the deep analytics and machine learning capabilities we have to help really extract, you know value and insight from data in near real time. You know, we're just seeing an incredible number of customers build those kinds of applications where they're processing data and feeding their results right back into their business right away. So I'm just going to briefly mention a couple, like, you know one example is ADP that really helps their customers measure, compare and sort of analyze their workforce. They have a couple petabytes of data, something like 25 billion individual data points and they're just processing that data continuously through their analytics and machine learning applications to then again, give those insights back to their customers. Another good example is AstraZeneca. You know, they are processing petabytes and petabytes of genomic sequencing data. And they have a goal to analyze 2 million genomes over the next four years. And so they're just really scaling up on AWS, both from a pure storage point of view, but more importantly, from all of the compute and analytics capability on top that is really critical to achieving that goal. And then, you know, beyond the first party services we have as I mentioned, it's really our third party, right? The AWS partner network provides customers an incredible range of choice in off the shelf applications that they can quickly provision and make use of the data to drive those business insights. And I think today the APN has something like 100,000 partners over in 150 countries. And we specifically have a storage competency partner where customers can go to get those applications that directly work, you know, on top of their data. And really, like I said, drive some of that insight. So, you know, I think it's that overall benefit of being able to really do a lot more with their data than just have it sit idle. You know, that's where I think we see a lot of customers interested in driving additional value. >> I'm glad you mentioned the ecosystem, and I'm glad you mentioned the storage competency as well. So there are other storage partners that you have, even though you're a head of a big storage division. And then I think there's some other under the cover things too. I've recently wrote, actually have written about this a lot. Things like nitro and rethinking virtualization and how to do, you know offloads. The security that comes, you know fundamentally as part of the platform is, I think architecturally is something that leads the way in the industry for sure. So there's a lot we could unpack, but you've fundamentally changed the storage market over the last 16 years. And again, I've written about this extensively. We used to think about storage in blocks or you got, you know, somebody who's really good in files, there were companies that dominated each space with legacy on-prem storage. You know, when you think about object storage Kevin, it was a niche, right? It was something used for archival, it was known for its simple, get put syntax, great for cheap and deep storage, and S3 changed that. Why do you think that's happened and S3 has evolved, the object has evolved the way it has, and what's the future hold for S3? >> Yeah I mean, you know, Dave, I think that probably the biggest overall trend there is that customers are looking to build cloud native applications. Where as much of that application is managed as they can have. They don't want to have to spend time managing the underlying infrastructure, the compute and storage and everything that goes around it. And so a fully managed service like S3, where there's no provisioning storage capacity, there's, you know we provide the resiliency and the durability that just really resonates with customers. And I think that increasingly, customers are seeing that they want to innovate across the entire range of business. So it's not about a central IT team anymore, it's about engineers that are embedded within lines of business, innovating around what is critical to achieve their business results. So, you know, if they're in a manufacturing segment, how can we pull data from sensors and other instrumentation off of our equipment and then make better decisions about when we need to do predictive maintenance, how quickly we can run our manufacturing line, looking for inefficiencies. And so we've developed around our managed offerings like S3, we've just developed, you know, customers who are investing and executing on plans and you know transformations. That really give them, you know put digital technology directly into the line of business that they're looking for. And I think that trend is just going to continue. People sometimes ask me, well "I mean, 16 years, you know, isn't S3 done?" And I would say, "By no stretcher are we done." We have plenty of feedback from customers on ways that we can continue to simplify, reduce the kinds of things they need to do, when they're looking for example and rolling out new security policies and parameters across their entire organization. So raising the bar there, finding, you know, raising the bar on how they can efficiently manage their storage and reduce costs. So I think we have plenty of innovation ahead of us to continue to help customers provide that fully managed capability. >> Yeah I often say Kevin, the next 10 years ain't going to be like the last in cloud. So I really thank you for coming on theCube and sharing your insights, really appreciate it. >> Absolutely Dave, thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. Okay keep it right there for more coverage of AWS Storage Day 2022 in theCube. (calm bright music)

>> Welcome back to the Seaport in Boston and this is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Paul Gillin. Rob Belson is here as the Developer Relations Lead at Verizon. Robbie great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So Verizon and developer relations. Talk about your role there. Really interesting. >> Absolutely. If you think about our mobile edge computing portfolio in Verizon 5G Edge, suddenly the developer is a more important persona than ever for actually adopting the cloud itself and adopting the mobile edge. So the question then quickly became how do we go after developers and how do we tell stories that ultimately resonate with them? And so my role has been spearheading our developer relations and experience efforts, which is all about meeting developers in the channels where they actually are, building content that resonates with them. Building out architectures that showcase how do you actually use the technology in the wild? And then ultimately creating automation assets that make their lives easier in deploying to the mobile edge. >> So, you know, telcos get a bad rap, when you're thinking it's amazing what you guys do. You put out all this capital infrastructure, big outlays. You know, we use our phones to drop a call. People like, "Ah, freaking Verizon." But it's amazing what we can actually do too. You think about the pandemic, the shift that the telcos had to go through to landlines to support home, never missed a beat. And yet at the same time you're providing all this infrastructure for people to come over the top, the cost forbid is going down, right? Your cost are going up and yet now we're doing this big 5G buildup. So I feel like there's a renaissance about to occur in edge computing that the telcos are going to lead new forms of monetization new value that you're going to be able to add, new services, new applications. The future's got to be exciting for you guys and it's going to be developer-led, isn't it? >> Absolutely. I mean it's been such an exciting time to be a part of our mobile edge computing portfolio. If you think back to late 2019 we were really asking the question with the advent of high speed 5G mobile networks, how can you drive more immersive experiences from the cloud in a cloud native way without compromising on the tools you know and love? And that's ultimately what caused us to really work with the likes of AWS and others to think about what does a mobile edge computing portfolio look like? So we started with 5G Edge with AWS Wavelength. So taking the compute and storage services you know and love in AWS and bringing it to the edge of our 4G and 5G networks. But then we start to think, well, wait a minute. Why stop at public networks? Let's think about private networks. How can we bring the cloud and private networks together? So you turn back to late 2021 we announced Verizon 5G Edge with AWS Outposts but we didn't even stop there. We said, "Well, interest's cool, but what about network APIs? We've been talking about the ability and the programmability of the 5G network but what does that actually look like to the developers? And one great example is our Edge Discovery Service. So you think about the proliferation of the edge 17 Wavelength Zones today in the US. Well, what edge is the right edge? You think about maybe the airline industry if the closest exit might be behind you absolutely applies to service discovery. So we've built an API that helps answer that seemingly basic question but is the fundamental building block for everything to workload orchestration, workload distribution. A basic network building block has become so important to some of these new sources of revenue streams, as we mentioned, but also the ability to disintermediate that purpose built hardware. You think about the future of autonomous mobile robots either ground and aerial robotics. Well, you want to make those devices as cheap as possible but you don't want to compromise on performance. And that mobile edge layer is going to become so critical for that connectivity, but also the compute itself. >> So I just kind of gave my little narrative up front about telco, but that purpose built hardware that you're talking about is exceedingly reliable. I mean, it's hardened, it's fossilized and so now as you just disaggregate that and go to a more programmable infrastructure, how are you able to and what gives you confidence that you're going to be able to maintain that reliability that I joke about? Oh, but it's so reliable. The network has amazing reliability. How are you able to maintain that? Is that just the pace of technology is now caught up, I wonder if you can explain that? >> I think it's really cool as I see reliability and sort of geo distribution as inextricably linked. So in a world where to get that best in class latency you needed to go to one place and one place only. Well, now you're creating some form of single source of failure whether it's the power, whether it's the compute itself, whether it's the networking, but with a more geo distributed footprint, particularly in the mobile edge more choices for where to deliver that immersive experience you're naturally driving an increase in reliability. But again, infra alone it's not going to do the job. You need the network APIs. So it's the convergence of the cloud and network and infra and the automation behind it that's been incredibly powerful. And as a great example, the work we've been doing in hybrid MEC the ability to converge within one single architecture, the private network, the public network, the AWS Outposts, the AWS Wavelength all in one has been such a fantastic journey and Red Hat has been a really important part in that journey. >> From the perspective of the developer when they're building a full cloud to edge application, where does Verizon pick up? Where do they start working primarily with you versus with their cloud provider? >> Absolutely. And I think you touched on a really important point. I think when you often think about the edge it's thought of as an either, or. Is it the edge? Is it the cloud? Is it both? It's an and I can't emphasize that enough. What we've seen from the customers greenfield or otherwise it's about extending an application or services that were never intended to live at the edge, to the edge itself, to deliver a more performant experience. And for certain control plane operations, metadata, backend operations analytics that can absolutely stay in the cloud itself. And so our role is to be a trusted partner in some of our enterprise customers' journeys. Of course, they can lean on the cloud provider in select cases, but we're an absolutely critical mode of support as you think about what are those architectures? How do you integrate the network APIs? And through our developer relations efforts, we've put a major role in helping to shape what those patterns really look like in the wild. >> When they're developing for 5G I mean, the availability of 5G of particularly you know, the high bandwidth 5G is pretty spotty right now. Mostly urban areas. How should they be thinking in the future developing an application roll out two years from now about where 5G will be at that point? >> Absolutely. I think one of the most important things in this case is the interoperability of our edge computing portfolio with both 4G and 5G. Whenever somebody asks me about the performance of 5G they ask how fast? Or for edge computing. It's always about benchmark. It's not an absolute value. It's always about benchmarking the performance to that next best alternative. What were you going to get if you didn't have edge computing in your back pocket? And so along that line of thought having the option to go either through 4G or 5G, having a mobile edge computing portfolio that works for both modes of connectivity even CAN-AM IoT is incredibly powerful. >> So it sounds like 4G is going to be with us for quite a while still? >> And I think it's an important part of the architecture. >> Yeah. >> Robert, tell us about the developer that's building these applications. Where does that individual come from? What's their persona? >> Oh, boy I think there's a number of different personas and flavors. I've seen everything from the startup in the back of a garage working hard to try to figure out what could I do for a next generation media and entertainment experience but also large enterprises. And I think a great area where we saw this was our 5G Edge Computing Challenge that we hosted last year. Believe it or not 100 submissions from over 22 countries, all building on Verizon 5G Edge. It was so exciting to see because so many different use cases across public safety, healthcare, media and entertainment. And what we found was that education is so important. A lot of developers have great ideas but if you don't understand the fundamentals of the infrastructure you get bogged down in networking and setting up your environment. And that's why we think that developer education is so important. We want to make it easy and in fact, the 5G Edge portfolio was designed in such a way that we'll abstract the complexities of the network away so you can focus on building your application and that's such a central theme and focus for how we approach the development. >> So what kind of services are you exposing via APIs? >> Absolutely, so first and foremost, as you think about 5G Edge with say AWS Wavelength, the infra there are APIs that are exposed by AWS to launch your infra, to patch your infrastructure, to automate your infrastructure. Specifically that Verizon has developed that's our network APIs. And a great example is our Edge Discovery Service. So think of this as like a service registry you've launched an application in all 17 edge zones. You would take that information, you would send it via API to the Edge Discovery Service so that for any mobile client say, you wake up one morning in Boston, you can ask the API or query, "Hey, what's the closest edge zone?" DNS isn't going to be able to figure it out. You need knowledge of the actual topology of the mobile network itself. So the API will answer. Let's say you take a little road trip 1,000 miles south to say Miami, Florida you ask that question again. It could change. So that's the workflow and how you would use the network API today. >> How'd you get into this? You're an engineer it's obvious how'd you stumble into this role? >> Well, yeah, I have a background in networks and distributed systems so I always knew I wanted to stay in the cloud somewhere. And there was a really unique opportunity at Verizon as the portfolio was being developed to really think about what this developer community looked like. And we built this all from scratch. If you look at say our Verizon 5G Edge Blog we launched it just along the timing of the actual GA of Wavelength. You look at our developer newsletter also around the time of the launch of Wavelength. So we've done a lot in such a short period and it's all been sort of organic, interacting with developers, working backwards from the customer. And so it's been a fairly new, but incredibly exciting journey. >> How will your data, architecture, data flow what will that look like in the future? How will that be different than it is sort of historically? >> When I think about customer workloads real time data architecture is an incredibly difficult thing to do. When you overlay the edge, admittedly, it gets more complicated. More places that produce the data, more places that consume data. How do you reconcile all of these environments? Maintain consistency? This is absolutely something we've been working on with the ecosystem at large. We're not going to solve this alone. We've looked at architecture patterns that we think are successful. And some of the things that we found that we believe are pretty cool this idea of taking that embedded mobile database, virtualizing it to the edge, even making it multi-tenant. And then you're producing data to one single source and simplifying how you organize and share data because all of the data being produced to that one location will be relevant to that topology. So Boston, as an example, Boston data being produced to that edge zone will only service Boston clients. So having a geo distributed footprint really does help data architectures, but at the core of all of this database, architectures, you need a compute environment that actually makes sense. That's performant, that's reliable. That's easy to use that you understand how to manage and that the edge doesn't make it any more difficult to manage. >> So are you building that? >> That's exactly what we're doing. So here at Red Hat Summit we've had the unique opportunity to continue to collaborate with our partners at Red Hat to think about how you actually use OpenShift in the context of hybrid MEC. So what have done is we've used OpenShift as is to extend what already exists to some of these new edge zones without adding in an additional layer of complexity that was unmanageable. >> So you use OpenShift so you don't have to cobble this together on your own as a full development environment and that's the role really that OpenShift plays here? >> That's exactly right. And we presented pieces of this at our re:Invent this past year and what we basically did is we said the edge needs to be inextricably linked with the cloud. And you want to be able to manage it from some seamless central pane of glass and using that OpenShift console is a great way. So what we did is we wanted to show a really geo-distributed footprint in action. We started with a Wavelength zone in Boston, the region in Northern Virginia, an outpost in the Texas area. We cobbled it all together in one cluster. So you had a whole compute mesh separated by thousands of miles all within a single cluster, single pane of glass. We take that and are starting to expand on the complexity of these architectures to overlay the network APIs we mentioned, to overlay multi-region support. So when we say you can use all 17 zones at once you actually can. >> So you've been talking about Wavelength and Outposts which are AWS products, but Microsoft and Google both have their distributed architectures as well. Where do you stand with those? Will you support those? Are you working with them? >> That's a great question. We have made announcements with Microsoft and Google but today I focus a lot on the work we do with AWS Wavelength and Outposts and continuing to work backwards from the customer and ultimately meet their needs. >> Yeah I mean, you got to start with an environment that the developers know that obviously a great developer community, you know, you see it at re:Invent. What was the reaction at re:Invent when you showed this from a developer community? >> Absolutely. Developers are excited and I think the best part is we're not the only ones talking about Wavelength not even AWS are the only ones talking about Wavelength. And to me from a developer ecosystem perspective that's when you know it's working. When you're not the one telling the best stories when others are evangelizing the power of your technology on your behalf that's when the ecosystem's starting to pick up. >> Speaking of making a bet on Outposts you know, it's somewhat limited today. I'll say it it's limited today in terms of we think it supports RDS and there's a few storage players. Is it your expectation that Outposts is going to be this essentially the cloud environment on your premises is that? >> That's a great question. I see it more as we want to expand customer choice more than ever and ultimately let the developers and architects decide. That's why I'm so bullish on this idea of hybrid MEC. Let's provide all of the options the most complicated geo distributed hybrid deployment you can imagine and automate it, make it easy. That way if you want to take away components of this architecture all you're doing is simplifying something that's already automated and fairly simple to begin with. So start with the largest problem to solve and then provide customers choice for what exactly meets their requirements their SLAs, their footprint, their network and work backwards from the customer. >> Exciting times ahead. Rob, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It's great to have you. >> Appreciate it, thanks for your time. >> Good luck. All right, thank you for watching. Keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for Paul Gillin. We're live at Red Hat Summit 2022 from the Seaport in Boston. We'll be right back.

>>Hi, buddy. Welcome back to the keeps coverage of AWS 2021. Re-invent you're watching the cube and I'm really excited. We're going to go outside the storage box. I like to say with my lawn Thompson Bukovac, who's the vice-president of block and object storage and Wayne Duso was a VP of storage edge and data governance guys. Great to see you again, we saw you at storage day, the 15 year anniversary of AWS, of course, the first product service ever. So awesome to be here. Isn't it. Wow. >>So much energy in the room. It's so great to see customers learning from each other, learning from AWS, learning from the things that you're observing as well. >>A lot of companies decided not to do physical events. I think you guys are on the right side of history. We're going to show you, you weren't exactly positive. How many people are going to show up. Everybody showed. I mean, it's packed house here, so >>Number 10. Yeah. >>All right. So let's get right into it. Uh, news of the week. >>So much to say, when you want to kick this off, >>We had a, we had a great set of announcements that Milan, uh, talked about yesterday, uh, in her talk and, and a couple of them in the file space, specifically a new, uh, member of the FSX family. And if you remember that the FSA, Amazon FSX is, uh, for customers who want to run fully managed versions of third party and open source file systems on AWS. And so yesterday we announced a new member it's FSX for open ZFS. >>Okay, cool. And there's more, >>Well, there's more, I mean, one of the great things about the new match file service world and CFS is it's powered by gravity. >>It is taught by Gravatar and all of the capabilities that AWS brings in terms of networking, storage, and compute, uh, to our customers. >>So this is really important. I want the audience to understand this. So I I've talked on the cube about how a large proportion let's call it. 30% of the CPU cycles are kind of wasted really on things like offloads, and we could be much more efficient, so graviton much more efficient, lower power and better price performance, lower cost. Amazon is now on a new curve, uh, cycles are faster for processors, and you can take advantage of that in storage it's storage users, compute >>That's right? In fact, you have that big launch as well for luster, with gravity. >>We did in fact, uh, so with, with, uh, Yasmin of open CFS, we also announced the next gen Lustre offering. And both of these offerings, uh, provide a five X improvement in performance. For example, now with luster, uh, customers can drive up to one terabyte per second of throughput, which is simply amazing. And with open CFS, right out of, right out of the box at GA a million IOPS at sub-millisecond latencies taking advantage of gravitas, taking advantage of our storage and networking capabilities. >>Well, I guess it's for HPC workloads, but what's the difference between these days HPC, big data, data intensive, a lot of AI stuff, >>All right. You to just, there's a lot of intersection between all of those different types of workloads they have, as you said, and you know, it all, it all depends on it all matters. And this is the reason why having the suite of capabilities that the, if you would, the members of the family is so important to our guests. >>We've talked a lot about, it's really can't think about traditional storage as a traditional storage anymore. And certainly your world's not a box. It's really a data platform, but maybe you could give us your point of view on that. >>Yeah, I think, you know, if, if we look, if we take a step back and we think about how does AWS do storage? Uh, we think along multiple dimensions, we have the dimension that Wayne's talking about, where you bring together the power of compute and storage for these managed file services that are so popular. You and I talked about, um, NetApp ONTAP. Uh, we went into some detail on that with you as well, and that's been enormously popular. And so that whole dimension of these managed file services is all about where is the customer today and how can we help them get to the cloud? But then you think about the other things that we're also imagining, and we're, re-imagining how customers want to grow those applications and scale them. And so a great example here at reinvent is let's just take the concept of archive. >>So many people, when they think about archive, they think about taking that piece of data and putting it away on tape, putting it away in a closet somewhere, never pulling it out. We don't think about archive like that archive just happens to be data that you just aren't using at the moment, but when you need it, you need it right away. And that's why we built a new storage class that we launched just yesterday, Dave, and it's called glacier instead of retrieval, it has retrieval and milliseconds, just like an Esri storage class has the same pricing of four tenths of a cent as glacier archive. >>So what's interesting at the analyst event today, Adam got a question about, and somebody was poking at him, you know, analysts can be snarky sometimes about, you know, price, declines and so forth. And he said, you know, one of the, one of the things that's not always shown up and we don't always get credit for lowering prices, but we might lower costs. And there's the archive and deep archive is an example of that. Maybe you could explain that point of view. >>Yeah. The way we look at it is that our customers, when they talk to us about the cost of storage, they talked to us about the total cost of the storage, and it's not just storing the data, it's retrieving it and using it. And so we have done an amazing amount across all the portfolio around reducing costs. We have glacier answer retrieval, which is 68% cheaper than standard infrequent access. That's a big cost reduction. We have EBS snapshots archive, which we introduced yesterday, 75% cheaper to archive a snapshot. And these are the types of that just transform the total cost. And in some cases we just eliminate costs. And so the glacier storage class, all bulk retrievals of data from the glacier storage class five to 12 hours, it's now free of charge. If you don't even have to think about, we didn't even reduce it. We just eliminated the cost of that data retrieval >>And additive to what Milan said around, uh, archiving. If you look at what we've done throughout the entire year, you know, a interesting statistic that was brought up yesterday is over the course of 2021, between our respective teams, we've launched over 105 capabilities for our customers throughout this year. And in some of them, for instance, on the file side for EFS, we launched one zone which reduced, uh, customer costs by 47%. Uh, you can now achieve on EFS, uh, cost of roughly 4.30 cents per gigabyte month on, uh, FSX, we've reduced costs up to 92%, uh, on Lustre and FSX for windows and with the introduction of ONTAP and open CFS, we continue those forward, including customers ability to compress and Dedoose against those costs. So they ended up seeing a considerable savings, even over what our standard low prices are. >>100 plus, what can I call them releases? And how can you categorize those? Are they features of eight? Do they fall into, >>Because they range for major services, like what we've launched with open ZFS to major features and really 95 of those were launched before re-invent. And so really what you have between the different teams that work in storage is you have this relentless drive to improve all the storage platforms. And we do it all across the course of the year, all across the course of the year. And in some cases, the benefit shows up at no cost at all to a customer. >>Uh, how, how did this, it seems like you're on an accelerated pace, a S3 EBS, and then like hundreds of services. I guess the question is how come it took so long and how is it accelerating now? Is it just like, there was so much focus on compute before you had to get that in place, or, but now it's just rapidly accessing, >>I I'll tell you, Dave, we took the time to count this year. And so we came to you with this number of 106, uh, that acceleration has been in place for many years. We just didn't take the time to couch. Correct. So this has been happening for years and years. Wayne and I have been with AWS for, for a long time now for 10 plus years. And really that velocity that we're talking about right now that has been happening every single year, which is where you have storage today. And I got to tell you, innovation is in our DNA and we are not going to stop now >>So 10 years. Okay. So it was really, the first five years was kind of slow. And then >>I think that's true at all. I don't think that try, you know, if you, if you look at, uh, the services that we have, we have the most complete portfolio of any cloud provider when it comes to storage and data. And so over the years, we've added to the foundation, which is S3 and the foundation, which is EBS. We've come out with a number of storage services in the, in the file space. Now you have an entire suite of persistent data stores within AWS and the teams behind those that are able to accelerate that pace. Just to give you an example, when I joined 10 years ago, AWS launched within that year, roughly a hundred and twenty, a hundred and twenty eight services or features our teams together this year have launched almost that many, just in those in, just in this space. So AWS continues to accelerate the storage teams continue to accelerate. And as my line said, we just started counting >>The thing. And if you think about those first five years, that was laying the baseline to launch us three, to launch EBS, to get that foundation in place, get lifecycle policies in place. But really, I think you're just going to see an even faster acceleration that number's going up. >>No, I that's what I'm saying. It does appear that way. And you had to build a team and put teams in place. And so that's, you know, part of the equation. But again, I come back to, it's not even, I don't even think of it as storage anymore. It's it's data. People are data lake is here to stay. You might not like the term. We always use the joke about a data ocean, but data lake is here to say 200,000 data lakes. Now we heard Adam talk about, uh, this morning. I think it was Adam. No, it was Swami. Do you want a thousand data lakes in your customer base now? And people are adding value to that data in new ways, injecting machine intelligence, you know, SageMaker is a big piece of that. Tying it in. I know a lot of customers are using glue as catalogs and which I'm like, wow, is glue a catalog or, I mean, it's just so flexible. So what are you seeing customers do with that base of data now and driving new business value? Because I've said last decade plus has been about it transformation. And now we're seeing business transformation. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >>Well, the base of every data lake is going to be as three yesterday has over 200 trillion objects. Now, Dave, and if you think about that, if you took every person on the planet, each of those people would have 26,000 S3 objects. It's gotten that big. And you know, if you think about the base of data with 200 trillion plus objects, really the opportunity for innovation is limitless. And you know, a great example for that is it's not just business value. It's really the new customer experiences that our customers are inventing the NFL. Uh, they, you know, they have that application called digital athlete where, you know, they started off with 10,000 labeled images or up to 20,000 labeled images now. And they're all using it to drive machine learning models that help predict and support the players on the field when they start to see things unfold that might cause injury. That is a brand new experience. And it's only possible with vast amounts of data >>Additive to when my line said, we're, we're in you talk about business transformation. We are in the age of data and we represent storage services. But what we really represent is what our customers hold one of their most valuable assets, which is their data. And that set of data is only growing. And the ability to use that data, to leverage that data for value, whether it's ML training, whether it's analytics, that's only accelerated, this is the feedback we get from our customers. This is where these features and new capabilities come from. So that's, what's really accelerating our pace >>Guys. I wish we had more time. I'd have to have you back because we're on a tight clock here, but, um, so great to see you both especially live. I hope we get to do more of this in 2022. I'm an optimist. Okay. And keep it right there, everybody. This is Dave Volante for the cube you're leader in live tech coverage, right back.

(soft electronic music) >> Welcome to this session of the Amazon EC2 15th Birthday Event. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I'm joined by Joshua Burgin, General Manager of AWS Outposts at AWS. Joshua, welcome back to the program. Thank you, it's great to be here again. >> So 15th birthday, a tremendous amount has gone on in the last 15 years, but I want to understand what brought you to AWS? What excited you about cloud and EC2, in particular? >> Yeah, I mean, that's a, it's a great question and it's kind of a fun story. I actually worked at Amazon back in the 90s for three years as a software engineer when I don't think anybody you asked back then would have said that cloud was in our future. And so I'd kind of obviously kept in touch with people over the years and I was working at a customer who, interestingly enough, had moved off of AWS thinking that they could build a better cloud. And then of course, over the years, found out that it's actually quite difficult and was in process of moving back to AWS. And so I reconnected with some of the senior leaders who I was still friendly with and they said, you know, come back in, the water's fine, there's still a lot of opportunity. And it's, it's really been true, right? There's been just a tremendous amount of growth in the last seven years that I've been back and obviously, over the last 15 years for EC2, in general. >> Well, this 15th birthday not only marks a big milestone for AWS, but also for the cloud computing world that it serves globally. Talk to me a little bit about the impact over the last seven years you've been there and 15 years of EC2's life. >> Well, I mean, we've really been transforming every industry that you could possibly imagine as everyone's had to develop a plan to move to the cloud to take advantage of the opportunities for innovation, for cost efficiency, for developer efficiency, for operational improvements. And so EC2 was one of the foundational services inside of AWS and, you know, a lot of things are built on top of it, and so it's been really great to work with all of these different customers in financial services, in Telco, in gaming, you know, healthcare, you name it, all around the world. >> So 15 years ago, EC2 obviously started quite small. Can you talk to us about some of the early trends that are emerging from the hybrid space? >> Yeah, I mean, we're fond of saying here that it's still day one and that's very true for the outposts and the hybrid business, in general, at AWS. The early trends, if I had to kind of bundle them together, would be that first of all, people are operating in more places than they ever thought they would have to. These are big customers, manufacturing, Telco, healthcare, public sector customers, people in gaming, they serve customers around the world. That's a trend that's kind of, irregardless of industry, that's what we're seeing. And so of course, having an outpost available everywhere, we're up to 60 countries now, having local zones in many countries which we hope is our longterm plan, having wavelength zones with lots of partners, you know, that's why we're doing those things 'cause customers are telling us that we need to operate everywhere. It's actually the reason we went from one availability zone or excuse me, three availability zones in one region 15 years ago, to 25 regions in 80 availability zones. And of course, hybrid is building on top of that. The other thing we're seeing, you know, real specifically for hybrid is low latency, local data processing, and data residency. Across every industry, those are the needs that are driving people to adopt hybrid technology and they're the ones pushing us forward here, at AWS to innovate on their behalf. >> Talk to me about some of the innovation in the last few years alone, that customers are helping drive where those regulations are becoming more and more critical. We're seeing more importance on security and ensuring that customer data is secure, protected, but also accessible. >> Yeah, absolutely, I mean, we're fond of saying at AWS that security is job zero. You know, we take it incredibly seriously, even though, of course, it's a shared responsibility model where we secure the underlying infrastructure and then provide tooling and services on top of that for customers to create the level of security that's appropriate for their application. Obviously, a government workload or a banking workload is different than a mobile game, even of course as customer data needs to be secured in all situations. So with outposts and with local zones, what we're giving people the ability to do is ensure that their compute and their storage are in whatever country or municipality or city or state that they need them to be. So you could take something as diverse as a bank or a healthcare company where they might need to have that compute and storage literally in a specific facility because of regulations, or in a specific state, you know, that's kind of happening around the world. You also see something you might not have thought about, but customer is in the iGaming space, so that's mobile betting. Tipico and FanDuel are a couple of early examples of those for outposts where as it becomes legal, at least in more states in the United States and more places in Europe, the regulations are requiring that the cloud computing, if they want to use it, is placed in a specific place. So the only way you can do that is either, of course, if we had a region everywhere, which we don't, or if you have something like outposts, otherwise you'd be forced to revert to like a bare metal solution and kind of take on all that heavy burden yourself. Your developers would be less efficient because they'd be using AWS in one place and bare metal kind of hardware somewhere else. So, you know, it's still really early, but I've been pleased to kind of see that kind of adoption across those diverse industries. >> It is really early, as you said. The philosophy at Amazon AWS is it's day one. Give me some feedback from customers now where, you know, we, we see a lot of different reports that suggest where businesses are, enterprises are in terms of cloud adoption. What are some of the things that you're seeing where you really think hybrid is going to be an absolute game changer? >> Yeah, I mean, one example that comes to mind is Telco which is one of the biggest industries with the smallest amount of cloud adoption to date. And so I think a lot of that was driven by specific requirements in that industry that required on-prem components for that ultra low latency. You can imagine they needed the compute and the storage to be at the cell site or distributed around the United States or other countries. And so that's where you have examples now with Dish Networks where we just announced a strategic partnership with them. They're going to be using this combination of the new small form factor outposts that we're releasing later this year. They're about the size of a pizza box or a couple of pizza boxes. They're also going to be using our network of local zones that we're building out, 15 of them across the United States, and they'll be using our regions for workloads that are, of course, less latency sensitive, and that can kind of be run centrally. So it's really kind of one of the best examples I can think of where people that were held back by the technology, by the offerings are now enabled to move really quickly. And so I think you're going to see a lot in that space and other industries where before they had to kind of not move to the cloud because a portion of their workload needed to remain on-prem, and now we're delivering a continuum of offerings, including, you know, to the very smallest locations. >> Let's look forward into the next decade. As barriers to adoption are being removed daily, you mentioned Dish Network. I saw that they're going to build their 5G, their core 5G network on AWS. That's huge, that's a big signal for the telecommunications industry. But what are some of the things that you think we're going to be able to open this book and there will maybe a crystal ball in the next decade can expect. >> Yeah, I mean, if I had a crystal ball, my roadmap would be perfect. >> Wouldn't it? >> It would be, it would be great. So if anybody's offering one of those I'm, I'm taking. But what I think you'll see is that, that the day one metaphor is going to continue. As big as AWS has become, and I think we're really proud of the accomplishments and innovation we've delivered for customers over the last 15 years, as I mentioned, we started with one instance type and one region, and now we have over 400 instance types in EC2. That's a lot of choice for people and that's just EC2, right? We have another 185 or 200 services these days, I can barely keep up with them which is exciting in its own right. And so the reason is that we're doing all that innovation is that customers are telling us what they want and a lot of that is, although they're driven to move to the cloud and they really want to move there quickly, somewhere between 75 and 90% of technology spending is still in the traditional hardware-software space. So again, I'd like you to think about that. 15 years in, you know, at the run rate that we're at, and obviously with other people in this space, there's still so much more to go that has already moved to the cloud. So I think you'll see more new instance types, more locations, more form factors, you know, from Outpost and us using Outpost to deliver infrastructure like local zones and wavelength which are built on top of Outposts, and so we don't force people to pick and choose between moving to the cloud and running the kinds of workloads they're already running. We want to be driven by the customer not force them into a narrow way of working that we think is best. That's probably the hallmark of AWS is giving people the choice. They can use EC2 and manage their own databases, they can use RDS or one of our, you know, 14 purpose-built databases, depending on what their application needs. And that's true across the board. Storage, compute, machine learning, container services, hybrid offerings, of course, which I manage for the AWS business, we're going to continue to do that. So the choice is going to proliferate, the performance is going to continue to improve, we're going to continue to bring down pricing and increase price for performance, and we're going to hopefully make things easier and more cost-effective for people, whether that's for their developers or their finance people, so that they can innovate on behalf of their customers versus handling all that undifferentiated muck and heavy lifting of managing the infrastructure themselves. >> That customer centricity has always been key to AWS. Just some of what you said, I think we can expect to see a ton more from AWS, announcements, customer-driven choices for customers. Joshua, thank you for joining me today. Happy 15th birthday to Amazon EC2. >> Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. >> For Joshua Burgin, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. (soft electronic music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. Yeah, welcome back to the cubes. Live coverage here for eight of us. Reinvent 2020. Virtual normally were on the show floor getting all of the interviews and talking about the top newsmakers and we have one of them here on the Cube were remote. I'm John for your host of the Cube. George Ellis Eros, GM and director of product manager for AWS. Talking about Wavelength George. Welcome to the remote Cube Cube. Virtual. Thanks for coming on. >>Good to be here. Thanks for having a John >>Eso Andy's Kino. One of the highlights last year, I pointed out that the five g thing is gonna be huge with the L A Wavelength Metro thing going on this year. Same thing. Mawr Proofpoint S'more expansion. Take us through what was announced this year. What's the big update on wavelength? >>Yes, so John Wavelength essentially brings a W services at the edge of the five G network, allowing our AWS customers and developers to reach their own end users and devices. Five devices with very low latency enabling a number off emerging applications ranging from industrial automation and I O. T. All the way to weigh AR VR smart cities, connected vehicles and much more this year we announced earlier in the year the general availability of wavelength in two locations one in the Bay Area and one in the Boston area. And since then we've seen we've been growing with Verizon or five D partner in the U. S. And and increasing that coverage in multiple off the larger U. S cities, including Miami and D. C in New York. And we launched Las Vegas yesterday at Andy's keynote with Verizon. We also announced that we are going toe to have a global footprint with K d D I in Japan launching a wavelength in Tokyo with SK detail SK Telecom in in South Korea or launching indigestion and with Vodafone in London >>so significant its expansion. Um, we used to call these points of presence back in the old days. I don't know what you call them now. I guess they're just zones like you calling them zones, but this really is gonna be a critical edge network, part of the edge, whether it's stadiums, metro area things and the density and the group is awesome. And everyone loves at about five gs. More of a business at less consumer. When you think about it, what has been some of the response as you guys had deployed mawr, What's the feedback? Um, can you take us through what the response has been? What's it been like? What have been some of the observations? >>Yeah, customers air really excited with the promise of five G and really excited to get their hands on these new capabilities that we're offering. Um, And they're telling us, you know, some consistent feedback that we're getting is that they're telling us that they love that they can use the same A W s, a P I S and tools and services that they used today in the region to get their hands on this new capabilities. So that's being pretty pretty consistent. Feedback these off use and the you know, Sometimes customers tell us that within a day they are able to deploy their applications in web. So that's a that's pretty consistent there. We've seen customers across a number of areas arranging, you know, from from manufacturing to healthcare to a ar and VR and broadcasting and live streaming all the way to smart cities and and connected vehicles. So a number of customers in these areas are using wavelength. Some of my favorite you know, examples are in in actually connected vehicles where you really can see that future materialized. You get, you know, customers like LG that are building the completely secularized vehicle, tow everything platform, and customers like safari that allow multiple devices to do, you know, talkto the Waveland, the closest Waveland Zone process. All of those device data streams at the edge. And then, um, it back. You know messages to the drivers, like for emergency situations, or even construct full dynamic maps for consumption off the off the vehicle themselves. >>I mean, it's absolutely awesome. And, you know, one of things that someone Dave Brown yesterday around the C two and the trend with smaller compute. You have the compute relationship at the edge to moving back and forth so I can see those dots connecting and looking forward to see how that plays out. Sure, and it will enable more capabilities. I do want to get your your thoughts, or you could just for the audience and our perspective just define the difference between wavelength and local zones because we know what regions are. Amazon regions are well understood all around the world. But now you have this new concept called locals owns part of wavelength, not part of wavelengths. Are they different technology? Can you just explain? Take him in to exclaim wavelength versus local zones how they work together? >>Yeah, So let me take a step back at AWS. Basically, what we're trying to do is we're trying to enable our customers to reach their end users with low latency and great performance, wherever those end users are and whatever network they're they're using to get connected, whether that's the five g mobile network with the Internet or in I o t Network. So we have a number of products that help our customers do that. And we expect, like, in months off other areas of the AWS platform, that customers are gonna pick and twos and mix and match and combine some of these products toe master use case. So when you're talking about wavelength and local zones, wavelength is about five g. There is obviously a lot off excitement as you said yourself about five g about the promise off those higher throughput. They're Lowell agencies. You know, the large number of devices supported and with wavelengths were enabling our customers toe to make the most of that. You know, of the five G technology and toe work on these emerging new use cases and applications that we talked about When it comes to local zones, we're talking more about extending AWS out two more locations. So if you think about you mentioned AWS regions, we have 24 regions in another five coming. Those are worldwide and enabled most of our customers to run their workloads. You know all of their workloads with low latency and adequate performance across the world. But we are hearing from customers that they want AWS in more locations. So local zones basically bring a W S extend those regions to more locations by bringing a W s closer to population I t and industrial centers. You know, l A is a great example of that. We launched the lay last year toe to local zones in L. A and toe toe a mainly at the media and entertainment customers that are, you know, in the L. A Metro, and we've seen customers like Netflix, for example, moving their artist workstations to the local zones. If they were to move that somewhere, you know, to the cloud somewhere further out the Laden's, he might have been too much for their ass artists work clothes and having some local AWS in the L. A. Metro allows them to finally move those workstation to the cloud while preserving that user experience. You know, interacting with the workstations that's happened. The cloud. >>So just like in conceptualizing is local zone, like a base station is in the metro point of physical location. Is it outpost on steroids? Been trying to get the feel for what it is >>you can think off regions consisting off availability zones. So these are, you know, data center clusters that deliver AWS services. So a local zone is much like an availability zone. But instead of being co located with the rest of the region, is in another locations that, for example, in L. A. Rather than being, you know, in in Virginia, let's say, um, they are internally. We use the same technology that we use for outpost, I suppose, is another great example of how AWS is getting closer to customers for on premises. Deployments were using much of the same technology that you you probably know as Nitro System and a number of other kind of technology that we've been working on for years, actually, toe make all this possible. >>You know, anyone who's been to a football game or any kind of stadium knows you got a great WiFi signal, but you get terrible bandwidth that is essentially kind of the back hall component for the telecom geeks out there. This is kind of what we're talking about here, right? We're talking about more of an expansionary at that edge on throughput, not just signal. So there's, you know, there's there's a wireless signal, and it's like really conductivity riel functionality for applications. >>Yeah, and many. Many of those use case that we're talking about are about, you know, immersive experiences for for end users. So with five t, you get that increasing throughput, you can get up to 10 GPS. You know, it is much higher with what you get 40. You also get lower latents is, but in order to really get make the most out of five G. You need to have the cloud services closer to the end user. So that's what Wavelength is doing is bringing all of those cloud services closer to the end user and combined with five G delivers on these on these applications. You know, um, a couple of customers are actually doing very, very, very exciting things on immersive application, our own immersive experiences. Um, why be VR is a customer that's working on wavelength today to deliver a full 3 60 video off sports events, and it's like you're there. They basically take all of those video streams. They process them in the waving zone and then put them back down to your to your VR headset. But don't you have seen those? We are headsets there, these bulky, awkward, big things because we can do a lot of the processing now at the edge rather than on the heads of itself. We are envisioning that these headsets will Will will string down to something that's indistinguishable potential from, you know, your glasses, making that user experience much better. >>Yeah, from anything from first responders toe large gatherings of people having immersive experiences, it's only gonna get better. Jorge. Thanks for coming on. The Cuban explaining wavelength graduates on the news and expansion. A lot more cities. Um, what's your take for reinvent while I got you? What's the big take away for you this year? Obviously. Virtual, but what's the big moment for you? >>Well, I think that the big moment for me is that we're continuing to, you know, to deliver for our customers. Obviously, a very difficult year for everyone and being able to, you know, with our help off our customers and our partners deliver on the reinvent promised this year as well. It is really impressed for >>me. All right. Great to have you on. Congratulations on local news. Great to see Andy pumping up wavelength. Ah, lot more work. We'll check in with you throughout the year. A lot to talk about. A lot of societal issues and certainly a lot of a lot of controversy as well as tech for good, great stuff. Thanks for coming. I appreciate it. >>Thanks for having me. Thanks. >>Okay, That's the cube. Virtual. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. We'll be back with more coverage from reinvent 2023 weeks of coverage. Walter Wall here in the Cube. Thanks for watching. Yeah,

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of DevOps Virtual Forum, brought to you by Broadcom. >> Hi, Lisa Martin here covering the Broadcom DevOps Virtual Forum. I'm very pleased to be joined today by a CUBE alumni, Jeffrey Hammond, the Vice President and Principal Analyst serving CIOs at Forrester. Jeffrey, nice to talk with you today. >> Good morning, it's good to be here. >> So, a virtual forum, a great opportunity to engage with our audiences. So much has changed in the last, it's an understatement, right? Or it's an overstated thing, but it's obvious. So much has changed. When we think of DevOps, one of the things that we think of is speed, enabling organizations to be able to better serve customers or adapt to changing markets like we're in now. Speaking of the need to adapt, talk to us about what you're seeing with respect to DevOps and Agile in the age of COVID. What are things looking like? >> Yeah, I think that for most organizations, we're in a period of adjustment. When we initially started, it was essentially a sprint. You run as hard as you can for as fast as you can for as long as you can and you just kind of power through it. And that's actually what the folks at GitHub saw in May, when they run an analysis of how developers commit times and level of work that they were committing and how they were working. In the first couple months of COVID, was progressing, they found that developers, at least in the Pacific Time Zone, were actually increasing their work volume, maybe 'cause they didn't have two hour commutes, or maybe because they work stuck away in their homes, but for whatever reason, they were doing more work. And it's almost like, if you've ever run a marathon, the first mile or two in the marathon, you feel great, you just want to run and you want to power through it, you want to go hard. And if you do that, by the time you get to mile 18 or 19, you're going to be gassed, sucking for wind. And that's I think where we're starting to hit. So as we start to gear our development shops up for the reality that most of us won't be returning into an office until 2021 at the earliest. And many organizations will be fundamentally changing their remote work policies, we have to make sure that the agile processes that we use, and the DevOps processes and tools that we use to support these teams are essentially aligned to help developers run that marathon, instead of just kind of power through. So, let me give you a couple specifics. For many organizations, they have been in an environment where they will tolerate remote work and what I would call remote work around the edges, like developers can be remote, but product managers and essentially scrum masters and all the administrators that are running the SCM repositories and the DevOps pipelines are all in the office. And it's essentially centralized work. That's not where we are anymore. We're moving from remote workers at the edge to remote workers at the center of what we do. And so, one of the implications of that is that we have to think about all the activities that you need to do from a DevOps perspective, or from an agile perspective. They have to be remotable. One of the things I found with some of the organizations I talked to early on was, there were things that administrators had to do that required them to go into the office, to reboot the SCM server as an example, or to make sure that the final approvals for production were made. And so, the code could be moved into the production environment. And so, it actually was a little bit difficult because they had to get specific approval from the HR organizations to actually be allowed to go into the office in some states. And so, one of the the results of that is that, while we've traditionally said tools are important, but they're not as important as culture, as structure, as organization, as process, I think we have to rethink that a little bit. Because to the extent that tools enable us to be more digitally organized and to achieve higher levels of digitization in our processes, and be able to support the idea of remote workers in the center. They're now on an equal footing with so many of the other levers that organizations have at their disposal. I'll give you another example. For years, we've said that the key to success with Agile at the team level is cross functional, co-located teams that are working together. Physically co-located. It's the easiest way to show agile success. We can't do that anymore. We can't be physically located at least for the foreseeable future. So, how do you take the low hanging fruits of an agile transformation and apply it in the time of COVID? Well, I think what you have to do is you have to look at what physical co-location has enabled in the past and understand that it's not so much the fact that we're together looking at each other across the table, it's the fact that we're able to get into a shared mind space. From a measurement perspective, we can have shared purpose, we can engage in high bandwidth communications. It's the spiritual aspect of that physical co-location that is actually important. So, one of the biggest things that organizations need to start to ask themselves is, how do we achieve spiritual co-location with our Agile teams, because we don't have the ease of physical co-location available to us anymore. >> Well, spiritual co-location is such an interesting kind of provocative phrase there, but something that probably was a challenge. Here we are seven, eight months in, for many organizations as you say, going from physical workspaces, co-location, being able to collaborate face to face to a light switch flip overnight, and this undefined indeterminate period of time where all we were living with was uncertainty. How does spiritual... When you talk about spiritual co-location in terms of collaboration and processes and technology. Help us unpack that and how are you seeing organizations adopt it? >> Yeah, it's a great question. And I think it goes to the very root of how organizations are trying to transform themselves to be more agile and to embrace DevOps. If you go all the way back to the original Agile Manifesto. There were four principles that were espoused. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. That's still important, individuals and interactions are at the core of software development. Processes and tools that support those individuals in those interactions are more important than ever. Working software over comprehensive documentation. Working software is still more important. But when you are trying to onboard employees, and they can't come into the office, and they can't do the two day training session, and kind of understand how things work, and they can't just holler over theCUBE, to ask a question, you may need to invest a little bit more in documentation to help that onboarding process be successful in a remote context. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Absolutely still important. But employee collaboration is equally as important if you want to be spiritually co-located and if you want to have a shared purpose. And then, responding to change over following a plan. I think one of the things that's happened in a lot of organizations is we have focused so much of our DevOps effort around velocity. Getting faster, we need to run as fast as we can. Like that sprinter, okay? Trying to just power through it as quickly as possible. But as we shift to the marathon way of thinking, velocity is still important but agility becomes even more important. So when you have to create an application in three weeks to do track and trace for your employees, agility is more important than just flat out velocity. And so, changing some of the ways that we think about DevOps practices is important to make sure that that agility is there. For one thing, you have to defer decisions as far down the chain to the team level as possible. So those teams have to be empowered to make decisions. Because you can't have a program level meeting of six or seven teams in one large hall and say, here's the lay of the land, here's what we're going to do, here are our processes, and here are our guardrails. Those teams have to make decisions much more quickly. The developers are actually developing code in smaller chunks of flow. They have to be able to take two hours here, or 50 minutes there and do something useful. And so, the tools that support us have to become tolerant of the reality of how we're working. So, if they work in a way that it allows the team together to take as much autonomy as they can handle, to allow them to communicate in a way that delivers shared purpose, and allows them to adapt and master new technologies, then they're in the zone, they'll get spiritually connected. I hope that makes sense (chuckles). >> It does, I think we all could use some of that. But you talked about in the beginning and I've talked to numerous companies during the pandemic on theCUBE about the productivity or rather the number of hours worked has gone way up for many roles, and times that they normally at late at night on the weekends. So, but it's a cultural, it's a mind shift. To your point about DevOps focused on velocity, sprint, sprint, sprint, and now we have to. So that cultural shift is not an easy one for developers and even the biz folks to flip so quickly. What have you seen in terms of the velocity at which businesses are able to get more of that balance between the velocity, the sprint and the agility? >> I think at the core, this really comes down to management sensitivity. When everybody was in the office, you could kind of see the mental health of development teams by watching how they work, you can call it management by walking around, right? We can't do that, managers have to be more aware of what their teams are doing, because they're not going to see that developer doing a check in at 9:00 p.m. on a Friday, because that's what they had to do to meet the objectives. And they're going to have to find new ways to measure engagement and also potential burnout. A friend of mine once had a great metric that he called the Parking Lot Metric. It was helpful as the parking lot at nine and helpful was it at five. And that gives you an indication of how engaged your developers are. What's the digital equivalent of the Parking Lot Metric in the time of COVID, it's commit stats, it's commit rates, it's the turn rate that we have in our code. So we have this information, we may not be collecting it, but then the next question becomes how do we use that information? Do we use that information to say, well, this team isn't delivering at the same level of productivity as another team? Do we weaponize that data? Or do we use that data to identify impedances in the process? Why isn't a team working effectively? Is it because they have higher levels of family obligations, and they've got kids that are at home? Is it because they're working with hardware technology, and guess what, it's not easy to get the hardware technology into their home office, because it's in the lab, at the corporate office. Or they're trying to communicate halfway around the world. And they're communicating with an office lab that is also shut down. And the bandwidth just doesn't enable the level of high bandwidth communications. So, from a DevOps perspective, managers have to get much more sensitive to the exhaust that the DevOps tools are throwing off, but also how they're going to use that in a constructive way to prevent burnout. And then they also need to, if they're not already managing, or monitoring or measuring the level of developer engagement they have, they really need to start. Whether that's surveys around developer satisfaction, whether it's more regular social events where developers can kind of just get together and drink a beer and talk about what's going on in the project and monitoring who checks in and who doesn't. They have to work harder, I think than they ever have before. >> Well, and you mentioned burnout. And that's something that I think we've all faced in this time at varying levels, and it changes and it's a real, there's a tension in the air regardless of where you are. There's a challenge, as you mentioned, people having their kids as co-workers and fighting for bandwidth, because everyone is forced in this situation. I'd love to get your perspective on some businesses that have done this, well, this adaptation. What can you share in terms of some real world examples that might inspire the audience? >> Yeah, I'll start with Stack Overflow. They recently published a piece in the Journal of the ACM around some of the things that they had discovered. First of all, just a cultural philosophy. If one person is remote, everybody is remote. And you just think that way from the executive level. Social spaces, one of the things that they talk about doing is leaving the video conference room open at the team level all day long. And the team members will go on mute, so that they don't have to, that they don't necessarily have to be there with somebody else listening to them. But if they have a question, they can just pop off mute really quickly and ask the question and if anybody else knows the answer, it's kind of like being in that virtual pod, if you will. Even here at Forrester, one of the things that we've done is we've invested in social ceremonies. We've actually moved our team meetings on my analyst team from once every two weeks to weekly. And we have built more time in for socialization, just so we can see how we're doing. I think Microsoft has really made some good information available in how they've managed things like the onboarding process. I think Amanda Silver over there mentioned that a couple of weeks ago, a presentation they did that Microsoft's onboarded over 150,000 people since the start of COVID. If you don't have good remote onboarding processes, that's going to be a disaster. Now, they're not all developers, but if you think about it, everything from how you do the interviewing process, to how you get people their badges, to how they get their equipment. Security is another issue that they called out. Typically, IT security, security of developers machines, ends at the corporate desktop. But now since we're increasingly using our own machines, our own hardware, security organization's going to have to extend their security policies to cover employee devices. And that's caused them to scramble a little bit. So, the examples are out there. It's not a lot of like, we have to do everything completely differently. But it's a lot of subtle changes that have to be made. I'll give you another example. One of the things that we are seeing is that more and more organizations to deal with the challenges around agility with respect to delivering software and embracing low code tools. In fact, we see about 50% of firms are using low code tools right now, we predict it's going to be 75% by the end of next year. So, figuring out how your DevOps processes support an organization that might be using Mendix or OutSystems, or the Power Platform, building the front end of an application, like a track and trace application really, really quickly. But then hooking it up to your back end infrastructure. Does that happen completely outside the DevOps investments that you're making? And the agile processes that you're making? Or do you adapt your organization. Are hybrid teams now, teams that not just have professional developers, but also have business users that are doing some development with a low code tool. Those are the kinds of things that we have to be willing to entertain in order to shift the focus a little bit more toward the agility side, I think. >> A lot of obstacles but also a lot of opportunities for businesses to really learn, pay attention here, pivot and grow and hopefully some good opportunities for the developers and the business folks to just get better at what they're doing and learning to embrace spiritual co-location. Jeffrey, thank you so much for joining us on the program today, very insightful conversation. >> It's my pleasure, it's an important thing. Just remember, if you're going to run that marathon, break it into 26, 10 minute runs, take a walk break in between each, and you'll find that you'll get there. >> Digestible components, wise advice. Jeffrey Hammond, thank you so much for joining. For Jeffrey, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching Broadcom's DevOps Virtual Forum. (bright upbeat music)

>>From around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of dev ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Hi, Lisa Martin here covering the Broadcom dev ops virtual forum. I'm very pleased to be joined today by a cube alumni, Jeffrey Hammond, the vice president and principal analyst serving CIO is at Forester. Jeffrey. Nice to talk with you today. >>Good morning. It's good to be here. Yeah. >>So a virtual forum, great opportunity to engage with our audiences so much has changed in the last it's an understatement, right? Or it's an overstated thing, but it's an obvious, so much has changed when we think of dev ops. One of the things that we think of is speed, you know, enabling organizations to be able to better serve customers or adapt to changing markets like we're in now, speaking of the need to adapt, talk to us about what you're seeing with respect to dev ops and agile in the age of COVID, what are things looking like? >>Yeah, I think that, um, for most organizations, we're in a, uh, a period of adjustment, uh, when we initially started, it was essentially a sprint, you know, you run as hard as you can for as fast as you can for as long as you can and you just kind of power through it. And, and that's actually what, um, the folks that get hub saw in may when they ran an analysis of how developers, uh, commit times and a level of work that they were committing and how they were working, uh, in the first couple of months of COVID was, was progressing. They found that developers, at least in the Pacific time zone were actually increasing their work volume, maybe because they didn't have two hour commutes or maybe because they were stuck away in their homes, but for whatever reason, they were doing more work. >>And it's almost like, you know, if you've ever run a marathon the first mile or two in the marathon, you feel great and you just want to run and you want to power through it and you want to go hard. And if you do that by the time you get to mile 18 or 19, you're going to be gassed. It's sucking for wind. Uh, and, and that's, I think where we're starting to hit. So as we start to, um, gear our development chops out for the reality that most of us won't be returning into an office until 2021 at the earliest and many organizations will, will be fundamentally changing, uh, their remote workforce, uh, policies. We have to make sure that the agile processes that we use and the dev ops processes and tools that we use to support these teams are essentially aligned to help developers run that marathon instead of just kind of power through. >>So, um, let me give you a couple of specifics for many organizations, they have been in an environment where they will, um, tolerate Rover remote work and what I would call remote work around the edges like developers can be remote, but product managers and, um, you know, essentially scrum masters and all the administrators that are running the, uh, uh, the SCM repositories and, and the dev ops pipelines are all in the office. And it's essentially centralized work. That's not, we are anymore. We're moving from remote workers at the edge to remote workers at the center of what we do. And so one of the implications of that is that, um, we have to think about all the activities that you need to do from a dev ops perspective or from an agile perspective, they have to be remote people. One of the things I found with some of the organizations I talked to early on was there were things that administrators had to do that required them to go into the office to reboot the SCM server as an example, or to make sure that the final approvals for production, uh, were made. >>And so the code could be moved into the production environment. And so it actually was a little bit difficult because they had to get specific approval from the HR organizations to actually be allowed to go into the office in some States. And so one of the, the results of that is that while we've traditionally said, you know, tools are important, but they're not as important as culture as structure as organization as process. I think we have to rethink that a little bit because to the extent that tools enable us to be more digitally organized and to hiring, you know, achieve higher levels of digitization in our processes and be able to support the idea of remote workers in the center. They're now on an equal footing with so many of the other levers, uh, that, that, um, uh, that organizations have at their disposal. Um, I'll give you another example for years. >>We've said that the key to success with agile at the team level is cross-functional co located teams that are working together physically co located. It's the easiest way to show agile success. We can't do that anymore. We can't be physically located at least for the foreseeable future. So, you know, how do you take the low hanging fruits of an agile transformation and apply it in, in, in, in the time of COVID? Well, I think what you have to do is that you have to look at what physical co-location has enabled in the past and understand that it's not so much the fact that we're together looking at each other across the table. It's the fact that we're able to get into a shared mindspace, uh, from, um, uh, from a measurement perspective, we can have shared purpose. We can engage in high bandwidth communications. It's the spiritual aspect of that physical co-location that is actually important. So one of the biggest things that organizations need to start to ask themselves is how do we achieve spiritual colocation with our agile teams? Because we don't have the, the ease of physical co-location available to us anymore? >>Well, the spiritual co-location is such an interesting kind of provocative phrase there, but something that probably was a challenge here, we are seven, eight months in for many organizations, as you say, going from, you know, physical workspaces, co-location being able to collaborate face to face to a, a light switch flip overnight. And this undefined period of time where all we were living with with was uncertainty, how does spiritual, what do you, when you talk about spiritual co-location in terms of collaboration and processes and technology help us unpack that, and how are you seeing organizations adopted? >>Yeah, it's, it's, um, it's a great question. And, and I think it goes to the very root of how organizations are trying to transform themselves to be more agile and to embrace dev ops. Um, if you go all the way back to the, to the original, uh, agile manifesto, you know, there were four principles that were espoused individuals and interactions over processes and tools. That's still important. Individuals and interactions are at the core of software development, processes and tools that support those individual and interact. Uh, those individuals in those interactions are more important than ever working software over comprehensive documentation. Working software is still more important, but when you are trying to onboard employees and they can't come into the office and they can't do the two day training session and kind of understand how things work and they can't just holler over the cube, uh, to ask a question, you may need to invest a little bit more in documentation to help that onboarding process be successful in a remote context, uh, customer collaboration over contract negotiation. >>Absolutely still important, but employee collaboration is equally as important if you want to be spiritually, spiritually co-located. And if you want to have a shared purpose and then, um, responding to change over following a plan. I think one of the things that's happened in a lot of organizations is we have focused so much of our dev ops effort around velocity getting faster. We need to run as fast as we can like that sprinter. Okay. You know, trying to just power through it as quickly as possible. But as we shift to, to the, to the marathon way of thinking, um, velocity is still important, but agility becomes even more important. So when you have to create an application in three weeks to do track and trace for your employees, agility is more important. Um, and then just flat out velocity. Um, and so changing some of the ways that we think about dev ops practices, um, is, is important to make sure that that agility is there for one thing, you have to defer decisions as far down the chain to the team level as possible. >>So those teams have to be empowered to make decisions because you can't have a program level meeting of six or seven teams and one large hall and say, here's the lay of the land. Here's what we're going to do here are our processes. And here are our guardrails. Those teams have to make decisions much more quickly that developers are actually developing code in smaller chunks of flow. They have to be able to take two hours here or 50 minutes there and do something useful. And so the tools that support us have to become tolerant of the reality of, of, of, of how we're working. So if they work in a way that it allows the team together to take as much autonomy as they can handle, um, to, uh, allow them to communicate in a way that, that, that delivers shared purpose and allows them to adapt and master new technologies, then they're in the zone in their spiritual, they'll get spiritually connected. I hope that makes sense. >>It does. I think we all could use some of that, but, you know, you talked about in the beginning and I've, I've talked to numerous companies during the pandemic on the cube about the productivity, or rather the number of hours of work has gone way up for many roles, you know, and, and, and times that they normally late at night on the weekends. So, but it's a cultural, it's a mind shift to your point about dev ops focused on velocity, sprints, sprints, sprints, and now we have to, so that cultural shift is not an easy one for developers. And even at this folks to flip so quickly, what have you seen in terms of the velocity at which businesses are able to get more of that balance between the velocity, the sprint and the agility? >>I think, I think at the core, this really comes down to management sensitivity. Um, when everybody was in the office, you could kind of see the mental health of development teams by, by watching how they work. You know, you call it management by walking around, right. We can't do that. Managers have to, um, to, to be more aware of what their teams are doing, because they're not going to see that, that developer doing a check-in at 9:00 PM on a Friday, uh, because that's what they had to do, uh, to meet the objectives. And, um, and, and they're going to have to, to, um, to find new ways to measure engagement and also potential burnout. Um, friend of mine once had, uh, had a great metric that he called the parking lot metric. It was helpful as the parking lot at nine. And how full was it at five? >>And that gives you an indication of how engaged your developers are. Um, what's the digital equivalent equivalent to the parking lot metric in the time of COVID it's commit stats, it's commit rates. It's, um, you know, the, uh, the turn rate, uh, that we have in our code. So we have this information, we may not be collecting it, but then the next question becomes, how do we use that information? Do we use that information to say, well, this team isn't delivering as at the same level of productivity as another team, do we weaponize that data or do we use that data to identify impedances in the process? Um, why isn't a team working effectively? Is it because they have higher levels of family obligations and they've got kids that, that are at home? Um, is it because they're working with, um, you know, hardware technology, and guess what, they, it's not easy to get the hardware technology into their home office because it's in the lab at the, uh, at the corporate office, uh, or they're trying to communicate, uh, you know, halfway around the world. >>And, uh, they're communicating with a, with an office lab that is also shut down and, and, and the bandwidth just doesn't enable the, the level of high bandwidth communications. So from a dev ops perspective, managers have to get much more sensitive to the, the exhaust that the dev ops tools are throwing off, but also how they're going to use that in a constructive way to, to prevent burnout. And then they also need to, if they're not already managing or monitoring or measuring the level of developer engagement, they have, they really need to start whether that's surveys around developer satisfaction, um, whether it's, you know, more regular social events, uh, where developers can kind of just get together and drink a beer and talk about what's going on in the project, uh, and monitoring who checks in and who doesn't, uh, they have to, to, um, work harder, I think, than they ever have before. >>Well, and you mentioned burnout, and that's something that I think we've all faced in this time at varying levels and it changes. And it's a real, there's a tension in the air, regardless of where you are. There's a challenge, as you mentioned, people having, you know, coworker, their kids as coworkers and fighting for bandwidth, because everyone is forced in this situation. I'd love to get your perspective on some businesses that are, that have done this well, this adaptation, what can you share in terms of some real-world examples that might inspire the audience? >>Yeah. Uh, I'll start with, uh, stack overflow. Uh, they recently published a piece in the journal of the ACM around some of the things that they had discovered. Um, you know, first of all, just a cultural philosophy. If one person is remote, everybody is remote. And you just think that way from an executive level, um, social spaces. One of the things that they talk about doing is leaving a video conference room open at a team level all day long, and the team members, you know, we'll go on mute, you know, so that they don't have to, that they don't necessarily have to be there with somebody else listening to them. But if they have a question, they can just pop off mute really quickly and ask the question. And if anybody else knows the answer, it's kind of like being in that virtual pod. Uh, if you, uh, if you will, um, even here at Forrester, one of the things that we've done is we've invested in social ceremonies. >>We've actually moved our to our team meetings on, on my analyst team from, from once every two weeks to weekly. And we have built more time in for social Ajay socialization, just so we can see, uh, how, how, how we're doing. Um, I think Microsoft has really made some good, uh, information available in how they've managed things like the onboarding process. I think I'm Amanda silver over there mentioned that a couple of weeks ago when, uh, uh, a presentation they did that, uh, uh, Microsoft onboarded over 150,000 people since the start of COVID, if you don't have good remote onboarding processes, that's going to be a disaster. Now they're not all developers, but if you think about it, um, everything from how you do the interviewing process, uh, to how you get people, their badges, to how they get their equipment. Um, security is a, is another issue that they called out typically, uh, it security, um, the security of, of developers machines ends at, at, at the corporate desktop. >>But, you know, since we're increasingly using our own machines, our own hardware, um, security organizations kind of have to extend their security policies to cover, uh, employee devices, and that's caused them to scramble a little bit. Uh, so, so the examples are out there. It's not a lot of, like, we have to do everything completely differently, but it's a lot of subtle changes that, that have to be made. Um, I'll give you another example. Um, one of the things that, that we are seeing is that, um, more and more organizations to deal with the challenges around agility, with respect to delivering software, embracing low-code tools. In fact, uh, we see about 50% of firms are using low-code tools right now. We predict it's going to be 75% by the end of next year. So figuring out how your dev ops processes support an organization that might be using Mendix or OutSystems, or, you know, the power platform building the front end of an application, like a track and trace application really, really quickly, but then hooking it up to your backend infrastructure. Does that happen completely outside the dev ops investments that you're making and the agile processes that you're making, or do you adapt your organization? Um, our hybrid teams now teams that not just have professional developers, but also have business users that are doing some development with a low-code tool. Those are the kinds of things that we have to be, um, willing to, um, to entertain in order to shift the focus a little bit more toward the agility side, I think >>Lot of obstacles, but also a lot of opportunities for businesses to really learn, pay attention here, pivot and grow, and hopefully some good opportunities for the developers and the business folks to just get better at what they're doing and learning to embrace spiritual co-location Jeffrey, thank you so much for joining us on the program today. Very insightful conversation. >>My pleasure. It's it's, it's an important thing. Just remember if you're going to run that marathon, break it into 26, 10 minute runs, take a walk break in between each and you'll find that you'll get there. >>Digestible components, wise advice. Jeffery Hammond. Thank you so much for joining for Jeffrey I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching Broadcom's dev ops virtual forum >>From around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of dev ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom, >>Continuing our conversations here at Broadcom's dev ops virtual forum. Lisa Martin here, please. To welcome back to the program, Serge Lucio, the general manager of the enterprise software division at Broadcom. Hey, Serge. Welcome. Thank you. Good to be here. So I know you were just, uh, participating with the biz ops manifesto that just happened recently. I just had the chance to talk with Jeffrey Hammond and he unlocked this really interesting concept, but I wanted to get your thoughts on spiritual co-location as really a necessity for biz ops to succeed in this unusual time in which we're living. What are your thoughts on spiritual colocation in terms of cultural change versus adoption of technologies? >>Yeah, it's a, it's, it's quite interesting, right? When we, when we think about the major impediments for, uh, for dev ops implementation, it's all about culture, right? And swore over the last 20 years, we've been talking about silos. We'd be talking about the paradox for these teams to when it went to align in many ways, it's not so much about these teams aligning, but about being in the same car in the same books, right? It's really about fusing those teams around kind of the common purpose, a common objective. So to me, the, this, this is really about kind of changing this culture where people start to look at a kind of OKR is instead of the key objective, um, that, that drives the entire team. Now, what it means in practice is really that's, uh, we need to change a lot of behaviors, right? It's not about the Yarki, it's not about roles. It's about, you know, who can do what and when, and, uh, you know, driving a bias towards action. It also means that we need, I mean, especially in this school times, it becomes very difficult, right? To drive kind of a kind of collaboration between these teams. And so I think there there's a significant role that especially tools can play in terms of providing this complex feedback from teams to, uh, to be in that preface spiritual qualification. >>Well, and it talked about culture being, it's something that, you know, we're so used to talking about dev ops with respect to velocity, all about speed here. But of course this time everything changed so quickly, but going from the physical spaces to everybody being remote really does take it. It's very different than you can't replicate it digitally, but there are collaboration tools that can kind of really be essential to help that cultural shift. Right? >>Yeah. So 2020, we, we touch to talk about collaboration in a very mundane way. Like, of course we can use zoom. We can all get into, into the same room. But the point when I think when Jeff says spiritual, co-location, it's really about, we all share the same objective. Do we, do we have a niece who, for instance, our pipeline, right? When you talk about dev ops, probably we all started thinking about this continuous delivery pipeline that basically drives the automation, the orchestration across the team, but just thinking about a pipeline, right, at the end of the day, it's all about what is the meantime to beat back to these teams. If I'm a developer and a commit code, I don't, does it take where, you know, that code to be processed through pipeline pushy? Can I get feedback if I am a finance person who is funding a product or a project, what is my meantime to beat back? >>And so a lot of, kind of a, when we think about the pipeline, I think what's been really inspiring to me in the last year or so is that there is much more of an adoption of the Dora metrics. There is way more of a focus around value stream management. And to me, this is really when we talk about collaboration, it's really a balance. How do you provide the feedback to the different stakeholders across the life cycle in a very timely matter? And that's what we would need to get to in terms of kind of this, this notion of collaboration. It's not so much about people being in the same physical space. It's about, you know, when I checked in code, you know, to do I guess the system to automatically identify what I'm going to break. If I'm about to release some allegation, how can the system help me reduce my change pillar rates? Because it's, it's able to predict that some issue was introduced in the outpatient or work product. Um, so I think there's, there's a great role of technology and AI candidate Lynch to, to actually provide that new level of collaboration. >>So we'll get to AI in a second, but I'm curious, what are some of the, of the metrics you think that really matter right now is organizations are still in some form of transformation to this new almost 100% remote workforce. >>So I'll just say first, I'm not a big fan of metrics. Um, and the reason being that, you know, you can look at a change killer rate, right, or a lead time or cycle time. And those are, those are interesting metrics, right? The trend on metric is absolutely critical, but what's more important is you get to the root cause what is taught to you lean to that metric to degrade or improve or time. And so I'm much more interested and we, you know, fruit for Broadcom. Are we more interested in understanding what are the patterns that contribute to this? So I'll give you a very mundane example. You know, we know that cycle time is heavily influenced by, um, organizational boundaries. So, you know, we talk a lot about silos, but, uh, we we've worked with many of our customers doing value stream mapping. And oftentimes what you see is that really the boundaries of your organization creates a lot of idle time, right? So to me, it's less about the metrics. I think the door metrics are a pretty, you know, valid set metrics, but what's way more important is to understand what are the antiperspirants, what are the things that we can detect through the data that actually are affecting those metrics. And, uh, I mean, over the last 10, 20 years, we've learned a lot about kind of what are, what are the antiperspirants within our large enterprise customers. And there are plenty of them. >>What are some of the things that you're seeing now with respect to patterns that have developed over the last seven to eight months? >>So I think the two areas which clearly are evolving very quickly are on kind of the front end of the life cycle, where DevOps is more and more embracing value stream management value stream mapping. Um, and I think what's interesting is that in many ways the product is becoming the new silo. Uh, the notion of a product is very difficult by itself to actually define people are starting to recognize that a value stream is not its own little kind of Island. That in reality, when I define a product, this product, oftentimes as dependencies on our products and that in fact, you're looking at kind of a network of value streams, if you will. So, so even on that, and there is clearly kind of a new sets, if you will, of anti-patterns where products are being defined as a set of OTRs, they have interdependencies and you have have a new set of silos on the operands, uh, the Abra key movement to Israel and the SRE space where, um, I think there is a cultural clash while the dev ops side is very much embracing this notion of OTRs and value stream mapping and Belgium management. >>On the other end, you have the it operations teams. We still think business services, right? For them, they think about configure items, think about infrastructure. And so, you know, it's not uncommon to see, you know, teams where, you know, the operations team is still thinking about hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands of business services. And so the, the, there is there's this boundary where, um, I think, well, SRE is being put in place. And there's lots of thinking about what kind of metrics can be fined. I think, you know, going back to culture, I think there's a lot of cultural evolution that's still required for true operations team. >>And that's a hard thing. Cultural transformation in any industry pandemic or not is a challenging thing. You talked about, uh, AI and automation of minutes ago. How do you think those technologies can be leveraged by DevOps leaders to influence their successes and their ability to collaborate, maybe see eye to eye with the SRS? >>Yeah. Um, so th you're kind of too. So even for myself, as a leader of a, you know, 1500 people organization, there's a number of things I don't see right. On a daily basis. And, um, I think the, the, the, the technologies that we have at our disposal today from the AI are able to mind a lot of data and expose a lot of, uh, issues that's as leaders we may not be aware of. And some of the, some of these are pretty kind of easy to understand, right? We all think we're agile. And yet when you, when you start to understand, for instance, uh, what is the, what is the working progress right to during the sprint? Um, when you start to analyze the data you can detect, for instance, that maybe the teams are over committed, that there is too much work in progress. >>You can start to identify kind of, interdepencies either from a technology, from a people point of view, which were hidden, uh, you can start to understand maybe the change filler rates he's he is dragging. So I believe that there is a, there's a fundamental role to be played by the tools to, to expose again, these anti parents, to, to make these things visible to the teams, to be able to even compare teams. Right. One of the things that's, that's, uh, that's amazing is now we have access to tons of data, not just from a given customer, but across a large number of customers. And so we start to compare all of these teams kind of operate, and what's working, what's not working >>Thoughts on AI and automation as, as a facilitator of spiritual co-location. >>Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's um, you know, th there's, uh, the problem we all face is the unknown, right? The, the law city, but volume variety of the data, uh, everyday we don't really necessarily completely appreciate what is the impact of our actions, right? And so, um, AI can really act as a safety net that enables us to, to understand what is the impact of our actions. Um, and so, yeah, in many ways, the ability to be informed in a timely matter to be able to interact with people on the basis of data, um, and collaborate on the data. And the actual matter, I think is, is a, is a very powerful enabler, uh, on, in that respect. I mean, I, I've seen, um, I've seen countless of times that, uh, for instance, at the SRE boundary, um, to basically show that we'll turn the quality attributes, so an incoming release, right. And exposing that to, uh, an operations person and a sorry person, and enabling that collaboration dialogue through data is a very, very powerful tool. >>Do you have any recommendations for how teams can use, you know, the SRE folks, the dev ops says can use AI and automation in the right ways to be successful rather than some ways that aren't going to be nonproductive. >>Yeah. So to me, the th there, there's a part of the question really is when, when we talk about data, there are there different ways you can use data, right? Um, so you can, you can do a lot of an analytics, predictive analytics. So I think there is a, there's a tendency, uh, to look at, let's say a, um, a specific KPI, like a, an availability KPI, or change filler rate, and to basically do a regression analysis and projecting all these things, going to happen in the future. To me, that that's, that's a, that's a bad approach. The reason why I fundamentally think it's a better approach is because we are systems. The way we develop software is, is a, is a non-leader kind of system, right? Software development is not linear nature. And so I think there's a D this is probably the worst approach is to actually focus on metrics on the other end. >>Um, if you, if you start to actually understand at a more granular level, what har, uh, which are the things which are contributing to this, right? So if you start to understand, for instance, that whenever maybe, you know, you affect a specific part of the application that translates into production issues. So we, we have, I've actually, uh, a customer who, uh, identified that, uh, over 50% of their unplanned outages were related to specific components in your architecture. And whenever these components were changed, this resulted in these plant outages. So if you start to be able to basically establish causality, right, cause an effect between kind of data across the last cycle. I think, I think this is the right way to, uh, to, to use AI. And so pharma to be, I think it's way more God could have a classification problem. What are the classes of problems that do exist and affect things as opposed to analytics, predictive, which I don't think is as powerful. >>So I mentioned in the beginning of our conversation, that just came off the biz ops manifesto. You're one of the authors of that. I want to get your thoughts on dev ops and biz ops overlapping, complimenting each other, what, from a, the biz ops perspective, what does it mean to the future of dev ops? >>Yeah, so, so it's interesting, right? If you think about DevOps, um, there's no felony document, right? Can we, we can refer to the Phoenix project. I mean, there are a set of documents which have been written, but in many ways, there's no clear definition of what dev ops is. Uh, if you go to the dev ops Institute today, you'll see that they are specific, um, trainings for instance, on value management on SRE. And so in many ways, the problem we have as an industry is that, um, there are set practices between agile dev ops, SRE Valley should management. I told, right. And we all basically talk about the same things, right. We all talk about essentially, um, accelerating in the meantime fee to feedback, but yet we don't have the common framework to talk about that. The other key thing is that we add to wait, uh, for, uh, for jeans, Jean Kim's Lascaux, um, to, uh, to really start to get into the business aspect, right? >>And for value stream mapping to start to emerge for us to start as an industry, right. It, to start to think about what is our connection with the business aspect, what's our purpose, right? And ultimately it's all about driving these business outcomes. And so to me, these ops is really about kind of, uh, putting a lens on this critical element that it's not business and it, that we in fact need to fuse business 19 that I need needs to transform itself to recognize that it's, it's this value generator, right. It's not a cost center. And so the relationship to me, it's more than BizOps provides kind of this Oliver or kind of framework, if you will. That set the context for what is the reason, uh, for it to exist. What's part of the core values and principles that it needs to embrace to, again, change from a cost center to a value center. And then we need to start to use this as a way to start to unify some of the, again, the core practices, whether it's agile, DevOps value, stream mapping SRE. Um, so, so I think over time, my hope is that we start to optimize a lot of our practices, language, um, and, uh, and cultural elements. >>Last question surgeon, the last few seconds we have here talking about this, the relation between biz ops and dev ops, um, what do you think as DevOps evolves? And as you talked to circle some of your insights, what should our audience keep their eyes on in the next six to 12 months? >>So to me, the key, the key, um, challenge for, for the industry is really around. So we were seeing a very rapid shift towards kind of, uh, product to product, right. Which we don't want to do is to recreate kind of these new silos, these hard silos. Um, so that, that's one of the big changes, uh, that I think we need to be, uh, to be really careful about, um, because it is ultimately, it is about culture. It's not about, uh, it's not about, um, kind of how we segment the work, right. And, uh, any true culture that we can overcome kind of silos. So back to, I guess, with Jeffrey's concept of, um, kind of the spiritual co-location, I think it's, it's really about that too. It's really about kind of, uh, uh, focusing on the business outcomes on kind of aligning on driving engagement across the teams, but, but not for create a, kind of a new set of silos, which instead of being vertical are going to be these horizontal products >>Crazy by surge that looking at culture as kind of a way of really, uh, uh, addressing and helping to, uh, re re reduce, replace challenges. We thank you so much for sharing your insights and your time at today's DevOps virtual forum. >>Thank you. Thanks for your time. >>I'll be right back >>From around the globe it's the cube with digital coverage of devops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Welcome to Broadcom's DevOps virtual forum, I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm joined by another Martin, very socially distanced from me all the way coming from Birmingham, England is Glynn Martin, the head of QA transformation at BT. Glynn, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you, Lisa. I'm looking forward to it. As we said before, we went live to Martins for the person one in one segment. So this is going to be an interesting segment guys, what we're going to do is Glynn's going to give us a really kind of deep inside out view of devops from an evolution perspective. So Glynn, let's start. Transformation is at the heart of what you do. It's obviously been a very transformative year. How have the events of this year affected the >> transformation that you are still responsible for driving? Yeah. Thank you, Lisa. I mean, yeah, it has been a difficult year. >>Um, and although working for BT, which is a global telecommunications company, um, I'm relatively resilient, I suppose, as a, an industry, um, through COVID obviously still has been affected and has got its challenges. And if anything, it's actually caused us to accelerate our transformation journey. Um, you know, we had to do some great things during this time around, um, you know, in the UK for our emergency and, um, health workers give them unlimited data and for vulnerable people to support them. And that's spent that we've had to deliver changes quickly. Um, but what we want to be able to do is deliver those kinds of changes quickly, but sustainably for everything that we do, not just because there's an emergency. Um, so we were already on the kind of journey to agile, but ever more important now that we are, we are able to do those, that kind of work, do it more quickly. >>Um, and that it works because the, the implications of it not working is, can be terrible in terms of you know, we've been supporting testing centers,  new hospitals to treat COVID patients. So we need to get it right. And then therefore the coverage of what we do, the quality of what we do and how quickly we do it really has taken on a new scale and what was already a very competitive market within the telco industry within the UK. Um, you know, what I would say is that, you know, we are under pressure to deliver more value, but we have small cost challenges. We have to obviously, um, deal with the fact that, you know, COVID 19 has hit most industries kind of revenues and profits. So we've got this kind of paradox between having less costs, but having to deliver more value quicker and  to higher quality. So yeah, certainly the finances is, um, on our minds and that's why we need flexible models, cost models that allow us to kind of do growth, but we get that growth by showing that we're delivering value. Um, especially in these times when there are financial challenges on companies. So one of the things that I want to ask you about, I'm again, looking at DevOps from the inside >>Out and the evolution that you've seen, you talked about the speed of things really accelerating in this last nine months or so. When we think dev ops, we think speed. But one of the things I'd love to get your perspective on is we've talked about in a number of the segments that we've done for this event is cultural change. What are some of the things that you've seen there as, as needing to get, as you said, get things right, but done so quickly to support essential businesses, essential workers. How have you seen that cultural shift? >>Yeah, I think, you know, before test teams for themselves at this part of the software delivery cycle, um, and actually now really our customers are expecting that quality and to deliver for our customers what they want, quality has to be ingrained throughout the life cycle. Obviously, you know, there's lots of buzzwords like shift left. Um, how do we do shift left testing? Um, but for me, that's really instilling quality and given capabilities shared capabilities throughout the life cycle that drive automation, drive improvements. I always say that, you know, you're only as good as your lowest common denominator. And one thing that we were finding on our dev ops journey was that we  would be trying to do certain things quick, we had automated build, automated tests. But if we were taking a weeks to create test scripts, or we were taking weeks to manually craft data, and even then when we had taken so long to do it, that the coverage was quite poor and that led to lots of defects later on in the life cycle, or even in our production environment, we just couldn't afford to do that. >>And actually, focusing on continuous testing over the last nine to 12 months has really given us the ability to deliver quickly across the whole life cycle. And therefore actually go from doing a kind of semi agile kind of thing, where we did the user stories, we did a few of the kind of agile ceremonies, but we weren't really deploying any quicker into production because our stakeholders were scared that we didn't have the same control that we had when we had more waterfall releases. And, you know, when we didn't think of ourselves. So we've done a lot of work on every aspect, um, especially from a testing point of view, every aspect of every activity, rather than just looking at automated tests, you know, whether it is actually creating the test in the first place, whether it's doing security testing earlier in the lot and performance testing in the life cycle, et cetera. So, yeah,  it's been a real key thing that for CT, for us to drive DevOps, >>Talk to me a little bit about your team. What are some of the shifts in terms of expectations that you're experiencing and how your team interacts with the internal folks from pipeline through life cycle? >>Yeah, we've done a lot of work on this. Um, you know, there's a thing that I think people will probably call it a customer experience gap, and it reminds me of a Gilbert cartoon, where we start with the requirements here and you're almost like a Chinese whisper effects and what we deliver is completely different. So we think the testing team or the delivery teams, um, know in our teeth has done a great job. This is what it said in the acceptance criteria, but then our customers are saying, well, actually that's not working this isn't working and there's this kind of gap. Um, we had a great launch this year of agile requirements, it's one of the Broadcom tools. And that was the first time in, ever since I remember actually working within BT, I had customers saying to me, wow, you know, we want more of this. >>We want more projects to have extra requirements design on it because it allowed us to actually work with the business collaboratively. I mean, we talk about collaboration, but how do we actually, you know, do that and have something that both the business and technical people can understand. And we've actually been working with the business , using agile requirements designer to really look at what the requirements are, tease out requirements we hadn't even thought of and making sure that we've got high levels of test coverage. And what we actually deliver at the end of it, not only have we been able to generate tests more quickly, but we've got much higher test coverage and also can more smartly, using the kind of AI within the tool and then some of the other kinds of pipeline tools, actually deliver to choose the right tasks, and actually doing a risk based testing approach. So that's been a great launch this year, but just the start of many kinds of things that we're doing >>Well, what I hear in that, Glynn is a lot of positives that have come out of a very challenging situation. Talk to me about it. And I liked that perspective. This is a very challenging time for everybody in the world, but it sounds like from a collaboration perspective you're right, we talk about that a lot critical with devops. But those challenges there, you guys were able to overcome those pretty quickly. What other challenges did you face and figure out quickly enough to be able to pivot so fast? >>I mean, you talked about culture. You know, BT is like most companies  So it's very siloed. You know we're still trying to work to become closer as a company. So I think there's a lot of challenges around how would you integrate with other tools? How would you integrate with the various different technologies. And BT, we have 58 different IT stacks. That's not systems, that's stacks, all of those stacks can have hundreds of systems. And we're trying to, we've got a drive at the moment, a simplified program where we're trying to you know, reduce that number to 14 stacks. And even then there'll be complexity behind the scenes that we will be challenged more and more as we go forward. How do we actually highlight that to our users? And as an it organization, how do we make ourselves leaner, so that even when we've still got some of that legacy, and we'll never fully get rid of it and that's the kind of trade off that we have to make, how do we actually deal with that and hide that from our users and drive those programs, so we can, as I say, accelerate change,  reduce that kind of waste and that kind of legacy costs out of our business. You know, the other thing as well, I'm sure telecoms is probably no different to insurance or finance. When you take the number of products that we do, and then you combine them, the permutations are tens and hundreds of thousands of products. So we, as a business are trying to simplify, we are trying to do that in an agile way. >>And haven't tried to do agile in the proper way and really actually work at pace, really deliver value. So I think what we're looking more and more at the moment is actually  more value focused. Before we used to deliver changes sometimes into production. Someone had a great idea, or it was a great idea nine months ago or 12 months ago, but actually then we ended up deploying it and then we'd look at the users, the usage of that product or that application or whatever it is, and it's not being used for six months. So we haven't got, you know, the cost of the last 12 months. We certainly haven't gotten room for that kind of waste and, you know, for not really understanding the value of changes that we are doing. So I think that's the most important thing of the moment, it's really taking that waste out. You know, there's lots of focus on things like flow management, what bits of our process are actually taking too long. And we've started on that journey, but we've got a hell of a long way to go. But that involves looking at every aspect of the software delivery cycle. >> Going from, what 58 IT stacks down to 14 or whatever it's going to be, simplifying sounds magical to everybody. It's a big challenge. What are some of the core technology capabilities that you see really as kind of essential for enabling that with this new way that you're working? >>Yeah. I mean, I think we were started on a continuous testing journey, and I think that's just the start. I mean as I say, looking at every aspect of, you know, from a QA point of view is every aspect of what we do. And it's also looking at, you know, we've started to branch into more like AI, uh, AI ops and, you know, really the full life cycle. Um, and you know, that's just a stepping stone to, you know, I think autonomics is the way forward, right. You know, all of this kind of stuff that happens, um, you know, monitoring, uh, you know, watching the systems what's happening in production, how do we feed that back? How'd you get to a point where actually we think about change and then suddenly it's in production safely, or if it's not going to safety, it's automatically backing out. So, you know, it's a very, very long journey, but if we want to, you know, in a world where the pace is in ever-increasing and the demands for the team, and, you know, with the pressures on, at the moment where we're being asked to do things, uh, you know, more efficiently and as lean as possible, we need to be thinking about every part of the process and how we put the kind of stepping stones in place to lead us to a more automated kind of, um, you know, um, the future. >>Do you feel that that planned outcomes are starting to align with what's delivered, given this massive shift that you're experiencing? >>I think it's starting to, and I think, you know, as I say, as we look at more of a value based approach, um, and, um, you know, as I say, print, this was a kind of flow management. I think that that will become ever, uh, ever more important. So, um, I think it starting to people certainly realize that, you know, teams need to work together, you know, the kind of the cousin between business and it, especially as we go to more kind of SAS based solutions, low code solutions, you know, there's not such a gap anymore, actually, some of our business partners that expense to be much more tech savvy. Um, so I think, you know, this is what we have to kind of appreciate what is its role, how do we give the capabilities, um, become more of a centers of excellence rather than actually doing mounds amounts of work. And for me, and from a testing point of view, you know, mounds and mounds of testing, actually, how do we automate that? How do we actually generate that instead of, um, create it? I think that's the kind of challenge going forward. >>What are some, as we look forward, what are some of the things that you would like to see implemented or deployed in the next, say six to 12 months as we hopefully round a corner with this pandemic? >>Yeah, I think, um, you know, certainly for, for where we are as a company from a QA perspective, we are, um, you let's start in bits that we do well, you know, we've started creating, um, continuous delivery and DevOps pipelines. Um, there's still manual aspects of that. So, you know, certainly for me, I I've challenged my team with saying how do we do an automated journey? So if I put a requirement in JIRA or rally or wherever it is and why then click a button and, you know, with either zero touch for one such, then put that into production and have confidence that, that has been done safely and that it works and what happens if it doesn't work. So, you know, that's, that's the next, um, the next few months, that's what our concentration, um, is, is about. But it's also about decision-making, you know, how do you actually understand those value judgments? >>And I think there's lots of the things dev ops, AI ops, kind of that always ask aspects of business operations. I think it's about having the information in one place to make those kinds of decisions. How does it all try and tie it together? As I say, even still with kind of dev ops, we've still got elements within my company where we've got lots of different organizations doing some, doing similar kinds of things, but they're all kind of working in silos. So I think having AI ops as it comes more and more to the fore as we go to cloud, and that's what we need to, you know, we're still very early on in our cloud journey, you know, so we need to make sure the technologies work with cloud as well as you can have, um, legacy systems, but it's about bringing that all together and having a full, visible pipeline, um, that everybody can see and make decisions. >>You said the word confidence, which jumped out at me right away, because absolutely you've got to have be able to have confidence in what your team is delivering and how it's impacting the business and those customers. Last question then for you is how would you advise your peers in a similar situation to leverage technology automation, for example, dev ops, to be able to gain the confidence that they're making the right decisions for their business? >>I think the, the, the, the, the approach that we've taken actually is not started with technology. Um, we've actually taken a human centered design, uh, as a core principle of what we do, um, within the it part of BT. So by using human centered design, that means we talk to our customers, we understand their pain points, we map out their current processes. Um, and then when we mapped out what this process does, it also understand their aspirations as well, you know? Um, and where do they want to be in six months? You know, do they want it to be, um, more agile and, you know, or do they want to, you know, is, is this a part of their business that they want to do one better? We actually then looked at why that's not running well, and then see what, what solutions are out there. >>We've been lucky that, you know, with our partnership, with Broadcom within the payer line, lots of the tools and the PLA have directly answered some of the business's problems. But I think by having those conversations and actually engaging with the business, um, you know, especially if the business hold the purse strings, which in, in, uh, you know, in some companies include not as they do there is that kind of, you know, almost by understanding their, their pain points and then starting, this is how we can solve your problem. Um, is we've, we've tended to be much more successful than trying to impose something and say, well, here's the technology that they don't quite understand. It doesn't really understand how it kind of resonates with their problems. So I think that's the heart of it. It's really about, you know, getting, looking at the data, looking at the processes, looking at where the kind of waste is. >>And then actually then looking at the right solutions. Then, as I say, continuous testing is massive for us. We've also got a good relationship with Apple towards looking at visual AI. And actually there's a common theme through that. And I mean, AI is becoming more and more prevalent. And I know, you know, sometimes what is AI and people have kind of this semantics of, is it true AI or not, but it's certainly, you know, AI machine learning is becoming more and more prevalent in the way that we work. And it's allowing us to be much more effective, be quicker in what we do and be more accurate. And, you know, whether it's finding defects running the right tests or, um, you know, being able to anticipate problems before they're happening in a production environment. >>Well, thank you so much for giving us this sort of insight outlook at dev ops sharing the successes that you're having, taking those challenges, converting them to opportunities and forgiving folks who might be in your shoes, or maybe slightly behind advice enter. They appreciate it. We appreciate your time. >>Well, it's been an absolute pleasure, really. Thank you for inviting me. I have a extremely enjoyed it. So thank you ever so much. >>Excellent. Me too. I've learned a lot for Glenn Martin. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube >>Driving revenue today means getting better, more valuable software features into the hands of your customers. If you don't do it quickly, your competitors as well, but going faster without quality creates risks that can damage your brand destroy customer loyalty and cost millions to fix dev ops from Broadcom is a complete solution for balancing speed and risk, allowing you to accelerate the flow of value while minimizing the risk and severity of critical issues with Broadcom quality becomes integrated across the entire DevOps pipeline from planning to production, actionable insights, including our unique readiness score, provide a three 60 degree view of software quality giving you visibility into potential issues before they become disasters. Dev ops leaders can manage these risks with tools like Canary deployments tested on a small subset of users, or immediately roll back to limit the impact of defects for subsequent cycles. Dev ops from Broadcom makes innovation improvement easier with integrated planning and continuous testing tools that accelerate the flow of value product requirements are used to automatically generate tests to ensure complete quality coverage and tests are easily updated. >>As requirements change developers can perform unit testing without ever leaving their preferred environment, improving efficiency and productivity for the ultimate in shift left testing the platform also integrates virtual services and test data on demand. Eliminating two common roadblocks to fast and complete continuous testing. When software is ready for the CIC CD pipeline, only DevOps from Broadcom uses AI to prioritize the most critical and relevant tests dramatically improving feedback speed with no decrease in quality. This release is ready to go wherever you are in your DevOps journey. Broadcom helps maximize innovation velocity while managing risk. So you can deploy ideas into production faster and release with more confidence from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of dev ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Hi guys. Welcome back. So we have discussed the current state and the near future state of dev ops and how it's going to evolve from three unique perspectives. In this last segment, we're going to open up the floor and see if we can come to a shared understanding of where dev ops needs to go in order to be successful next year. So our guests today are, you've seen them all before Jeffrey Hammond is here. The VP and principal analyst serving CIO is at Forester. We've also Serge Lucio, the GM of Broadcom's enterprise software division and Glenn Martin, the head of QA transformation at BT guys. Welcome back. Great to have you all three together >>To be here. >>All right. So we're very, we're all very socially distanced as we've talked about before. Great to have this conversation. So let's, let's start with one of the topics that we kicked off the forum with Jeff. We're going to start with you spiritual co-location that's a really interesting topic that we've we've uncovered, but how much of the challenge is truly cultural and what can we solve through technology? Jeff, we'll start with you then search then Glen Jeff, take it away. >>Yeah, I think fundamentally you can have all the technology in the world and if you don't make the right investments in the cultural practices in your development organization, you still won't be effective. Um, almost 10 years ago, I wrote a piece, um, where I did a bunch of research around what made high-performance teams, software delivery teams, high performance. And one of the things that came out as part of that was that these teams have a high level of autonomy. And that's one of the things that you see coming out of the agile manifesto. Let's take that to today where developers are on their own in their own offices. If you've got teams where the team itself had a high level of autonomy, um, and they know how to work, they can make decisions. They can move forward. They're not waiting for management to tell them what to do. >>And so what we have seen is that organizations that embraced autonomy, uh, and got their teams in the right place and their teams had the information that they needed to make the right decisions have actually been able to operate pretty well, even as they've been remote. And it's turned out to be things like, well, how do we actually push the software that we've created into production that would become the challenge is not, are we writing the right software? And that's why I think the term spiritual co-location is so important because even though we may be physically distant, we're on the same plane, we're connected from a, from, from a, a shared purpose. Um, you know, surgeon, I worked together a long, long time ago. So it's been what almost 15, 16 years since we were at the same place. And yet I would say there's probably still a certain level of spiritual co-location between us, uh, because of the shared purposes that we've had in the past and what we've seen in the industry. And that's a really powerful tool, uh, to build on. So what do tools play as part of that, to the extent that tools make information available, to build shared purpose on to the extent that they enable communication so that we can build that spiritual co-location to the extent that they reinforce the culture that we want to put in place, they can be incredibly valuable, especially when, when we don't have the luxury of physical locate physical co-location. Okay. That makes sense. >>It does. I shouldn't have introduced us. This last segment is we're all spiritually co-located or it's a surge, clearly you're still spiritually co located with jump. Talk to me about what your thoughts are about spiritual of co-location the cultural impact and how technology can move it forward. >>Yeah. So I think, well, I'm going to sound very similar to Jeff in that respect. I think, you know, it starts with kind of a shared purpose and the other understanding, Oh, individuals teams, uh, contributed to kind of a business outcome, what is our shared goal or shared vision? What's what is it we're trying to achieve collectively and keeping it kind of aligned to that? Um, and so, so it's really starts with that now, now the big challenge, always these over the last 20 years, especially in large organization, there's been specialization of roles and functions. And so we, we all that started to basically measure which we do, uh, on a daily basis using metrics, which oftentimes are completely disconnected from kind of a business outcome or purpose. We, we kind of reverted back to, okay, what is my database all the time? What is my cycle time? >>Right. And, and I think, you know, which we can do or where we really should be focused as an industry is to start to basically provide a lens or these different stakeholders to look at what they're doing in the context of kind of these business outcomes. So, um, you know, probably one of my, um, favorites experience was to actually weakness at one of a large financial institution. Um, you know, Tuesday Golder's unquote development and operations staring at the same data, right. Which was related to, you know, in calming changes, um, test execution results, you know, Coverity coverage, um, official liabilities and all the all ran. It could have a direction level links. And that's when you start to put these things in context and represent that to you in a way that these different stakeholders can, can look at from their different lens. And, uh, and it can start to basically communicate and, and understand have they joined our company to, uh, to, to that kind of common view or objective. >>And Glen, we talked a lot about transformation with you last time. What are your thoughts on spiritual colocation and the cultural part, the technology impact? >>Yeah, I mean, I agree with Jeffrey that, you know, um, the people and culture, the most important thing, actually, that's why it's really important when you're transforming to have partners who have the same vision as you, um, who, who you can work with, have the same end goal in mind. And w I've certainly found that with our, um, you know, continuing relationship with Broadcom, what it also does though, is although, you know, tools can accelerate what you're doing and can join consistency. You know, we've seen within simplify, which is BTS flagship transformation program, where we're trying to, as it can, it says simplify the number of systems stacks that we have, the number of products that we have actually at the moment, we've got different value streams within that program who have got organizational silos. We were trying to rewrite, rewrite the wheel, um, who are still doing things manually. >>So in order to try and bring that consistency, we need the right tools that actually are at an enterprise grade, which can be flexible to work with in BT, which is such a complex and very dev, uh, different environments, depending on what area of BT you're in, whether it's a consumer, whether it's a mobile area, whether it's large global or government organizations, you know, we found that we need tools that can, um, drive that consistency, but also flex to Greenfield brownfield kind of technologies as well. So it's really important that as I say, for a number of different aspects, that you have the right partner, um, to drive the right culture, I've got the same vision, but also who have the tool sets to help you accelerate. They can't do that on their own, but they can help accelerate what it is you're trying to do in it. >>And a really good example of that is we're trying to shift left, which is probably a, quite a bit of a buzz phrase in their kind of testing world at the moment. But, you know, I could talk about things like continuous delivery direct to when a ball comes tools and it has many different features to it, but very simply on its own, it allows us to give the visibility of what the teams are doing. And once we have that visibility, then we can talk to the teams, um, around, you know, could they be doing better component testing? Could they be using some virtualized services here or there? And that's not even the main purpose of continuous delivery director, but it's just a reason that tools themselves can just give greater visibility of have much more intuitive and insightful conversations with other teams and reduce those organizational silos. >>Thanks, Ben. So we'd kind of sum it up, autonomy collaboration tools that facilitate that. So let's talk now about metrics from your perspectives. What are the metrics that matter? Jeff, >>I'm going to go right back to what Glenn said about data that provides visibility that enables us to, to make decisions, um, with shared purpose. And so business value has to be one of the first things that we look at. Um, how do we assess whether we have built something that is valuable, you know, that could be sales revenue, it could be net promoter score. Uh, if you're not selling what you've built, it could even be what the level of reuse is within your organization or other teams picking up the services, uh, that you've created. Um, one of the things that I've begun to see organizations do is to align value streams with customer journeys and then to align teams with those value streams. So that's one of the ways that you get to a shared purpose, cause we're all trying to deliver around that customer journey, the value with it. >>And we're all measured on that. Um, there are flow metrics which are really important. How long does it take us to get a new feature out from the time that we conceive it to the time that we can run our first experiments with it? There are quality metrics, um, you know, some of the classics or maybe things like defect, density, or meantime to response. Um, one of my favorites came from a, um, a company called ultimate software where they looked at the ratio of defects found in production to defects found in pre production and their developers were in fact measured on that ratio. It told them that guess what quality is your job to not just the test, uh, departments, a group, the fourth level that I think is really important, uh, in, in the current, uh, situation that we're in is the level of engagement in your development organization. >>We used to joke that we measured this with the parking lot metric helpful was the parking lot at nine. And how full was it at five o'clock. I can't do that anymore since we're not physically co-located, but what you can do is you can look at how folks are delivering. You can look at your metrics in your SCM environment. You can look at, uh, the relative rates of churn. Uh, you can look at things like, well, are our developers delivering, uh, during longer periods earlier in the morning, later in the evening, are they delivering, uh, you know, on the weekends as well? Are those signs that we might be heading toward a burnout because folks are still running at sprint levels instead of marathon levels. Uh, so all of those in combination, uh, business value, uh, flow engagement in quality, I think form the backbone of any sort of, of metrics, uh, a program. >>The second thing that I think you need to look at is what are we going to do with the data and the philosophy behind the data is critical. Um, unfortunately I see organizations where they weaponize the data and that's completely the wrong way to look at it. What you need to do is you need to say, you need to say, how is this data helping us to identify the blockers? The things that aren't allowing us to provide the right context for people to do the right thing. And then what do we do to remove those blockers, uh, to make sure that we're giving these autonomous teams the context that they need to do their job, uh, in a way that creates the most value for the customers. >>Great advice stuff, Glenn, over to your metrics that matter to you that really make a big impact. And, and, and also how do you measure quality kind of following onto the advice that Jeff provided? >>That's some great advice. Actually, he talks about value. He talks about flow. Both of those things are very much on my mind at the moment. Um, but there was this, I listened to a speaker, uh, called me Kirsten a couple of months ago. It taught very much around how important flow management is and removing, you know, and using that to remove waste, to understand in terms of, you know, making software changes, um, what is it that's causing us to do it longer than we need to. So where are those areas where it takes long? So I think that's a very important thing for us. It's even more basic than that at the moment, we're on a journey from moving from kind of a waterfall to agile. Um, and the problem with moving from waterfall to agile is with waterfall, the, the business had a kind of comfort that, you know, everything was tested together and therefore it's safer. >>Um, and with agile, there's that kind of, you know, how do we make sure that, you know, if we're doing things quick and we're getting stuff out the door that we give that confidence, um, that that's ready to go, or if there's a risk that we're able to truly articulate what that risk is. So there's a bit about release confidence, um, and some of the metrics around that and how, how healthy those releases are, and actually saying, you know, we spend a lot of money, um, um, an investment setting up our teams, training our teams, are we actually seeing them deliver more quickly and are we actually seeing them deliver more value quickly? So yeah, those are the two main things for me at the moment, but I think it's also about, you know, generally bringing it all together, the dev ops, you know, we've got the kind of value ops AI ops, how do we actually bring that together to so we can make quick decisions and making sure that we are, um, delivering the biggest bang for our buck, absolutely biggest bang for the buck, surge, your thoughts. >>Yeah. So I think we all agree, right? It starts with business metrics, flow metrics. Um, these are kind of the most important metrics. And ultimately, I mean, one of the things that's very common across a highly functional teams is engagements, right? When, when you see a team that's highly functioning, that's agile, that practices DevOps every day, they are highly engaged. Um, that that's, that's definitely true. Now the, you know, back to, I think, uh, Jeff's point on weaponization of metrics. One of the key challenges we see is that, um, organizations traditionally have been kind of, uh, you know, setting up benchmarks, right? So what is a good cycle time? What is a good lead time? What is a good meantime to repair? The, the problem is that this is very contextual, right? It varies. It's going to vary quite a bit, depending on the nature of application and system. >>And so one of the things that we really need to evolve, um, as an industry is to understand that it's not so much about those flow metrics is about our, these four metrics ultimately contribute to the business metric to the business outcome. So that's one thing. The second aspect, I think that's oftentimes misunderstood is that, you know, when you have a bad cycle time or, or, or what you perceive as being a buy cycle time or better quality, the problem is oftentimes like all, do you go and explore why, right. What is the root cause of this? And I think one of the key challenges is that we tend to focus a lot of time on metrics and not on the eye type patterns, which are pretty common across the industry. Um, you know, if you look at, for instance, things like lead time, for instance, it's very common that, uh, organizational boundaries are going to be a key contributor to badly time. >>And so I think that there is, you know, the only the metrics there is, I think a lot of work that we need to do in terms of classifying, descend type patterns, um, you know, back to you, Jeff, I think you're one of the cool offers of waterscrumfall as a, as, as a key pattern, the industry or anti-spatter. Um, but waterscrumfall right is a key one, right? And you will detect that through kind of a defect arrival rates. That's where that looks like an S-curve. And so I think it's beyond kind of the, the metrics is what do you do with those metrics? >>Right? I'll tell you a search. One of the things that is really interesting to me in that space is I think those of us had been in industry for a long time. We know the anti-patterns cause we've seen them in our career maybe in multiple times. And one of the things that I think you could see tooling do is perhaps provide some notification of anti-patterns based on the telemetry that comes in. I think it would be a really interesting place to apply, uh, machine learning and reinforcement learning techniques. Um, so hopefully something that we'd see in the future with dev ops tools, because, you know, as a manager that, that, you know, may be only a 10 year veteran or 15 year veteran, you may be seeing these anti-patterns for the first time. And it would sure be nice to know what to do, uh, when they start to pop up, >>That would right. Insight, always helpful. All right, guys, I would like to get your final thoughts on this. The one thing that you believe our audience really needs to be on the lookout for and to put on our agendas for the next 12 months, Jeff will go back to you. Okay. >>I would say look for the opportunities that this disruption presents. And there are a couple that I see, first of all, uh, as we shift to remote central working, uh, we're unlocking new pools of talent, uh, we're, it's possible to implement, uh, more geographic diversity. So, so look to that as part of your strategy. Number two, look for new types of tools. We've seen a lot of interest in usage of low-code tools to very quickly develop applications. That's potentially part of a mainstream strategy as we go into 2021. Finally, make sure that you embrace this idea that you are supporting creative workers that agile and dev ops are the peanut butter and chocolate to support creative, uh, workers with algorithmic capabilities, >>Peanut butter and chocolate Glen, where do we go from there? What are, what's the one silver bullet that you think folks to be on the lookout for now? I, I certainly agree that, um, low, low code is, uh, next year. We'll see much more low code we'd already started going, moving towards a more of a SAS based world, but low code also. Um, I think as well for me, um, we've still got one foot in the kind of cow camp. Um, you know, we'll be fully trying to explore what that means going into the next year and exploiting the capabilities of cloud. But I think the last, um, the last thing for me is how do you really instill quality throughout the kind of, um, the, the life cycle, um, where, when I heard the word scrum fall, it kind of made me shut it because I know that's a problem. That's where we're at with some of our things at the moment we need to get beyond that. We need >>To be releasing, um, changes more frequently into production and actually being a bit more brave and having the confidence to actually do more testing in production and go straight to production itself. So expect to see much more of that next year. Um, yeah. Thank you. I haven't got any food analogies. Unfortunately we all need some peanut butter and chocolate. All right. It starts to take us home. That's what's that nugget you think everyone needs to have on their agendas? >>That's interesting. Right. So a couple of days ago we had kind of a latest state of the DevOps report, right? And if you read through the report, it's all about the lost city, but it's all about sweet. We still are receiving DevOps as being all about speed. And so to me, the key advice is in order to create kind of a spiritual collocation in order to foster engagement, we have to go back to what is it we're trying to do collectively. We have to go back to tie everything to the business outcome. And so for me, it's absolutely imperative for organizations to start to plot their value streams, to understand how they're delivering value into aligning everything they do from a metrics to deliver it, to flow to those metrics. And only with that, I think, are we going to be able to actually start to really start to align kind of all these roles across the organizations and drive, not just speed, but business outcomes, >>All about business outcomes. I think you guys, the three of you could write a book together. So I'll give you that as food for thought. Thank you all so much for joining me today and our guests. I think this was an incredibly valuable fruitful conversation, and we appreciate all of you taking the time to spiritually co-located with us today, guys. Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you. Thank you for Jeff Hammond serves Lucio and Glen Martin. I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you for watching the broad cops Broadcom dev ops virtual forum.

(bright upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to the cube virtual coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. Virtual, not face to face this year, obviously because of COVID, and all events are going virtual. This is theCUBE virtual. I'm excited to have on CUBE, alumni Mandy Whaley, who's the Senior Director of DevNet & Cisco Certifications. Mandy, great to see you, >> Thank you. >> virtually. >> Great to see you too. It's exciting to be here with theCUBE again, and especially here at AnsibleFest. >> Last time we saw each other at a physical event was Barcelona in January, as the world was taking a turn. I see a lot of people online, learning has been great. What would DevOpsSec things going on, we'll get to that in a second, but I want to first talk about you and your role in Cisco and Red Hat Ansible. You're a trusted adviser. What are customers experiencing? And what are their expectations around automation? The big theme of this conference? >> Absolutely. So, in terms of the community that I work with at Cisco, it's our DevNet, and our learning community, all of our Cisco certified engineers, as well as our DevNet developer audience. And so, automation is at the core of what they're working on. And we've seen even the move to more work from home, all the virtual things that we're dealing with, that's even more emphasis on companies needing to do automation and needing to have the skills to build that within their teams. So we're really seeing that everyone has expectations around platforms being able to have open API's, integrate with tool sets, having choice in how they integrate things into their different workflows that they may already be using. And then we're seeing a big demand for people wanting to skill up and learn about automation, learn about Ansible, learn about Python. Our new DevNet certifications, they actually cover Cisco platforms as well as industry standard topics like Python and Ansible. And we've seen really great feedback from the community around loving that combination of getting to work really deeply with our Cisco technologies, as well as learning things like Ansible and Python. We had a special special challenge when we launched the DevNet Certifications, for the first 500 people to earn that certification. And we were really excited to see the community achieve that within the first 16 days. So I just think that shows how important automation is to our community right now. >> What do you hear from customers around this certification opportunity around Ansible and Python? Can you give an example? >> So what we're hearing from companies and customers and individual developers is that they're having to deal with more scale, they are seeing more opportunity to handle consistent policy to make sure configurations are consistent. All of these things are really important right now with the scale they're trying to handle. And so, they're looking for ways that they can quickly add these skills to their tool set. And since we are working from home, not traveling as much, everyone's schedule is a little bit different. There is extra opportunity for teams to dig in and do some learning. So, leaders, IT leaders are looking for how do they work with their teams to go after these skills and add them into their way that they approach problems, the way solve problems. And then individuals are looking for how they add them to open up new job roles and new opportunities for themselves. >> Well, I want to give you a shout out and props and kudos for the work you guys have done over at DevNet. We've watched the evolution. Obviously you guys have transformed the learning but also, the API enabled products and economy that Cisco is driving with the SaaS. This is consistent with Ansible's success in the cloud and on premise with private cloud. Again, Cloud, Ops, Sec, everything's kind of happening. Tell us the importance of automation within the Cisco products and how Ansible fits in. >> Absolutely. So, like I said earlier, having this open API's really, across the whole Cisco portfolio, and up and down the stack at the device level, at the controller level. That's part of our strategy. It's important to our customers, it's important to Cisco. We actually have a developer event, DevNet Create, coming up. And, Chuck Robbins, will be talking about some of that importance of developers and automation in the Cisco strategy at DevNet Create. So maybe you can tune in and see some of that as well. We have been working with Ansible since early on in terms of how we bring Cisco technologies together with Ansible. And as Ansible moved to the new collections, we stepped into that very early, we knew it was important to have a seamless transition around that for our community. And that's been a big part of our work this year in terms of how we've been working with Ansible and getting ready for the the new collection structure. >> The people who are watching and know theCUBE know that, or maybe new to theCUBE and our work, know that I've been a cheerleader for Cloud Native, but now it's actually happening, Mandy, we've been cheering it on and saying it's going to happen. Cloud Native and the modern app focus, again, this is some of the narrative on the inside, the industry is now mainstream. This is really a big deal because it's now DevOps and sec, so all that's happening mainstream, the rise of Kubernetes. Everything is on the front burner when it comes to Cloud Native. So I got to ask you, how do the developers here at AnsibleFest get to learn more about Cisco? Because now you're bringing everything together. The automation up and down the stack from modern apps down to the plumbing network's certainly super important from edge, 5G's right around the corner. This is a business enterprise opportunity. How can developers at AnsibleFest learn more about Cisco? >> Fantastic, yes. The one place to learn about all of our Cisco platforms, and like you said, how all these things, Cloud Native, DevOps, DevsSecOps, how all of these things are coming together. You can learn about it at developer.cisco.com. It's where all of our developer resources are, it's where you can find, if you're wanting to get started with Cisco products and Ansible. We have learning labs, engineer to engineer tutorials, videos, sample code, all kinds of the resources to help people get started on that journey. And the other thing we're really seeing is, like you said, this coming together and the real move in enterprises towards DevOps is creating all of these new job roles around DevSecOps, and network automation engineer, and web scale developer. And one of the things we're seeing is people are needing to add skills to their current skill set, mix and match, bringing hardware and software together, cloud and networking skills and development skills to really meet the need for these new job roles, which is being driven by the business demands that we're facing. And that's one of the things that we're working really hard on in the DevNet and Cisco community right now. >> Can't go wrong by continuing your career at Cisco and certainly configuration management software comes together as awesome. So, thanks for sharing that. One of the topics at AnsibleFest 2020 virtual this year is the theme is kind of three things, as we heard on some of the interviews, collections, collections collections. This notion of Ansible (Mandy laughs) automation platform has a numerous Cisco certified collections. Can you share some insight and anecdotes from your community on, from the DevNet users on what they're dealing with day to day around automation and how these collections and the certified collections fits in? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, part of my team has been working with our community, with Ansible, to bring the Cisco Ansible collections together. And it's been a big part of our work throughout the year. And we've seen tremendous use by the community. So we've been following the downloads of people downloading connections and using them is growing rapidly. We are really excited to see the use of the community and then the community interest support. And then we're doing our best to make sure that we have playbooks in our DevNet code exchange, so people can go in and find them. That we're helping people understand collections and how all that fits together in the current Ansible structure. And we've just seen tremendous interesting response from the community on that. >> How does this tie into security automation? Another theme that comes up, you talk about network, you got cloud, you got security, intrusion, detection, prevention, these are all useful things to DevNet users, how does that all fit in? >> Security is one of the areas that I'm consistently hearing about from our community and customers. I think people are really looking for how they can deal with increased scale, how they can increase the scale that they're able to deal with and keep it secure. We're seeing people want to take quick action, when a malicious activity occurs, or even something like ensuring that policy is consistent across a range of security endpoints. And these are all places where automation can really help out, and help teams manage the scale that they're having to deal with. So, one of the things we've been working with is showing some learning labs on DevNet, that combine using Ansible with our security products to help people tackle some of those use cases. We have an area called automation exchange. And it's all about these automation use cases, and giving you the sample code to get started on tackling some of these harder use cases. That's where we have seen a lot of interest around security. >> On a broader scale, could you tell us where you see NetOps going? I mean, it's a big theme, Susie Wee, April, yourself. We've all chatted about this in the past NetOps, or DevOps for networking ops for basically DevOps for networking, basically. >> Yes. >> Where's this... Where's it going in the future? Where are we on the progress? Certainly there's been great evolution. How is DevNet evolving to push this mission forward? >> So, one of the things that we talk with customers a lot about when they are moving down this pathway to bringing DevOps to the way that they run their network is we talk about a walk, run, fly progression. And walk is where there, I use cases where maybe you are only doing read-only type things, and you're gathering insight, you're gathering information to help with troubleshooting, you're gathering information that maybe gets packaged up into a ticket that then an engineer takes action on. And this is a great place where a lot of organizations can start. If they are learning these skills, building these practices, they don't have to worry about it, making changes but they get a lot of the benefit of the automation. So, we're recommending that to at least two companies who are getting started, teams that are getting started, as a place to start their automation journey. And then really moving through that progression of next, taking some automated action, all the way to that full DevOps, lifecycle and workflow. And we're seeing companies move through that progression as their teams also move through that progression. >> Just as a side note, one of the things we've been riffing on lately around the Cloud Native, as you know now, it's mainstream as we just talked about, is that the integrations are a big part of it. So, you could have an environment that has a little bit of that, a little bit of this. A lot of integrations because of API's, and also microservices, you get Kubernetes around to tie it on, glue it all together. You got DevNet Create coming up, and you guys always have a great DevNet Zone at your events. It's a real learning environment. Talk of Ansible developers in the community out there and how you guys work together for these classes, because you guys have a lot of learning, is like a cross section of the community that work together, some don't some do. The Cloud Native really enables the integrations to happen quicker. Can you just share what's going on at DevNet Create, and your world? >> Absolutely. So, and it's great because, John, you were at our first DevNet Create years ago when we started it. So it's really exciting. This is our first virtual DevNet Create, that's October 13th. And we had planned it to be an in person event in March when the pandemic hit the US, and so we had to re-plan, and regroup and bring it to a virtual audience this fall. And it's actually been great with our virtual events, we've been able to see how there's many more people who can participate, who can learn who can be a part of that community, because it's not only limited to the people who can be there in person. So we're actually really excited about that virtual part of it. And DevNet Create is the event where we have speakers from all over our community, from companies, from partners, from community groups, and all kinds of technologies, like you said, it's a great place to look at the integrations. So you'll find talks on Ansible, you'll find talks on Kubernetes, you'll find talks on IoT, you'll find talks on mashing up different API's to go after use cases. And it's really about that strength of the community speakers that brings a lot of excellent content into DevNet Create, and we're so thankful for them, and the way that our community likes to, step up and share and help each other. >> Well, yes, we were there for the first one we will still be there with you. But the question that comes up, and I'd like you to just quickly take a minute to clarify the difference between DevNet and DevNet Create, cause there is a nuance here, it's important. Take a minute to explain DevNet and DevNet Create, and the objective of the two. >> Absolutely. So DevNet are DevNet Zone Event, which happen typically in our Cisco lives, they have more of a focus on our more network engineer community who's spanning into programmability, DevOps, moving that direction because it happens within a Cisco live event, normally, the DevNet Zone. DevNet Create is our conference that started to focus on the application developer, the cloud developer, and how they are starting to tackle some of these hybrid use cases. And so DevNet Create is the place where that really comes together. And when, last year, Susie and I are on stage and we really wanted to know kind of what aspects people were bringing to the conference. And we asked the community, how many people are really focused on application development in their day job? That's their main focus. How many people are more on the Ops side? Infrastructure developer, DevOps engineer? And then how many people are really working to bridge that? And it was one third, one third, one third, in terms of the people at Create that year. And that was just really great to see. And to me, I think really shows the community that's building around around DevNet Create. >> And if you look at the trends too, the discussions are about modern applications, and certainly with COVID, people are looking at this and saying, "Hey, it's an opportunity to use this pandemic "and look at the opportunity to be very agile, "and create these modern apps which require programmability, "which require "some instructions away >> That's right. >> "from the complexity, all the way down to the network." I mean, it really gives great vision. >> All the way to the network. Yeah, and even things like, using things with Meraki cameras with using things like our collaboration products, to build those use cases that are really helping out in a lot of the new challenges that we're facing. So that's all what you can find at DevNet Create. It's one of my favorite events because it does cover such a range of topics. >> I'm in my first interview at one of your first event with Todd Nightingale. He is doing the Meraki thing. Now he's running a lot of the big part of the business there. But it really was a great vision. You guys really nailed it. Hats off to you guys. Kudos props. Congratulations and stay safe. And we'll see you at your event. Thanks for joining me. >> Thank you so much, and thanks to AnsibleFest. >> Okay, that's theCUBE virtual coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host with AnsibleFest 2020. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

>>Hello everyone. This is Dave Volante, and I want to welcome you to the cubes presentation of accelerating automation with Devon it in this special program, we're going to explore how to accelerate digital transformation and how the global pandemic is changing the way we work and the kinds of work that we do, the cube has pulled together experts from Cisco dev net. Now dev net is essentially Cisco as code. I've said many times in the cube that in my opinion, it's the most impressive initiative coming out of any established enterprise infrastructure company. What Cisco has done brilliantly with dev net is to create an API economy by leveraging its large infrastructure portfolio and its ecosystem. But the linchpin of dev net is the army of trained Cisco engineers, including those with the elite CC I E designation. Now dev net was conceived to train people on how to code infrastructure and develop applications in integrations. >>It's a platform to create new value and automation is a key to that creativity. So today you're going to hear from a number of experts. For example, TK key Anini is a distinguished engineer and a security pro. He's going to join us, his colleagues, Thomas Scheiber and Joe Vaccaro. They're going to help us understand how to apply automation to your data center networks, cloud, and security journeys. Cisco's Eric nip and Coon Jacobs will also be here with a look into Cisco's marketplace shifts. We'll also hear from dev net partners. Now let's kick things off with the architect of dev net, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's dev net and CX ecosystem success. Susie, we roam around the globe. It's the cube presenting >>Decelerating automation with damnit >>Brought to you by Cisco. >>Hello and welcome to the cube. I'm Sean for a year host. We've got a great conversation, a virtual event, accelerating automation with dev net, Cisco dev net. And of course we got the Cisco brain trust here, our cube alumni, Susie wee vice president, senior vice president GM, and also CTO of Cisco dev net and ecosystem success CX, all that great stuff. Any Wade Lee, who's the director, a senior director of dev net certifications, Eric field, director of developer advocacy, Susie Mandy, Eric. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you, John. So we're not in first, then we don't, can't be at the dev net zone. We can't be on site doing dev net, create all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years. We're virtual the cube virtual. Thanks for coming on. Uh, Susie, I got to ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you had has been awesome, but dev net create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the dev net community. This is what this ties into the theme, accelerating automation with dev net, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service or X, a AAS as it's called and automation plays a critical role. Um, could you please share your vision because this is really important and still only five to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and programmability. What's your, what's your vision? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are coming online as well, I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud is they're growing in new areas. As we're dealing with security is everyone's dealing with the pandemic. There's so many things going on, but what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking. It has security, it has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be able to, you know, really satisfy everything that businesses need. And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable. The infrastructure is programmable and you don't need just apps writing on top, but now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation. You can rise to higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the staff by leveraging automation. >>You know, I remember a few years ago when dev net created for started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we were talking about Meraki, you know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about, then this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was a Cisco, um, uh, Europe in Barcelona before all the covert hit. And you had this massive cloud surgeon scale happening going on, right when the pandemic hit. And even now more than ever the cloud scale, the modern apps, the momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing more innovation at scale because the pressure to do that, um, cause the business to stay alive and to get your thoughts on, um, what's going on in your world because you were there in person now we're six months in scale is huge. >>We are. Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is as all of our customers, as businesses around the world, as we ourselves all dealt with, how do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because you have to go home and then figure out how from home, can I make sure that my it infrastructure is automated out from home? Can I make sure that every employee is out there working safely and securely, you know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and be in kind of, you know, just, you know, uh, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. >>So we had to extend business applications to people's homes, uh, in countries like, you know, well around the world, but also in India where it was actually not, you know, not, they wouldn't let, they didn't have rules to let people work from home in these areas. So then what we had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer, you know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home. So that put extra stress on automation. It put extra stress on our customer's digital transformation and it just forced them to, you know, automate digitally, transform quicker. And they had to, because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers, you had to figure out how to automate all of that. And we're still all in that environment today. >>You know, one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, uh, Coobernetti's serve, uh, microservices. So those things, again, all dev ops and you know, you guys got some acquisitions youth about thousand eyes. Um, um, you got a new one you just bought, um, recently port shift to raise the game and security, Kubernetes, all these microservices. So observability super hot, but then people go work at home. As you mentioned, how do you observe, what are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's zooms and WebExes and, uh, education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this and the app side? How are you guys looking at the what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this program? Ability, challenge and observability challenges. It's a huge deal. >>Yeah, absolutely. And, um, you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right. You know, back when we talked to Todd before he had Meraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place. And now he has Cisco's entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that bigger, at that bigger scale for Cisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation of the API APIs into all of it. Um, but when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. Um, they had to build it. And what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people to work from home and how well you could reach customers. >>All of that used to be an it conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually, you know, calling on the heads of it and the CIO and saying, you know, how's our VPN connectivity is everybody working from home, how many people are connected and able to work and what's their productivity. So all of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure, it stuff became a board level conversation. And, you know, once again, at first everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they are now building in automation and digital transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observability, you know, looking for those events, the dashboards, you know, so it really has, has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. >>I know you got to go, but real quick, um, describe what accelerating automation with dev net means. >>Well, you've been following, you know, we've been working together on dev net and the vision of the infrastructure programmability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that and you need the right skill sets and the programmability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people and it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people run things are definite community has risen to this challenge. Um, people have jumped in, they've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. Uh, you know, we have, you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals, we have partners, you know, they're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerate, accelerating automation while it is about going digital. It's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications of, you know, cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people just as much as it is about automation and technology. >>And we got dev net created right around the corner of virtual unfortunate. Won't be in person, but we'll be virtual. Susie. Thank you for your time. We're going to dig into those people, challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you got to go, but stay with us. We're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric. Thanks. >>Thank you so much. Have fun. Thanks John. >>Okay. Mandy, you heard Susie is about people. And one of the things that's close to your heart you've been driving is a senior director of dev net certifications, um, is getting people leveled up. I mean the demand for skills, cybersecurity network, programmability automation, network design solution architect, cloud multi-cloud design. These are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >>Oh yes, absolutely. The, you know, what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning, those are, what's accelerating a lot of the technology changes and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like DevSecOps engineer, network, automation, engineer, network automation, which Susie >>Mentioned, and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current scope and broaden out and take on new challenges. >>Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this, um, um, piece of getting the certifications. Um, first, before you get started, describe what your role is as director of developer advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving. What's the state of it now because with COVID people are working at home, they have more time to contact, switch and get some certifications and that they can code more. What's your, what's your role? >>Absolutely. So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the Devin that creates the Cisco lives and helping the community connect and to help share tech mountain technical information with them, um, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? Um, so that's had to pivot quite a bit. Um, obviously Cisco live us. We committed very quickly to a virtual event when, when conditions changed and we're able to actually connect as we found out with a much larger audience. So, you know, as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of, you know, how big the convention center is, uh, we were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with our, uh, our definite date that was kind of attached on to Cisco live. >>And we got great feedback from the audience that now we're actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it. Um, but to your broader question of, you know, what my team does. So that's one piece of it is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out build new sandboxes and your learning labs, things like that, that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the dev net site. And then my team also looks after community, such as the Cisco learning network where this there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. And we've seen a huge shift now in that group that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the domain certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with programmability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up the community with, you know, helping you answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the dev net space as well, and are helping people with that servicer. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that >>I got to ask you on the trends around automation, what skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Are, is there anything in particular, obviously network automation has been around for a long time. Cisco has been leader in that, but as you move up, the stack as modern applications are building, do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What are people learning? Yeah, absolutely. >>So you mentioned, uh, observability was big before COVID and we actually really saw that amplified during COVID. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observability, uh, now that we needed? Well, we're virtual. Um, so that's actually been a huge uptake and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that are now figuring out how can I do this at scale? And I think one good example that, uh, Susie was talking about the VPN example, and we actually had a number of SES in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up. And one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that it departments might care about, about their firewalls, things that you do normally look at me all days, you would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. >>And when that number went to a hundred percent things like licensing started coming into play, where they needed to make sure they had the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the STDs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use some open source tooling, to monitor and alert on these things and then published it. So the whole community could go out and get a copy of it, try it out their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that and trying to figure out, okay, now I can take that and I can adapt it to what I need to see for my observability. >>That's great. Mandy. I want to get your thoughts on this too, because as automation continues to scale, it's going to be a focus and people are at home and you guys had a lot of content online for you recorded every session that didn't the dev Ned zone learnings going on, sometimes linearly. And nonlinearly you got the certifications, which is great. That's key, key, great success there. People are interested, but what are the learnings? Are you seeing? What are people doing? What's the top top trends. >>Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time. They want to advance their skillset. And just like any kind of learning people want choice because they want to be able to choose what's matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors, leading them through a study plan. And we have two new, uh, expert led study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do, uh, an immersive learning experience together, uh, with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new, um, offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kinds of team experiences called automation boot camp. And then we're also seeing individuals who want to be able to, you know, dive into a topic, do a hands on lab, get some skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. >>And so we have really modular self-driven hands on learning through the dev net fundamentals course, which is available through dev net. And then there's also people who are saying, I just want to use the technology. I like to experiment and then go, you know, read the instructions, read the manual, do the deeper learning. And so they're, they're spending a lot of time in our dev net sandbox, trying out different technologies, Cisco technologies with open source technologies, getting hands on and building things. And three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD wan. There's a huge interest in people skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about security is a focus area where people are dealing with new scale, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways and then automating their data center, using infrastructure as code type principles. So those are three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing some more about that at dev net create >>Awesome. Eric and Mandy, if you guys can wrap up, um, this accelerated automation with dev net package and a virtual event here, um, and also tee up dev net create because dev net create has been a very kind of grassroots, organically building momentum over the years. Again, it's super important cause it's now the app world coming together with networking, you know, end to end programmability and with everything as a service that you guys are doing everything with API APIs, um, only can imagine the enablement that's gonna name, uh, create, can you share the summary real quick on accelerating automation with, at and T up dev net create Mandy we'll start. Yeah. >>Yes. I'll go first. And then Eric can close this out. Um, so just like we've been talking about with you at every definite event over the past years, you know, that's bringing APIs across our whole portfolio and up and down the stack and accelerating, uh, automation with dev net. Susie mentioned the people aspect of that. The people skilling up and how that transformed teams, transforms teams. And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so what I think about accelerating automation with dev net, it's about the dev community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community. With those new skills. >>Eric take us home. He accelerating automation, dev net and dev net create a lot of developer action going on in cloud native right now, your thoughts? >>Absolutely. I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for Devin that day, this year for Cisco live. And we're seeing, we're able to leverage it even further with creative this year. So, whereas it used to be, you know, confined by the walls that we were within for the event. Now we're actually able to do things like we're adding the start now track for people that want to be there. They want to be a developer, a network automation developer, for instance, we've now got attract just for them where they can get started and start learning. Some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. Um, so I love that we're able to bring that together with the experienced community that we usually do from across the industry, bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud, to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. >>So I'm really excited to bring that whole mix together, as well as getting some of our business units together too, and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new APIs into their platforms? What are the, what problems are they hoping that customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So like I said, Cisco learning network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. >>Awesome. Thanks so much, God, man, you can add, add one more thing. >>I'm just going to say the other really exciting thing about create this year with the virtual nature of it is it it's happening in three regions and um, you know, we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions and uh, content and speakers and the region stepping up to have things personalized to their area, to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for them that create that's going to be fantastic this year. Yeah. >>I was just gonna close out and just put the final bow on that by saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now during what this virtual dev net virtual dev net create virtual, the cube virtual, I think we're learning new things. People working in teams and groups and sharing content, we're going to learn new things. We're going to try new things and ultimately people will rise up and we'll be resilient. I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And we'll, we'll, we'll ride the wave with you guys. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the cube and talk about your awesome accelerating automation and dev net. Great. Looking forward to it. Thank you. >>Yeah. >>The cube virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content amendment say virtual until we're face to face. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching Jeffrey here with the cube. Uh, we have our ongoing coverage of the Cisco dev net event. It's really accelerating with automation and programmability in the new normal, and we know the new normal is definitely continuing to go. We've been doing this since the middle of March and now we're in October. So we're excited to have our next guest he's Thomas Sheba. He is the vice president of product management for data center for Cisco Thomas. Great to see you. >>Hey, good to see you too. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody can see on our background. >>Exactly, exactly. So, I mean, I'm curious, we've talked to a lot of people. We talked to a lot of leaders, you know, especially like back in March and April with this light moment, which was, >>You know, no time to prep and suddenly everybody has to work from home. Teachers got to teach from home. And so you've got the kids home, you've got the spouse home, everybody's home trying to get on the network and do their zoom calls and their classes. I'm curious from your perspective, you guys are right there on the, on the network you're right in the infrastructure. What did you hear and see kind of from your customers when suddenly, you know, March 16th hit and everybody had to go home? >>Well, good point, Hey, I do think we all appreciate the network much more than we used to do before. Uh, and then the only other difference is I'm really more on WebEx calls to zoom calls, but you know, otherwise, uh, yes. Um, what, what I do see actually is that as I said, network becomes much more obvious as a critical piece. And so before we really talked a lot about, uh, agility and flexibility these days, we talk much more about resiliency quite frankly. Uh, and what do I need to have in place with respect to network to get my things from left to right. And you know, it was 2000, he still West, as we say on the data center. Uh, and that just is for most of my customers, a very, very important topic at this point. Right. >>You know, it's, it's amazing to think, you know, had this happened, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, you know, the ability for so many people in, in, in the information industry to be able to actually make that transition relatively seamlessly, uh, is, is actually pretty amazing. I'm sure there was some, some excitement and some kudos in terms of, you know, it, it is all based on the network and it is kind of this quiet thing in the background that nobody pays attention to. It's like a ref in the football game until they make a bad play. So, you know, it is pretty fascinating that you and your colleagues have put this infrastructure and that enabled us to really make that move with, with, with really no prep, no planning and actually have a whole lot of services delivered into our homes that we're used to getting at the office are used to getting at school. >>Yeah. And I mean, to your point, I mean, some of us did some planning. Can we clearly talking about some of these, these trends in the way I look at this trends as being distributed data centers and, um, having the ability to move your, your workloads and access for users to wherever you want to be. And so I think that clearly went on for a while. And so in a sense, we, we, we prep was, are normal, but we're prepping for it. Um, but as I said, resiliency just became so much more important than, you know, one of the things I actually do a little plot, a little, little, uh, Bret before a block I put out end of August around resiliency. Uh, you, you, if you didn't, if you didn't put this in place, you better put it in place. Because I think as we all know, we saw her March. This is like maybe two or three months, we're now in October. Um, and I sing, this is the new normal for some time being. >>Yeah, I think so. So let's stick on that theme in terms of trends, right? The other great trend as public cloud, um, and cloud and multi cloud, there's all types of variants on that theme you had in that blog post about, uh, resiliency in data center, cloud networking, data center cloud, you know, some people think, wait, it's, it's kind of an either, or I either got my data center or I've got my stuff in the cloud and I've got public cloud. And then as I said, hybrid cloud, you're talking really specifically about enabling, um, both inner inner data center resiliency within multi data centers within the same enterprise, as well as connecting to the cloud. That's probably counterintuitive for some people to think that that's something that Cisco is excited about and supporting. So I wonder if you can share, you know, kind of how the market is changing, how you guys are reacting and really putting the things in place to deliver customer choice. >>Yeah, no, it's actually, to me it's really not a counterintuitive because in the end was what, uh, I'm focusing on. And the company is focusing on is what our customers want to do and need to do. Uh, and that's really, um, would, you know, most people call hybrid cloud or multi-cloud, uh, in, in the end, what it is, what it is, is really the ability to have the flexibility to move your workloads where you want them to be. And there are different reasons why you want to place them, right? You might've placed them for security reasons. You might've played some clients reasons, depending on which customer segment you after, if you're in the United States or in Europe or in Asia, there are a lot of different reasons where you're going to put your things. And so I think in the end, what, uh, an enterprise looks for is that agility, flexibility, and resiliency. >>And so really what you want to put in place is what we call like the cloud on ramp, right? You need to have an ability to move sings as needed, but the logic context section, which we see in the, um, last couple of months, accelerating is really this whole seam around digital transformation, uh, which goes hand in hand then was, uh, the requirement on the at T side really do. And I T operations transformation, right. How it operates. Uh, and I think that's really exciting to see, and this is excellent. Well, a lot of my discussions, I was customers, uh, what does it actually mean with respect to the it organization and what are the operational changes? This a lot of our customers are going through quite frankly, accelerated right. Going through, >>Right. And, and automation is in the title of the event. So automation is, you know, is an increasingly important thing, you know, as the, as we know, and we hear all the time, you know, the flows of data, the complexity of the data, either on the security or the way the network's moving, or as you said, shifting workloads around, based on the dynamic situations, whether that's business security, et cetera, in a software defined networking has been around for a while. How are you seeing kind of this evolution in adding more automation, you know, to more and more processes to free up those, those, um, no kind of limited resources in terms of really skilled people to focus on the things that they should be focusing and not stuff that, that hopefully you can, you know, get a machine to run with some level of automation. Yeah. >>Yeah. That's a good point. And it said the tech line, I have, you know, sometimes when my mind is really going from a cloud ready, which has in most of the infrastructure is today to cloud native. And so let me a little expand on those, right? There's like the cloud ready is basically what we have put in place over the last five to six years, all the infrastructure that all our customers have, network infrastructure, all the nexus 9,000, they're all cloud ready. Right. And what this really means, do you have API APIs everywhere, right? Whether this is on the box, whether it's on the controller, whether this is on the operations tools, all of these are API enabled and that's just a foundation for automation, right? You have to have that. Now, the next step really is what do you do with that capability? Right? >>And this is the integration with a lot of automation tools. Uh, and that's a whole range, right? This is where the it operation transformation kicks in different customers at different speed, right? Some just, you know, I use these API APIs and use normal tools that they have in a network world just to pull information. Some customers go for it further and saying, I want to integrate this with like some CMDB tools. Some go even further and saying, this is like the cloud native pieces saying, Oh, I want to use, let's say red hat Ansible. I want to use, uh, how she called Terraform and use those things to actually drive how I manage my infrastructure. And so that's really the combination of the automation capability. Plus the integration was relevant cloud native enabling tools that really is happening at this point. We're seeing customers accelerating that, that motion, which really then drives us how they run their it operations. Right. And so that's a pretty exciting, exciting area to see, uh, giving us, I said, we have the infrastructure in place. There's no need for customers to actually do change something. Most of them have already the infrastructures that can do this is just no doing the operational change. The process changes to actually get there. >>Right. And it's funny, we, we recently covered, you know, PagerDuty and, and they highlight what you just talked about, the cloud native, which is, you know, all of these applications now are so interdependent on all these different API APIs, you know, pulling data from all these applications. So a, when they work great, it's terrific. But if there's a problem, you know, there's a whole lot of potential throats to choke out there and find, find those issues. And it's all being connected via the network. So, you know, it's even more critically important, not only for the application, but for all these little tiny components within the application to deliver, you know, ultimately a customer experience within a very small units of time, uh, so that you don't lose that customer or you, you complete that transaction. They, they check out of their shopping cart. You know, all these, these things that are now created with cloud native applications that just couldn't really do before. >>No, you're absolutely right. And that's, this is like, just to say, sit, I'm actually very excited because it opens up a lot of abilities for our customers, how they to actually structure the operation. Right. One of the nice things around this or automation plus a tool integration to an integration is you actually opened us up, not a sole automation train, not just to the network operations personnel. Right. You also open it up and can use this for the SecOps person or for the dev ops person or for the cloud ops engineering team. Right. Because the way it's structured, the way we built this, um, it's literally as an API interface and you can now decide, what is your process do you want to have? And what traditional process you have a request network, operation teams executes the request using these tools and then hand it back over. >>Or do you say, Hey, maybe some of these security things I gotta hand over the sec ups team and they can directly call, uh, these, these API is right, or even one step further. You can have the opportunity that the dev ops or the application team actually says, Hey, I got to write a whole infrastructure as code kind of a script or template, and I just execute. Right. And it's really just using what the infrastructure provides. And so that whole range of different user roles and our customer base, what they can do with the automation capability that's available. It's just very, very exciting way because it's literally unleashes a lot of flexibility, how they want to structure and how they want to rebuild the it operations processes. >>Interesting. You know, cause the, you know, the DevOps culture has taken over a lot, right. Obviously changed software programming for the last 20 years. And, and I think, you know, there's a, there's a lot of just kind of the concept of dev ops versus necessarily, you know, the actual things that you do to execute that technique. And I don't think most people would think of, you know, network ops or, you know, net ops, you know, whatever the equivalent is in the networking world to have, you know, kind of a fast changing dynamic, uh, kind of point of view versus a, you know, stick it in, you know, spec it, stick it in, lock it down. So I wonder if you can, you can share how, you know, kind of that dev ops, um, attitude point of view, workflow, whatever the right verb is, has impacted, you know, things at Cisco and the way you guys think about networking and flexibility within the networking world. >>Yeah, literally, absolutely. And again, it's all customer driven, right? There's none of those, none of this is really actually, you know, a little bit of credit, maybe some of us where we have a vision, but a lot of it's just customer driven feedback. Uh, and yeah, we, we do have network operations teams comes from saying, Hey, we use Ansible heavily on the compute side, we might use this for alpha seven. We want to use the same for networking. And so we made available all these integrations, uh, with sobriety as a state, whether these are the switches, whether these are ACI dcnm controller or our multi-site orchestration capabilities, all of these has Ansible integration the way to the right, the other one, as I mentioned, that how she from Turco Terraform, we have integrations available and they see the requests for these tools to use that. >>Uh, and so that is the emotion we're in for all the, you know, and, uh, another block actually does out there, we just posted saying all set what you can do and then a Palo to this, right. Just making the integration available. We also have a very, very heavy focus on definite and enablement and training, uh, and you know, a little clock. And I know, uh, probably, uh, part of the segment, the whole definite community that Cisco has is very, very vibrant. Uh, and the beauty of this is right. If you look at those, whether you're a net ops person or a dev ops person or a SecOps person, it doesn't really matter. It has a lot of like capability available to just help you get going or go from one level to the next level. Right? And there's simple things like sandbox environments where you can, we know what's out stress, try sinks out snippets of code are there, you can do all of these things. And so we do see it's a kind of a push and pull a tremendous amount of interest and a tremendous, uh, uh, time people spend to learn quite frankly, then that's another site product of, of, you know, the situation where, and people said, Oh man, and say, okay, online learning is the thing. So these, these, these tools are used very, very heavily, right? >>That's awesome. Cause you know, we've, we've had Susie Lee on a number of times and I know he and Mandy and the team really built this dev net thing. And it really follows along this other theme that we see consistently across other pieces of tech, which is democratization, right democratization of the access tool, taking it out of, of just a mahogany row with, again, a really limited number of people that know how to make it work and it can make the changes and then opening it up to a software defined world where now that the, you know, the it's as application centric, point of view, where the people that are building the apps to go create competitive advantage. Now don't have to wait for, you know, the one network person to help them out in and out of these environments. Really interesting. And I wonder if, you know, when you look at what's happened with public cloud and how they kind of change the buying parameter, how they kind of change the degree of difficulty to get project started, you know, how you guys have kind of integrated that, that type of thought process to make it easier for app developers to get their job done. >>Yeah. I mean, again, it's, it's, uh, I typically look at this more from a, from a customer lens, right? It's the transformation process and it always starts as I want agility. I want flexibility. I want to resiliency, right? This is where we talk to a business owner, what they're looking for. And then that translates into, into an I, to operations process, right? Your strategy needs to map then how you actually do this. Uh, and that just drives then what tools do you want to have available to actually enable this? Right? And the enablement again is for different roles, right? There is you need to give sync services to the app developer and, uh, the, the platform team and the security team, right. To your point. So the network, uh, can act at the same speed, but you also give to us to the network operations teams because they need to adjust. >>Then they have the ability to react to, uh, to some of these requirements. Right. And it's just automation. I think we, we, we focused on that, but there's also to your point, the, the need, how do I extend between data centers? You know, just, just for backup and recovery and how do I extend into, into public clouds, right? Uh, and in the end, that's a, that's a network connectivity problem. Uh, and we have soft as, uh, we have made as available. We have integrations into, uh, AWS. We have integrations into a joy to actually make this very easy from a, from a network perspective to extend your private domains, private networks into which have private networks on these public clouds. So from an app development perspective, now it looks like he's on the same network. It's a protective enterprise network. Some of it might sit here. >>Some of it might sit here, but it's really looking the same. And that's really in the enticing. What, what a business looks at, right? They don't necessarily want to say, I need to have something separate for this deployment was a separate for that deployment. What they want is I need to deploy something. I need to do this resilient. And the resilient way in an agile way gives me the tools. And so that's really where we focused, um, and what we're driving, right? It's that combination of automation consistently, and then definite tools, uh, available that we support. Uh, but they're all open. Uh, they're all standard tools as the ones I mentioned, right. That everybody's using. So I'm not getting into this, Oh, this is specific to Cisco, right. Uh, it's really democratization. I actually liked your term. Yeah. >>It's a great terminate. And it's, it's really interesting, especially with, with the API APIs and the way everything is so tied together that everyone kind of has to enable this because that's what the customer is demanding. Um, and it is all about the applications and the workloads and where those things are moving, but they don't really want to manage that. They just want to, you know, deliver business benefit to their customers and respond to, uh, you know, competitive threats in the marketplace, et cetera. So it's really an interesting time for the infrastructure, you know, to really support kind of this app first point of view, uh, versus the other way around is kind of what it used to be and, and enable this hyper fast development hyper fast, uh, change in the competitive landscape or else you will be left behind. Um, so super important stuff. >>Yeah, no, I totally agree. And as I said, I mean, it's, it's kind of interesting because we, we started on a Cisco data center. So we started this probably six or seven years ago. Uh, when we, when we named the application centric, uh, clearly a lot of these concepts evolve, uh, but in a sense it is that reversal of the role from the network provides something and you use to, uh, this is what I want to do. And I need a service, uh, thinking on a networking side to expose. So as that can be consumed. And so that clearly is playing out. Um, and as I said, automation is a key key foundation that we put in place, uh, and our customers, most of our customers at this point, uh, on, on these products, >>They have all the capabilities there. They can literally take advantage. There's really nothing that stops them >>Good times for you, because I'm sure you've seen all the memes and social media, right? What what's driving your digital transformation. Is it the CEO, the CMO or COVID, and we all know the answer to the question. So I don't think the, the pace of change is going to slow down anytime soon. So keeping the network up and enabling us all to get done, what we have to get done and all the little magic that happens behind the scenes. >>Yeah. No thanks. Thanks for having me. And again, yeah. If you're listening and you're wondering, how do I get started Cisco? Definitely just the place to go. It's fantastic. Fantastic. And I highly recommend everybody roll up your sleeves, you know, the best reasons you can have. >>Yeah. And we know once the physical events come back, we've been to dev net create a bunch of times, and it's a super vibrant, super excited, but really engaged community sharing. Lots of information is kind of, it's still kind of that early vibe, you know, where everyone is still really enthusiastic and really about learning and sharing information. So I say Susie and the team are really built a great thing, and we're a, we're happy to continue to cover it. And eventually we'll be back, uh, face to face. >>Okay. I look forward to that as well. >>All right, thanks. Uh, he's Thomas I'm Jeff, you're watching continuing coverage of Cisco dev net accelerating with automation and programmability >>TK Kia. Nini is here. He's a distinguished engineer at Cisco TK, my friend. Good to see you again. How are you? Good. I mean, you and I were in Barcelona in January and, you know, we knew we saw this thing coming, but we didn't see it coming this way. Did we know that no one did, but yeah, that was right before everything happened. Well, it's weird. Right? I mean, we were, you know, we, we, it was in the back of our minds in January, we sort of had Barcelona's hasn't really been hit yet. It looked like it was really isolated in China, but, uh, but wow, what a change and I guess, I guess I'd say I'd start with the, we're seeing really a secular change in your space and security identity, access management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden these things explode as the work from home pivot has occurred. >>Uh, and it feels like these changes are permanent or semi-permanent, what are you seeing out there? Yeah, I don't, I don't think anybody thinks the world's going to go back the way it was. Um, to some degree it's, it's changed forever. Um, you know, I, I, I do a lot of my work remotely. Um, and, and so, you know, being a remote worker, isn't such a big deal for me, but for some, it was a huge impact. And like I said, you know, um, remote work, remote education, you know, everybody's on the opposite side, a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect. And the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. >>Yeah. And when you see that, you know, that work from home pivot, I mean, you know, our estimates are along with a partner DTR about 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to COVID and now it's, you know, North of 70% plus, and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next six months. We'll see what happens with the fall surge, but, but people essentially accept, expect that to at least double that 16%, you know, going forward indefinitely. So how, what is that, what kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and how, how organizations are approaching security? >>Yeah, I just think, uh, from a mindset standpoint, you know, what was optional, uh, maybe, um, last year, uh, is no longer optional and I don't think it's going to go back. Um, I think, I think a lot of people, uh, have changed the way, you know, they live and the way they work. Um, and they're doing it in ways, hopefully that in some cases, uh, yield more productivity, um, again, um, you know, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is it frankly works just as well for the bad guys. And so that's, that's the balance we need to keep, which is we need to be extra diligent, uh, on how we go about securing infrastructure, uh, how we go about securing even our social channels, because remember all our social channels now are digital. So that's, that's become the new norm. >>You know, you've helped me understand over the years. I remember a line you shared with me in the cube one time is that the adversary is highly capable, is sort of the phrase that you used. And essentially the way you describe it, as you know, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease the bad guy's return on investment, you know, increase their costs, increase the numerator, but as, as work shifts from home, yeah, I'm in my house, you know, my wifi in my, you know, router with my dog's name is the password. You know, it's much, much harder for me to, to increase that denominator at home. So how can you help? >>Yeah. I mean, it's, it is, it is truly, um, when you think, when you get into the mind of the adversary and, and, uh, you know, the cyber crime out there, they're honestly just like any other business they're trying to operate with high margin. And so if you can get there, if you can get in there and erode their margin, frankly go find something else to do. Um, and, and again, you know, you know, the shift we experienced day to day is it's not just our kids are online in school and, uh, our work is online, but all the groceries we order, um, uh, you know, this Thanksgiving and holiday season, uh, a lot more online shopping is going to take place. So, you know, everything's gone digital. And so the question is, you know, how, how do we up our game there so that we can go about our business, uh, effectively and make it very expensive for the adversary to operate, uh, and take care of their business? Cause it's nasty stuff. >>I want to ask you about automation generally, and then specifically how it applies to security. So we, I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyperscalers and of course they really attacked the it labor problem. We learned a lot from that and an it organizations have applied much of that thinking. And the it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace, the technology scales today, how does that apply to security and specifically, how is automation affecting security? >>Yeah, it's, it's, it's the topic these days. Um, you know, businesses, I think, realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like AI and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand, uh, and operate at machine scale. Now, I mean that for, for businesses, I mean that for education and everything else now, so are the adversaries, right? So it's expensive for them to operate at Cuban scale and they are going to machine scale, going to machine scale, uh, a necessity is that you're going to have to harness some level of automation, have the machines, uh, work on your behalf, have the machines carry your intent. Um, and when you do that, um, you can do it safely or you could do it dangerously. And that that's really kind of your choice. Um, you know, just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should, um, you, you wanna make sure that frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's, it's a tricky thing because, you know, if when you take the phrase, you know, how do we, how do we automate security? Well, you actually have, uh, take care of, of securing the automation first. >>Yeah. We talked about this in Barcelona, where you were explaining that, you know, the bad guys, the adversaries are essentially, you know, weaponizing using your own tooling, which makes them appear safe because it's, they're hiding in plain sight. Right? >>Well, there's, they're clever, uh, give them that, um, you know, there's this phrase that they, they always talk about called living off the land. Um, there's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools and, uh, and being detective, you know, if they can use the tools that's already there, then, uh, they have a higher degree of, of evading, uh, your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob, who's already been credentialed and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not marked as the adversary. So again, you know, having the detection methods available to find their behavior anomalies and things like that become a paramount, but also, you know, having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to, you know, minimize their effectiveness, um, without it, I mean, ideally without human interaction, cause you, you just, can you move faster, you move quicker. Um, and I see that with an asterisk because, um, if done wrong, frankly, um, you're just making their job more effective. >>I wonder if we could talk about the market a little bit, uh, it's I'm in the security space, cybersecurity 80 plus billion, which by the way, is just a little infant testable component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that, that massive, uh, GDP, but guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them, what's your, what's your biggest challenge? They'll say lack of talent. And, and so what this chart shows is from ETR, our, or our survey partner, and on the vertical axis is net score. And that's an indication of spending momentum on the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence, a pervasiveness, if you will, inside the datasets. And so there's a couple of key points here. I wanted to put forth to our audience and then get your reactions. >>So you can see Cisco, I highlighted in red, Cisco is business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter. It's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the, on the conference call. And so you can see on the horizontal axis, you've got a big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere, but you're right there, uh, in that, in that dataset. And then you've got for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. But the other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here. And that just adds to the complexity. This is of course only a subset of what's in the security space. You know, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is how can Cisco help, you know, simplify this picture? Is it automation? Is it, you know, you guys have done some really interesting tuck in acquisitions and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left there it's, um, I had a customer tell me once that, you know, I came to this trade show, looking for transportation and these people are trying to sell me car parts. Um, that's the frustration customers have, you know, and I think what Cisco has done really well is to really focus on outcomes. Um, what is the customer outcome? Cause ultimately that's, that is what the customer wants. You know, there might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closest closer you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think, I think security in general has just year over year have been just written with, um, you need to be an expert. Um, you need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself. And, and I think, I think those days are behind us, but particularly as, as security becomes more pervasive and we're, you know, we're selling to the business, we're not selling to the, you know, t-shirt wearing hacker anymore. >>Yeah. So, well, well how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about cloud people that God put my data in the cloud I'm safe, but you know, of course we know it's a shared responsibility model. So I'm interested in your, your thoughts on that. Is it really, is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way, say, Oh, the state of security is great in the cloud. Whereas many of us out there saying, wow, it's, it's not so great. Uh, so what are your thoughts on that, that whole narrative and what Cisco's play in cloud? >>I think cloud, um, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern, which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible. Um, you know, no, no data center required, no disk drive required, you just get storage, you know, it's, it's, it's all of those things that are again, closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud two is it's really been, it's really punctuated the way we go about building systems. Um, again at machine scale. So, you know, before, when I write code and I think about, Oh, what computers are gonna run on or, you know, what servers are going to is you're going to run on those. Those thoughts never crossed my mind anymore. You know, I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do and the machines then figure it out. So, you know, for instance, on Tuesday, if the entire internet shows up, uh, the, the system works without fail. And if on Wednesday, if only North America shows up, you know, so, but, but there's no way you could staff that, right. There's just no human scale approach that gets you there. And that's, that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff is, um, it really is, uh, the next level of how we do computer science. >>So you're talking about infrastructure as code and that applies to security as code. That's what dev net is really all about. I've said many times, I think Cisco of the large established enterprise companies is one of the few, if not the only, that really has figured out, you know, that developer angle, because it's practical. What are you doing? You're not trying to force your way into developers, but, you know, I wonder if you could, you could talk a little bit about that trend and where you see it going. >>Yeah, no, that is, that is truly the trend. Every time I walk into dev net, um, the big halls at Cisco live, it is Cisco as code. Um, everything about Cisco is being presented through an API. It is automation ready. And frankly, that is, um, that is the, the love language of the cloud. Um, it's it's machines is the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So, you know, it is the, the, uh, I, I think, I think necessary, maybe not sufficient but necessary for, um, you know, doing all the machine scale stuff. What what's also necessary, uh, is to, um, to secure if infrastructure is code therefore, um, what, what secure, uh, what security methodologies do we have today that we use to secure code? While we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, right? Those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So then when I, when I talk about how do you do, uh, automation securely, you do it the same way you secure your code, you test it, you, you threat model, you, you, you say, you know, Ken, my adversary, uh, exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intend it to go. Um, so all of those practices apply. It's just, everything has code these days. >>I've often said that security and privacy are sort of two sides of the same coin. And I want to ask you a question and it's really, you know, to me, it's not necessarily Cisco and company like companies like Cisco's responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you can help. And of course, there's this Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma. I don't know if you have a chance to see it, but basically dramatizes the way in which companies are appropriating our data to sell us ads and, you know, creating our own little set of facts, et cetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy and admin. It's good from the standpoint of awareness, you know, you may or may not care if you're a social media user. I love tick-tock, I don't care, but, but, but they, they sort of laid out. This is pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that and you'll consist go play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy. I mean, beyond GDPR and California, consumer privacy act, um, what do you think? >>Yeah. Um, uh, I'll give you my, you know, my humble opinion is you, you fix social problems with social tools, you fixed technology problems with technology tools. Um, I think there is a social problem, um, that needs to be rectified the, you know, um, we, we, weren't built as, um, human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. It's just pretty wrong. So yeah, that, that, that, um, that series that really kind of wake up a lot of people it is, is, you know, it's probably every day I hear somebody asked me if I, I saw, um, but I do think it also, you know, with that level of awareness, I think we, we overcome it or we compensate by what number one, just being aware that it's happening. Um, number two, you know, how you go about solving it, I think maybe come down to an individual or even a communities, um, solution and what might be right for one community might be, you know, not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >>Yeah. So it's, it's, it's almost, I think if I could play back, what I heard is, is yeah. Technology, you know, maybe got us into this problem, but technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic AI bot is going to solve this. It's got to be, you know, society has to really, really take this on as your premise. >>That's a good point. When I, when I first started playing online games, I'm going back to the text-based adventure stuff, like muds and moves. I did a talk at, at MIT one time, and I'm this old curmudgeon in the back of the room. Um, we were talking about democracy and we were talking about, you know, the social processes that we had modeled in our game and this and that. And this guy just gave us the SmackDown. He basically walked up to the front of the room and said, you know, all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes. He says, democracy is a completely the opposite, which is you need to sleep on it. In fact, you should be scared if somebody can decide in a minute, what is good for the community? It, two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community. So it almost has the opposite. And that was super interesting to me. >>That's really interesting, you know, you read the, like the, the Lincoln historians and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long, you know, to make certain decisions, but ultimately when he acted acted with, with confidence. Um, so to that point, but, um, so what, what else are you working on these days that, uh, that are, that is interesting that maybe you want to share with our audience? Anything that's really super exciting for you or you, >>Yeah. You know, generally speaking, I'm trying to try and make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's a general theme making it simpler for the common person to use, uh, tools. Um, again, you know, all of these security tools, no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity, it's that we're moving the complexity away from the user so that they can thrive at human scale. And we can do things at machine scale and kind of working those two together is sort of the, the magic recipe. Um, it's, it's not easy, but, um, but it is, it is fun. So that's, that's what keeps me engaged. >>I'm definitely seeing, I wonder if you see it just sort of a, obviously a heightened organization awareness, but I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. You know, the, you know, it used to be a sec ops team and an Island. Okay, it's your problem? You know, the, the, the CSO cannot report into the, to the CIO because that's like the Fox in the hen house, a lot of those structures are, are, are changing. It seems it'd be becoming this responsibility is coming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there and what are you putting on? >>And it's so familiar to me because, you know, um, I, I started out as a musician. So, you know, bands bands are a great analogy. You know, you play bass, I big guitar. You know, somebody else plays drums, everybody knows their role and you create something that's larger than, you know, the sum of all parts. And so that, that analogy I think, is coming to, you know, we, we saw it sort of with dev ops where, you know, the developer, doesn't just throw their coat over the wall and it's somebody else's problem. They move together as a band. And, and that's what I think, um, organizations are seeing is that, you know, why, why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business? Not just here's the product and here's the rest of the business. That's, that's, that's pretty awesome. Um, I think, uh, we see a lot of those patterns, uh, particularly for the highly high-performance businesses. >>No, in fact, it's interesting you for great analogy, by the way. And you actually see in that within Cisco, you're seeing sort of a, and I know sometimes you guys don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you got a leadership structure now. I I've talked to many of them. They seem to really be more focused on how they're connect, connecting, you know, across organizations. And it's increasingly critical in this world of, you know, of silo busters, isn't it? Yeah, no, I mean, you almost, as, as you move further and further away, you know, you can see how ridiculous it was before it would be like acquiring the band and say, okay, all you can talk later is go over here. All your bass players go over there. I'm like, what happened to the band? >>That's what I'm talking about is, you know, moving all of those disciplines, moving together and servicing the same backlog and achieving the same successes together is just so awesome. Well, I always, I always feel better after talking to you. You know, I remember I remember art. Coviello used to put out his, his letter every year and I was reading. I'd get depressed. We spend all this money now we're less secure. But when I talked to you TK, I feel like much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on the cube. It's awesome to have you as a guest. I love these, I love these sessions. So thanks. Thanks for inviting me. And I miss you. I, you know, hopefully, you know, next year we can get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird. Like the sign says doing my part to get Kenny, thanks so much for coming to the cube. We, uh, we really appreciate it. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante. We've right back with our next guest. This short break, >>Come back to the cubes coverage, just to keep virtuals coverage of dev net create virtual will not face to face the cubes. Been there with dev net and dev net create. Since the beginning, dev net create was really a part of the dev net community. Looking out at the external market outside of Cisco, which essentially is the cloud native world, which is going mainstream. We've got a great guest here. Who's who's been the company's been on the cube. Many times. We've been talking to them recently acquired by Cisco thousand eyes. We have Joe Vaccaro is BC vice president of product, Joe, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Great. And thanks for having me. You have the keys to the kingdom, you, the vice president of product, which means you get to look inside and you get to look outside, figure it all out, uh, make everything run on thousand eyes. >>You guys have been finding common language, uh, across multiple layers of network intelligence, external services. This is the heart of what we're seeing in innovation with multicloud microservices, cloud native. This is really a hot area. It's converging multiple theaters in technology. Super important. I want to get into that with you. But first thousand nine was recently acquired by Cisco, um, big acquisition, uh, super important new CEO of Cisco, very clear API, everything we're seeing that come out. That's a big theme at dev net create the ecosystem of Cisco's going outside their own, you know, their, their walls outside of the Cisco network operators, network engineers. We're talking to developers talk programmability. This is the big theme. What's it like at Cisco? Tell us, honestly, the COVID hits. You get acquired by Cisco, tell us what's happening. >>Yeah, surely been an exciting six months, 4,000 eyes on the entire team and our customers, you know, as we all kind of shifted to the new normal of working from home. And I think, you know, that change alone really kind of amplified. Even some of the fundamental beliefs that we have as a company that you know, cloud is becoming the new data center or customers that Indra internet has become the new network and the new enterprise network backbone. And that SAS has really become the new application stack. And as you think about these last six months, those fundamental truths have never been more evident as we rely upon the cloud to be able to, to work as we rely upon our own home networks and the internet in order to be productive. And as we access more sized applications on a daily basis. And as you think about those fundamental truths, what's common across all of them is that you rely upon them now more than ever, not only to run your business, but to any of your employees would be productive, but you don't own them. And if you don't own them, then you lack the ability in a traditional way to be able to understand that digital experience. And I think that's ultimately what, what thousand eyes is trying to solve for. And I think it's really being amplified in really these last six months. >>Talk about the COVID dynamic because I think it highlighted and certainly accelerated digital transformation, but specifically exposes opportunities, challenges, weaknesses, I've talked to many CXOs CSOs. Uh, sec security is huge. Um, home of the conference book talk track, we'll get to in a second, but exposes what's worth doubling down on what to abandon from a project standpoint, as people start to look at their priorities, they're going, Hey, we got to have a connected experience. We got to have security. People are working at home. No one has VPNs at home VPNs or passe, maybe it's way. And maybe it's something else they're on a backbone. They're connecting to the internet, a lot of different diversity in connections. At the same time, you got a ton of modern apps running along for these networks. This is a huge issue. COVID is exposed us at scale. What's your view on this? And what does thousand eyes thinking about this? >>You know, if you think about the kind of legacy application delivery, it went from largely users in an office connected over, say a dedicated corporate network, largely to traditional say internal hosted applications. And that was early simple connectivity bath. And as you mentioned, we've seen amplifications in terms of the diversity from the users. So users are not in the office. Now they're connected in distributed disparate locations that are dynamically changing. When you think that how they're getting to that application, they're going across a really complex service chain of different network services that are working together across as public internet backbone will totally to land them on an application. And then those applications themselves are becoming now, as you mentioned, distributed largely based upon a microservices architecture and increasing their own dependence upon third party sample size applications to fulfill say key functions of that application, those three things together. >>Ultimately you're creating that level of level of complex service chain that really makes it difficult to understand the digital experience. And ultimately the it organization it's really chartered with not just delivering the infrastructure, but delivering the right experience. And you have to then have a way to be able to see, to gain that visibility, that experience, you know, to measure it and understand, and to provide that intelligence and then ultimately to act on it, be able to ensure that your employees, as well as your customers are getting the right overall, um, approach to being able to leverage those assets. >>It's funny, you know, I was getting to some of these high scale environments, a lot of these concepts are converging. You know, we had terms like automation, self healing networks. Um, you mentioned microservices early, you mentioned data out of the clouds, the new data center, uh, or when's the new land. However, we're gonna look at it. It's a whole different architecture. So I want to get your thoughts on, on the automation piece of networking and internet outages, for instance, um, because when you, you know, there's so many outages going up and down, it is like, uh, catching, looking for a needle in a haystack, right. So, um, we've had this conversation with you guys on the cube before, how does automation occur when you guys look at those kinds of things? Uh, what's important to look at, can you comment on and react to, you know, the internet outages and how you find resolve those? >>Yeah. It's um, it was really great. And as you mentioned, automation really in a place that a key, when you think about the, just a broad problem that it is trying to drive and, you know, from our lens, we look at it in really three ways. You're first off is you have to be able to gain the level of visibility from where it matters and be able to, to test and be able to provide that level of active measurements across the, the type of ways you want to be able to inspect the network. But then also from the right vantage points, you want to inspect it. But what we talk about right aside, you know, data alone, doesn't solve that problem. As you mentioned, that needle in the haystack, you know, data just provides the raw metrics that are screaming across the screen, and you have to then enable that data to provide meeting. >>You need to enable that data become intelligent. And that intelligence comes through the automation of being able to process that data very quickly, allow you to be able to see the unseen, allow you to be able to quickly understand the issues that are happening across this digital supply chain to identify issues that are even happening outside of your own control across the public internet. And then the last step of automation really comes in the, of the action, right? How do you enable that intelligence to be put, to use? How do you enable that intelligence to then drive across the rest of your it workflow as well as to be able to be used as a signaling engine, to be able to then make the fundamental changes back at the network fabric, whether that is a dressing or modifying your BGB pairing, that we see happen with our customers using thousand eyes data, to be able to route around major internet outages that we've seen over the past six months, or to be able to then use that data, to be able to optimize the ultimate experience that they're delivering to both our customers, as well as their employees, >>Classic policy based activities. And you take it to a whole nother level. I got to get your thoughts on the employees working at home. Okay. Because, um, you know, most it people like, Oh yeah, we're going to forecast in cases of disruption or a hurricane or a flood or hurricane Sandy, but now with COVID, everyone's working at home. So who would have forecasted a hundred percent, um, you know, work from home, which puts a lot of pressure on him, everything. So I gotta ask you, now that employees are working at home, how do you tie network visibility to the actual user experience? >>Yeah, that's a great question. As you, you know, we saw within our own customer base, you know, when COVID head and we saw this rise of work from home, it teams are really scrambling and said, okay, I have to light up this, say VPN infrastructure, or I need to now be able to support my users in a work from home situation where I don't control the corporate network. In essence, now you have essentially thousands. Every employee is acting across their own corporate network and people were then using thousand eyes in different ways to be able to monitor their safety VPN infrastructure across, uh, back into the corporate network, as well as in using our thousand eyes end point agents that runs on a local, a user's laptop or machine in their home to help you to be able to gain that visibility down to that last mile of connectivity. >>Because when a user calls up support and says, I'm having trouble say accessing my application, whether that's Salesforce or something else, what ultimately might be causing that issue might not necessarily be a Salesforce issue, right? It could be the device and the device performance in terms of CPU, memory utilization. It could be the wifi and the signal quality within your wifi network. It could be your access point. It could be your raw, local home router. It can be your local ISP. It could be the path that you're taking ultimately to your corporate network or that application. There's so many places that could go wrong that are now difficult to be able to see, unless you have the ability to see comprehensively from the user to the application, and to be able to understand that full end to end path, >>You know, it teams have also been disrupted. They've been on offsite prop off property as well, but you got the cloud. How is your technology help the it teams? Can you give some examples there? Um, >>Yeah, great way is, you know, how people use thousand eyes as part of that data sharing ecosystem. Again, that notion of how do you go from visibility to intelligence action and we're in the past, you might be able as an it administrator to walk over to their network team and say, Hey, can you take a look at what I'm seeing now? That's no longer available. So how do you be able to work efficiently as the United organization? You know, we think a thousand eyes in how our customers are using us a thousand times becomes a common operating language that allows them to be able to analyze across from the application down into the underlying infrastructure, through those different layers of the network what's happening. And where do you need to focus your attention? And then furthermore, with 10,000 eyes in terms of a need nibbling, that data sharing ecosystem, leveraging our share link capability really gives them the ability to say, you know, here's what I'm seeing and be able to send that to anybody within the it organization, but it goes even further and many times in recent times, as well as over the course of people using thousand eyes, they take those share links and actually send them to their external providers because they're not just looking to resolve issues within their own it organization. >>They're having to work collaboratively with the different ISP that they're appearing with with their cloud providers that they're appearing, uh, they're leveraging, or the SAS applications that are part of that core dependency of how they deliver their experience. >>I asked you the question when you think about levels of visibility and making the lives easier for it, teams, um, and see a lot of benefits with thousand eyes. You pointed out a few of them. It's got to ask you the question. So if I'm an it person I'm in the trenches, are you guys have, uh, an aspirin or a vitamin or both? Can you give an example because there's a lot of pain point out there. So yeah. Give me a cup, a couple Advils and aspirins, but also you're an enabler to the new things are evolving. You pointed out some use case. You talked about the difference between where you're helping people pain points and also enabling them be successful for it teams. >>Yeah, that's a great analogy. You're thinking it, like you said, it definitely sits on both sides of that spectrum, you know, thousand eyes is the trusted tool, the source of truth for it. Organizations when issues are happening as their alarm bells are ringing, as they are generating the, um, the different, uh, on call, uh, to be able to jump into a worm situation thousand eyes is that trusted source of truth. Allow them to focus, to be able to resolve the issue in the heat of the moment. But that was a nice also when we think about baselining, your experience, what's important is not understanding that experience at that moment in time, but also how that's deviated over time. And so by leveraging thousand eyes on a continuous basis, it gives you the ability to see the history of that experience, to understand how your network is changing is as you mentioned, networks are constantly evolving, right? >>The internet itself is constantly changing. It's an organic system, and you need to be able to understand not only what are the metrics that are moving out of your balance, but then what is potentially the cause of that as a network has evolved. And then furthermore, you can be begin to use that as you mentioned, in terms of your vitamin type of an analogy, to be able to understand the health of your system over time on a baseline basis so that you can begin to be able to ensure its success in a great way to really kind of bring that to light. As people using say, thousand eyes as part of the same SC land-based rollout, where you're looking to seek benchmark and confidence as you look to scale out in either, you know, benchmarking different ISP within that, I feel like connectivity for as you look to ensure a level of success with a single branch to give you that competence, to then scale out to the rest of your organization. >>That's great insights, the classic financial model ROI, you get baseline and upside, right? You got handle the baseline as you pointed out, and the upside music experience connectivity, you know, application performance, which drives revenue, et cetera. So great point. Great insight, Joe. Thank you so much for that insight. It's got a final question for you. I want to just riff a little bit with you on the industry. A lot of us have been having debates about automation. I mean, who doesn't, who doesn't love automation. Automation is awesome, right? Automate things. But as the trend starts going on, as everything is a service or X, a S as it's called, certainly Cisco's going down that road. Talk about your view about the difference between automation and everything is a service because at the end of the day, everything will be a service, but without automation, you really can't have services, right? So, you know, automation, automation, automation, great, great drum to bang all day long, but then also you got the same business side saying as a service, as a service, pushing that into the products means not trivial. Talk about, talk about how you'd look at automation and everything as a service and the relationship and interplay between those two concepts. >>Yeah. Ultimately I think about in terms of what is the problem that the business is trying to solve in ultimately, what is the value that they're trying to face? And in many ways, right, they're being exploded with increase of data that needs, they need to be able to not only processing gather, but then be able to then make use of, and then from that, as we mentioned, once you've processed that data and you'd say, gather the insights from it. You need to be able to then act on that data. And automation plays a key role of allowing you to be able to then put that through your workflow. Because again, as that, it experience becomes even more complex as more and more services get put into that digital supply chain. As you adopt say increased complexity within your infrastructure, by moving to a multicloud architecture where you look to increase the number of say, network services that you're leveraging across that digital experience. >>Ultimately you need the level of automation. You'd be able to see outside of your own vantage point. You need to be able to look at the problem from as broad of a, a broad of a way as possible. And you know, data and automation allows you to be able to do what is fundamentally to do from a very narrow point of view, in terms of the visibility you gather intelligence you generate, and then ultimately, how do you act on that data as quick as possible to be able to provide the value of what you're looking to solve. >>It's like a feature it's under the hood. The feature of everything comes to the surface is automation, data, machine learning, all the goodness in the software. I mean, that's really kind of what we're talking about here. Isn't it a final question for you as we wrap up, uh, dev net create really, again, is going beyond Cisco's dev net community going into the industry ecosystem where developers are there. Um, these are folks that want infrastructure as code. They want network as code. So network programmability, huge topic. We've been having that conversation, uh, with Cisco and others throughout the industry for the past three years. What's your message to developers out there that are watching this who say, Hey, I just want to develop code. Like I want, you know, you guys got that. That was nice. Thanks so much. You know, you take care of that. I just want to write code. What's your message to those folks out there who want to tap some of these new services, these new automation, these new capabilities, what's your message. >>You know, ultimately I think, you know, when you look at thousand eyes, um, you know, from a product perspective, you know, we try to build our product in an API first model to allow you to be able to then shift left of how you think about that overall experience. And from a developer standpoint, you know, what I'd say is, is that while you're developing in your silo, you're going to be part of a larger ultimate system. In your experience you deliver within your application is now going to be dependent upon not only the infrastructure it's running upon, but the network gets connected to, and then ultimately the user and the stance of that user, if I leveraging a thousand eyes and being able to then integrate that into how you think closely on that experience, that's going to help ensure that ultimately the application experience that the is looking to deliver meets that objective. And I think what I would say is, you know, while you need to focus on your, uh, your role as a developer, having the understanding of how you fit into the larger ecosystem and what the reality of the, of how your users will access that application is critical. >>Awesome, Joe, thank you so much. Again, trust is everything letting people understand that what's going on underneath is going to be, you know, viable and capable. You guys got a great product and congratulations on the acquisition that Cisco made of your company. And we've been following you guys for a long time and a great technology chops, great market traction, congratulations to everyone, 1,009. Thanks for coming on today. >>I appreciate it. Thanks for having me >>Vice president of product here with thousand eyes. Now, part of Cisco, John, for your host of the cube cube virtual for dev net, create virtual. Thanks for watching. >>Even prior to the pandemic, there was a mandate to automate the hyperscale cloud companies. They've shown us that to scale. >>You really have to automate your human labor. It just can't keep up with the pace of technology. Now, post COVID that automation mandate is even more pressing. Now what about the marketplace? What are S E seeing on the horizon? The cubes Jeff Frick speaks with Cisco engineers to gather their insights and explore the definite specialized partner program. We've got >>Coon Jacobs. He's the director of systems engineering for Cisco. Good to see Kuhn, >>Thank you for having me >>And joining him as Eric nappy is the VP of system systems engineering for Cisco. Good to see Eric. Good to be here. Thank you. Pleasure. So before we jump into kind of what's going on now in this new great world of programmability and, and control, I want to kind of go back to the future for a minute, because when I was doing some research for this interview, it was Coon. I saw an old presentation that you were giving from 2006 about the changing evolution of the, uh, the changing evolution of networking and moving from. I think the theme was a human centered human centered network. And you were just starting to touch a little bit on video and online video. Oh my goodness, how far we have come, but, but I would love to get kind of a historical perspective because we've been talking a lot and I know Eric son plays football about the football analogy of the network is kind of like an offensive lineman where if they're doing a good job, you don't hear much about them, but they're really important to everything. >>And the only time you hear about them is when a flag gets thrown. So if you look back with the historical perspective, the load and the numbers and the evolution of the network, as we've moved to this modern time, and, you know, thank goodness cause of COVID hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, all of us in the information space would not have been able to make this transition. So I just, I just love to get some historical perspective cause you've been kind of charting this and mapping this for a very long time. >>Yeah, we absolutely have. I think, you know, what you're referring to was back in the day, the human network campaign, and to your point, the load, the number of hosts that traffic, the just overall the intelligence of the network has just evolved tremendously over these last decade and a half, uh, 15 years or so. And you look at where we are now in terms of the programmable nature of the network and what that enables in terms of new degrees of relevance that we can create for the customers. Um, and how, you know, the role of it has changed entirely again, especially during this pandemic, you know, the fact that it's now as a service and elastic, uh, is, is absolutely fundamental to being able to ensure, uh, on an ongoing basis, a great customer experience. And so, uh, it's been, it's been, uh, a very interesting ride. >>Yeah. And then, and then just to close the loop, the, one of your more later interviews talking to Sylvia, your question is, are you a developer or an engineer? So it was, and, and your whole advice to all these network engineers is just, just don't jump in and start doing some coding and learning. So, you know, the focus and really the emphasis and where the opportunity to differentiate as a company is completely shifting gears over to the S you know, really software defined side. >>Oh, absolutely. So, I mean, you look at how the software world and the network has come together and how we're applying now, you know, basically the same construct of CICB pipeline to network, uh, infrastructure, look at network really as code and get all of the benefits from that. And the familiarity of it, the way that our engineers have had to evolve. And that is just, you know, quite, quite significant in, in, in like the skill set. And the best thing is jump in, right. Um, you know, dip your toe in the water, but continue to evolve that skill set. And, uh, you know, don't, don't be shy. It's, it's a leap of faith for some of us who've been in the industry a bit longer. Uh, you know, we like to look at ourselves as the craftsman of the network, but now it's definitely a software centricity and programmability, right? >>So Eric, you've got some digital exhaust out there too, that I was able to dig up going back to 2002 752 page book, and the very back corner of a dark dirty dusty Amazon warehouse is managing Cisco network security, 752 pages. Wow. How has security changed from a time where before I could just read a book, a big book and, you know, throw some protocols in and probably block a bunch of ports to the world that we live in today, where everything is connected. Everything is API driven, everything is software defined. You've got pieces of workloads spread out all over the place and Oh, by the way, you need to bake security in at every single level of the application stack. >>Yeah, no I'm so, wow. Cocoon is that you, you found that book on the I'm really impressed. There was a thank you a little street, correct. So, uh, I want to hit on something that you, you talked about. Cause I think it's very important to, to this overall conversation. If we think about the scale of the network and Coon hit on it briefly, you talked about it as well. We're seeing a massive explosion of devices by the I, you know, it's estimated by the end of this year, there's going to be about 27 billion devices on the global internet. That's about 3.7 devices for every man, woman and child life. And if we extrapolate that out over the course of the next decade on the growth trajectory we're on. And if you look at some of the published research on this, it's estimated there could be upwards of 500 billion devices accessing the global internet on a, on a daily basis. >>And primarily that, that, that is a IOT devices. That's digitally connected devices. Anything that can be connected will be connected, but then introduces a really interesting security challenge because every one of those devices that is accessing the global internet is within a company's infrastructure or accessing pieces of corporate data is a potential attack factor. So we really need to, and I think the right for this is we need to reimagine security because security is, as you said, not about perimeters. You know, I wrote that book back in 2002, I was talking about firewalls and a cutting edge technology was intrusion prevention and intrusion detection. Now we need to look at security really in the, in the guise of, or under the, under the, under the realm of really two aspects, the identity who is accessing the data in the context, what data is being accessed. >>And that is going to require a level of intelligence, a level of automation and the technologies like machine learning and automated intelligence are going to be our artificial intelligence rather are going to be table stakes because the sheer scale of what we're trying to secure is going to be untenable, undercurrent, you know, just current security practices. I mean, the network is going to have to be incredibly intelligent and leverage again, a lot of that, uh, that AI type of data to match patterns of potential attacks and ideally shut them down before they ever cause any type of damage. >>Really interesting. I mean, one thing that COVID has done a bunk many things is kind of retaught us all about the power of exponential curves and how extremely large those things are and how fast they grow. We had Dave runs and on a Google cloud a couple of years ago. And I remember him talking about early days of Google when they were starting to map out kind of, as you described kind of map out their growth curves, and they just figured out they could not hire if they hired everybody, they couldn't hire enough people to deal with it. Right. So really kind of rethinking automation and rethinking about the way that you manage these things and the level, right. The old, is it a pet or is it, or is it, um, uh, part of a herd? And I think it's interesting what you talked about, uh, can really the human powered internet and being driven by a lot of this video, but to what you just said, Eric, the next big wave, right. >>Is IOT and five G. And I think, you know, you talk about 3.7 million devices per person. That's nothing compared to right. All these sensors and all these devices and all these factories, cause five G is really targeted to machine the machines, which there's a lot of them and they trade a lot of information really, really quickly. So, you know, I want to go back to you Coon thinking about this next great wave in a five G IOT kind of driven world where it's kind of like when voice kind of fell off compared to IP traffic on the network. I think you're going to see the same thing, kind of human generated data relative to machine generated data is also going to fall off dramatically as a machine generated data, just skyrocket through the roof. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think too, also what Eric touched on the visibility on that, and they'd be able to process that data at the edge. That's going to catalyze cloud adoption even further, and it's going to know, make the role of the network, the connectivity of it all and the security within that crucially important. And then you look at the role of programmability within that. We're seeing the evolution going so fast. You look at the element of the software defined network in an IOT speed space. We see that we have hosts there that are not necessarily, um, you know, behaving like other hosts would, uh, on a network, for example, manufacturing floor, uh, production robot, or a security camera. And what we're seeing is we're seeing partners and customers employing program ability to make sure that we overcome some of the shortcomings, uh, in terms of where the network is at, but then how do you customize it in terms of the relevance that it can provide, uh, bringing on board, uh, those, uh, those hosts in a very transparent way, and then, you know, keep, keep the agility of it and keep the speed of innovation going. >>Right. >>Right. So Eric, I want to come back to you and shift gears kind of back to the people will leave the IOT and the machines along, along for a minute, but I'm curious about what does beat the boss. I mean, I go to your LinkedIn profile and it's just filled with congratulatory statements, but everyone's talking about beating the boss. You know, it's, it's a really, you know, kind of interesting and different way to, to motivate people, to build this new skillset in terms of getting software certifications, uh, within the Cisco world. And I just thought it was really cute the way that you clearly got people motivated, cause there's posts all over the place and they've all got their, their nice big badge or their certification, but, you know, at a higher level, it is a different motivation to be a developer versus an engineer and a technician. And it's kind of a different point of view. And I just wonder if you could share, you know, some of the ways that you're, you're kind of encouraging, you know, kind of this transformation within your own workforce, as well as the partners, et cetera, and really adopting kind of almost a software first and this program kind of point of view versus, you know, I'm just wiring stuff up. >>Apparently a lot of people like to beat me. So of itself was a, was a, it was a great success, but you know, if we think we take a step back, you know, what is Cisco about as an organization? Um, I mean obviously if you look back to the very early days of our vision, right, it was, it was to change the way the world worked, played, live and learn. And that you think about, and you hit on this when we were, you know, you were discussion with co with Kuhn in the early days of COVID. We really saw that play out as so much shifted from, you know, in-person type of interactions to virtual interactions in the network that, uh, that our, our customers, our partners, our employees built over the course of the last several, the last three decades really helped the world continue to, um, to, to do business for students to continue to go to school or clinicians, to connect with patients. >>If I think about that mission to meet programmability is just the next iteration of that mission, continuing to enable the world to communicate, continuing, to enable customers, employees, uh, partners, uh, to essentially leverage the network for more than just connectivity now to leverage it for critical insight. Again, if we look at some of the, uh, some of the use cases that we're seeing for social distancing and contact tracing and network has a really important place to play there because we can pull insight from it, but it isn't necessarily an out of the box type of integration. So I look at programmability and in what we're doing with, with dev net to give relevance to the network for those types of really critical conversations that every organization is having right now, it's a way to extrapolate. It's a way to pull critical data so that I can make a decision. >>And if that decision is automated, or if that decision requires some type of a manual intervention, regardless, we're still about connecting. And in this case, we're connecting insight with the people who need it most, right. The debit challenge we ran is really in respect for how critical this new skill set is going to be. It's not enough. Like I said, just to connect the world anymore. We need to leverage that network, the network for that critical insight. And when we drove, we were, we created the beat, the boss challenge. It was really simple. Hey guys, I think this is important and I am going to go out and I'm going to achieve the certification myself, because I want to continue to be very relevant. I want to continue to be able to provide that insight for my customers and partners. So therefore I'm going for it. Anybody that can get there before me, maybe there's a little incentive tied to the incentive. Although it's funny, we interviewed a lot of, a lot of our team who, uh, who achieved it when incentive was secondary. They just wanted to have the bragging rights, like, yeah, I beat Eric, right. >>You know, putting your money where your mouth is, right. If it's important, then why, you know, you should do it too. And, and you know, the whole, you're not asking people to do what you wouldn't do yourself. So I think there's a lot of good leadership, uh, leadership lessons there as well. But I want to extend kind of the conversation on the covert impact, right? Cause I'm sure you've seen all the social media meme, you know, who's driving your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO or COVID. And we all know the answer to the question, but you know, you guys have already been dealing with kind of an increased complexity around enterprise infrastructure world in terms of cloud and public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi cloud. And people are trying to move stuff all, all the way around now suddenly had this COVID moment right in, in March, which is really a light switch moment. >>People didn't have time to plan or prepare for suddenly everybody working from home. And it's not only you, but your spouse and your kids and everybody else. So, but now we're six months plus into this thing. And I would just love to get your perspective and kind of the change from, Oh my goodness, we have to react to the light switch moment. What do we do to make sure people can, can get, get what they need when they need it from where they are. Uh, but, but then really moving from this is a, an emergency situation, a stop gap situation to, Hmm, this is going to extend for some period of time. And even when it's the acute crisis is over, you know, this is going to drive a real change in the way that people communicate in the way that people, where they sit and their jobs and, and kind of how customers are responding accordingly as the, you know, kind of the narrative has changed from an emergency stop gap to this is the new normal that we really need to plan for. >>So, uh, I think, I think you said it very well. I think anything that could be digitized, any, any interaction that could be driven virtually was, and what's interesting is we, as you said, we went from that light switch moment where I believe the stat is this, and I'll probably get the number wrong, but like in the United States here at the beginning, at the end of February, about 2% of the knowledge worker population was virtual, you know, working from home or in a remote work environment. And over the course of about 11 days, that number went from 2% to 70%. Wow. Interesting that it worked, you know, there was a lot of hiccups along the way, and there was a lot of organizations making really quick decisions on how do I enable VPN scale of mass? How do I, you know, leverage, uh, you know, things like WebEx for virtual meetings and virtual connectivity, uh, much faster now that as you said, that we kinda gotten out of the fog of war or frog fog of battle organizations are looking at what they accomplished. >>And it was nothing short of Herculean and looking at this now from a transition to, Oh my gosh, we need to change too. We have an opportunity to change. And we're looking, we see a lot of organizations specifically around, uh, financial services, healthcare, uh, the, uh, the K through 20, uh, educational environment, all looking at how can they do more virtually for a couple of reasons. Obviously there is a significant safety factor. And again, we're still in that we're still on the height of this pandemic. They want to make sure their employees, their customers, students, patients remain safe. But second, um, we've found in, in discussions with a lot of senior it executives that are customers that people are happier working from home. People are more productive working from home. And that, again, the network that's been built over the course of the last few decades has been resilient enough to allow that to happen. >>And then third, there is a potential cost savings here outside of people. The next most expensive resource that organizations are paying for is real estate. If they can shrink that real estate footprint while providing a better user experience at the locations that they're maintaining, again, leveraging things like location services, leveraging things like a unified collaboration. That's very personalized to the end user's experience. They're going to do that. And again, they're going to save money. They're going to have happier employees and ultimately they're going to make their, uh, their employees and their customers a lot safer. So we see, we believe that there is in some parts of the economy, a shift that is going to be more permanent in some estimates, put it as high as 15% of the current workforce is going to >>Stay in a virtual or a semi virtual working environment for the foreseeable future. >>Interesting. And I, and I, and I would say, I'd say 15% is low, especially if you, if you qualify it with, you know, part-time right. I, there was a great interview we were doing and talking about working from home, we used to work from home as the exception, right? Cause the cable person was coming, are you getting a new washing machine or something where now that's probably getting, you know, in many cases we'll shift to the other where I'm generally going to work from home, unless, you know, somebody is in town or having an important meeting or there's some special collaboration, uh, that drives me to be in. But you know, I want to go back to you Kuhn and, and really doubled down on, you know, I think most people spent too much time focusing, especially, we'll just say within the virtual events space where we play on the things you can't do virtually, we can't meet in the hall. >>We can't grab a quick coffee and a drink instead of focusing on the positive things like we're accomplishing right here, you're in Belgium, right. Eric is in Ohio, we're in California. Um, and you know, we didn't take three days to travel and, and check into a hotel and, and all that stuff to get together, uh, for this period of time. So there's a lot of stuff that digital enables. And I think, you know, people need to focus more on that versus continuing to focus on the two or three things that, that it doesn't replace and it doesn't replace those. So let's just get that off the table and move on with our lives. Cause those aren't coming back anytime soon. >>No, totally. I think it's the balance of those things. It's guarding the fact that you're not necessarily working for home. I think the trick there is you could be sleeping at the office, but I think the positives are way, way more outspoken. Um, I, you know, I look at myself, I got much more exercise time in these last couple of months than I usually do because you don't travel. You don't have the jet lag and the connection. And then you talked about those face to face moments. I think a lot of people are in a way, um, wanting to go back to the office part-time as, as Eric also explain, but a lot of it you can do virtually we have virtual coffees with team, or, you know, even here in Belgium, our local general manager has a virtual effort, TIF every Friday, obviously skip the one this week. But, uh, you know, there's, there's ways to be very creative with the technology and the quality of the technology that enables, um, you know, to, to get the best of both worlds. Right? >>So I just, we're going to wrap the segment. I want to give you guys both the last word you both been at Cisco for a while and, you know, Susie, we, and the team on dev net has really grown this thing. I think we were there at the very beginning couple of four or five, six years ago. I can't keep track of time anymore, but it has really, really grown. And, you know, the timing is terrific to get into this more software defined world, which is where we are. I wonder if you could just, you know, kind of share a couple of thoughts as you know, with a little bit of perspective and you know, what you're excited about today and kind of what you see coming down the road since you guys have been there for a while you've been in this space, uh, let's start with Yukon. >>I think the possibility it creates, I think really programmability software defined is really >>About the art of the possible it's what you can dream up and then go code. Um, Eric talked about the relevance of it and how it maximizes the relevance on a customer basis. Um, you know, and then it is the evolution of the teams in terms of the creativity that they can bring to us. We've seen really people dive into that and customers co-creating with us. And I think that's where we're going in terms of the evolution of the value proposition there in terms of what technology can provide, but also how it impacts people as we discussed and redefines process >>That the art of the possible, which is a lot harder to execute in a, in hardware than software certainly takes a lot longer. I'd love to get your, uh, your thoughts. >>Absolutely. So I started my career at Cisco, uh, turning, uh, putting IP phones onto the network. And back then, you know, it was, you know, 2001, 2002, when, uh, the idea of putting telephones onto the network was such a, um, just such an objectionable idea. And so many purists were telling us all the reasons it wouldn't work. Now, if we go forward again, 19 years, the idea of not having them plugging into the network is a ridiculous idea. So we have a, we're looking at an inflection point in this industry and it's really, it's not about programming. It's not necessarily about programming. It's about doing it smarter. It's about being more efficient. It's about driving automation, but again, it's, it's about unlocking the value of what the network is. We've moved so far past. What can, you know, just connectivity, the network touches everything and there's more workload moves to the cloud is more workload moves to things like containers. >>Um, the network is the really, the only common element that ties all of these things together. The network needs to take its rightful place in the end, the it lexicon as being that critical or that critical insight provider, um, for, for how users are interacting with the network, how users are interacting with applications, how applications are interacting with one, another program ability is a way to do that more efficiently, uh, with greater a greater degree of certainty with much greater relevance into the overall delivery of it services and digitization. So to me, I think we're going to look back 20 years from now, probably even 10 and say, man, we used to configure things manually. What was that like? I think, I think really this is, this is the future. And I think we want to be aligned with where we're going versus where we've been. Right. >>Well, Coon, Eric, thank you for sharing your perspective. You know, it's, it's really nice to have, you know, some historical reference, uh, and it's also nice to be living in a new age where you can, you can, you know, stay at the same company and still refresh, you know, new challenges, new opportunities and grow this thing. Cause as you said, I remember those IP first IP phone days and I thought, well, my bell must be happy because the old mother's problem is finally solved. And when we don't have to have a dedicated connection between every mother and every child in the middle of may. So good news. So thank you very much for sharing your, uh, your insights and really, uh, really enjoyed the conversation. >>Thank you. >>We've been covering dev net create for a number of years. I think since the very first show and Susie, we and the team really built, uh, a practice built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and in getting devs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software defined networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and, and developing solutions and, you know, using brain power. That's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have, uh, our next guest, uh, partner for someone is Brad Hoss. He is the engineering director for dev ops at Presidio, Brad. Great to see you. >>Hey Jeff, great to be here. >>And joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect for Cisco DevNet partners and he has been driving a whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Great to be here and looking forward to this conversation. >>So let's, let's start with you Chuck, because I think, um, you know, you're leading this kind of partner effort and, and you know, software defined, networking has been talked about for a long time and you know, it's really seems to be maturing and, and software defined everything right. Has been taking over, especially with, with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the customer program ability customability in software and Mo and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about, you know, the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is to have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward, versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. >>Yeah, Jeff, absolutely. So along this whole journey of dev net where we're, we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of our Cisco platforms, most of Cisco's business is transacted through partners. And what we hear from our customers and our partners is they want to, our customers want a way to be able to identify, does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey I'm trying to do, do a new implementation. I want to automate that. How can I find a partner to, to get there? And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices going along this step, in that journey with us for the last six years, they really want to say, Hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and give an edge to my customers to show them that, yes, I have these capabilities. I've built a business practice. I have technology, I have technologists that really understand this capability and they have the dub net certifications to prove it helped me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what our Danette partner specialization is all about. Right. >>That's great. And Brad, you're certainly one of those partners and I want to get your perspective because partners are oftentimes a little bit closer to the customer cause you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions and just reflect on, we know what happened, uh, back in March 15th, when basically everybody was told to go home and you can't go to work. So, you know, there's all the memes and social media about who, you know, who pushed forward your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO, or COVID. And we all know what the answer is, whatever you can share some information as to what happened then, and really for your business and your customers, and then reflect now we're six months into it, six months plus, and, and you know, this new normal is going to continue for a while. How's the customer attitudes kind of changed now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment and really we need to put in place some foundation to carry forward for a very long time potentially. >>Yeah, it's really quite interesting actually, you know, when code first hit, we got a lot of requests to help with automation of provisioning our customers and in the whole, you know, digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there and I'd say it became more of, of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly, uh, you know, migrating customers to, you know, new typologies where instead of the, the, you know, users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly in a, we, we didn't have a lot of success there in those beginning months with, you know, using automation and programmability, um, building, you know, provisioning portals for our customers to get up and running really fast. Um, and that, that, that was what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit. >>You know, now they're asking, you know, how can I take advantage of the technology to, you know, look at my offices in a different way, you know, for example, you know, how many people are coming in and out of those locations, you know, what's the usage of my conference rooms. Um, are there, uh, are there, um, situations where I can use that information? Like how many people are in the building and at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that, you know, like, do I even need this office anymore? So, so the conversations have really changed in, in ways that you couldn't have imagined before March. >>Right. And I wonder with, with you Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view, I mean, the network is amazing. It had had, COVID struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly entertainment, um, restaurant, business, transportation, they, you know, hospitality, but for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. Um, you know, and, and the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if, you know, kind of from your perspective as, as suddenly, you know, the importance of the network, the importance of security and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that, having, you know, dev net with, with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space as good as space as you could be given this new challenge thrown at you. >>Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. Uh, Cisco has always pushed the idea that the network is transformational. The network is the foundation, and as our customers have really adopted that message, it is enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. So for myself, I've, I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years, this is, you know, the, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore, but my day to day functions are still the same. And it's built because of the capabilities we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry, as far as kind of moving to that application type of economy, as we go to microservices, as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud, those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this, to this COVID situation. And I think it's helped to, to justify the investments that's that our customers have made as well as what our partners have been, being able to do to deliver on that multicloud capability, to take those applications, get them closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable to, to users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional four walls. >>Right, right. That's interesting. And Brad, you, you made a comment on another interview. I was watching getting ready for this one in terms of, uh, applications now being first class citizens was, was what you said. And it's kind of interesting coming from an infrastructure point of view, where before it was, you know, what do I have and what can I build on it now, I really it's the infrastructure that responds back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of, of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that apps first is the way to go, because that gives people the competitive advantage that it gives them the ability to react in the marketplace and to innovate and move faster. So, you know, it's, it's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first, by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. >>Yeah, no doubt. And, you know, I think that the whole push to cloud was really interesting in the early days, it was like, Hey, we're going to change our applications to be cloud first. You know? And then I think the terminology changed over time, um, to more cloud native. So when we, when we look at what cloud has done over the past five years with customers moving, you know, their, their assets into the cloud in the early days that we were all looking at it just >>Like another data center, but what it's really become is a place to host your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're, we're no longer talking about, you know, the assets per se, we're talking about the applications and what, what did those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially with the whole move to cloud native and microservices in the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure as code. You're now able to bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application, as infrastructure, as code the application in the definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are, all are wrapped together and you've got change control, version control, um, and it's all automated, you know, it's, it's a beautiful thing. And I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. >>You know, when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking, I think everybody was trying to figure it out and they didn't really fully understand what that meant now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like as it's, as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's Terraform or Ansible, whatever that might be, whatever method or tool that you're using to, to bring it all together. It's, it's, you know, it's really interesting now, I think, I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than, you know, those early days of SDN, uh we're out, you know, it was a, was it a controller or is it a new version of SNMP? You know, now it makes sense. It's actually something tangible. Right, >>Right. But still check, as you said, right. There's still a lot of API APIs and there's still a lot of component pieces to these applications that are all run off the network that all have to fit, uh, that had to fit together. You know, we cover PagerDuty summit and you know, their whole thing is trying to find out where the, where the problems are within the very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandons their shopping cart or whatever the particular application. So again, the network infrastructure and the program ability super important. But I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of, and they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. >>Yeah, absolutely. Jeff said the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference. I mean, we, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the internet. The amount of people necessary to, to be able to facilitate that type of traffic. If we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not >>Scale it's automation. That makes that possible. That allows us to look higher up the ability to do that automatic provisional provisioning. Now that we're in microservices now that everything is cloud native, we have the ability to, to better, to better adjust to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we can very quickly spend something up to take that load off where traditionally it was open up a ticket. Let me get someone in there, let me fix it. Now it's instantaneously identify the solution, go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team, they just simply need to get notified that this happened. And as long as there's traceability and a point that Brad made, as far as you being able to go through here doing the automation of the documentation side of it. >>I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the API is from the infrastructure. And then the ability to tie that into other systems like an IP address management or a change control, or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made an infrastructure change. And now I can automatically do that documentation update and record. I know who did it. I know when they did it and I know what they did, and I know what the test results were even five years ago, that was fantasy land. Now, today that's just the new normal, that's just how we all operate. >>Right. Right, right. So I want to get your take on the other trend, which is cloud multicloud, public cloud. You know, as, as I think you said Brad, when public cloud first came out, there was kind of this, this rush into, we're going to throw everything in there then for, for, for different reasons. People decided maybe that's not the best, the best solution, but really it's horses for courses. Right. And, and I think it was pretty interesting that, that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're going to put their workloads. And Oh, by the way, that might not be a static place, right. It might be moving around based on, you know, maybe I do my initial dev and, and, and Amazon. And then when I go into production, maybe I want to move it into my data center. >>And then maybe I'm having a big promotion or something I want to flex capability. So from, from your perspective and helping customers work through this, because still there's a lot of opinions about what is multicloud, what is hybrid cloud and, you know, it's horses for courses. How are you helping people navigate that? And what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through, you know, everybody talks about their journey. I think there's still kind of bumbling down, bumbling down paths, trying to find new things, what works, what doesn't work. And I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. Yeah, >>Yeah. No doubt. It is still early days. And you know, I, I, I go back to it being application centric because, you know, being able to understand that application, when you move to the cloud, it may not look like, what did he still look like when you, when you move it over there, you may be breaking parts off of it. Some of them might be running on a platform as a service while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as a service. >>And some of it might still be in your data center. Those applications are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier, those resources, wherever they are, can be defined in that infrastructure as code and automation. But you know, the side from provisioning, I think we focus a lot about provisioning. When we talk about automation, we also have these amazing capabilities on, on the side of operations too. Like we've got streaming telemetry in the ability to, to gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before, or at least in the, in, you know, in the early days of monitoring software, right. You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. >>It probably had a friendly name, like maybe it was, uh, something from the Hobbit right now. You've got things coming up and spinning and spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place. And that thing you used to know what that was. Now, you have to quickly figure out where it went. So the observability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody should be paying attention to attention, to moving forward with regards to when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers or, you know, in your premise, um, breaking that into microservices, you really need to understand what's going on in the, you know, programmability and API APIs and, you know, yang models are tied into streaming telemetry. Now there's just so many great things coming out of this, you know, and it's all like a data structure that, that people who are going down this path and the dev net path, they're learning these data structures and being able to rationalize and make sense of them. And once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or switch, um, Amazon, you know, it doesn't matter. You're, you're all speaking a common language, which is that data structure. >>That's great. Chuck, I want to shift gears a little bit, cause there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about, about Deb, not really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco, um, as, as really more of a software, a software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you can put a little more color on that. Um, because clearly as you said, partners are super important. It's your primary go to market and, and Presidios, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world that's and you know, you said there's some, there's some non traditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner that suddenly you guys are playing with because of really software lead. >>Yeah. Jeff that's exactly right. So as we've been talking to folks with dev nets and whether it'd be at one of the Cisco live events in the dev net zone or at the prior dev net create events, we'll have, we'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views us as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resell market. This what we're doing with the dev that specialization gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem, share them with our extremely large dev net community so they can get access to those, to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner to partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they built a fantastic networking. They always have the fantastic networking business, but they built this fantastic automation business that's there, but they may come into, into a scenario where it's working with their vertical and working with the technology piece, that they may not have an automation practice for. >>We can leverage some of these software specific partners to come in there and do a joint, go to markets where, so they can go where that traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value on top of that traditional stack, that brings us to this business outcomes. If the customers are looking for and a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion, that's terrific. Well, again, it's a, it's, it's unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the, the Cisco dev net shows, you know, they're still small, they're still intimate. There's still a lot of, uh, information sharing and, you know, great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the computer museum, I think the last couple of years and in, in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together, uh, maybe, maybe for next year's event, but, uh, thank you very much for stopping by and sharing the information. Really appreciate it. It happens happy to be here >>From around the globe. It's the cube presenting, accelerating automation with dev net brought to you by Cisco. What I'm Sean for the cube, your host for accelerating automation with dev net with Cisco. And we're here to close out the virtual event with Mindy Whaley, senior director, Mandy, take it away. >>Thank you, John. It's been great to be here at this virtual event, hearing all these different automation stories from our different technology groups, from customers and partners. And what I'd like to take a minute now is to let people know how they can continue this experience at dev net create, which is our free virtual event happening globally. On October 13th, there's going to be some really fun stuff. We're going to have our annual demo jam, which is kind of like an open for demos where the community gets to show what they've been building. We're also going to be, um, giving out and recognizing our dev net creator award winners for this year, which is a really great time where we recognize our community contributors who have been giving back to the community throughout the year. And then we find really interesting channels. We have our creators channels, which is full of technical talks, lightening talks. >>This is where our community, external Cisco people come in share what they've been working on, what they've been working learning during the year. We also have a channel called API action, which is where you can go deep into IOT or collaboration or data center automation and get demos talks from engineers on how to do certain use cases. And also a new segment called straight from engineering, where you get to hear from the engineers, building those products as well. And we have a start now for those people just getting started, who may need to dive into some basics around coding, API APIs and get that's a whole channel dedicated to getting them started so that they can start to participate in some of the fun challenges that we're going to have during the event. And we're going to have a few fun things. Like we have some definite, um, advocate team members who are awesome, musically talented. They're going to share some performances with us. So, um, we encourage everyone to join us there. Pick your favorite channel, uh, join us in whichever time zone you live in. Cause we'll be in three different time zones. And, um, we would love for you to be there and to hear from you during the event. >>That's awesome. Very innovative, multiple time zones, accelerating automation with dev net. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Presenting Accelerating Automation with DevNet. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got a great conversation and a virtual event, Accelerating Automation with DevNet , Cisco DevNet. And of course we got the Cisco brain trust here. Cube alumni, Susie Wee, Vice President, Senior Vice President, GM, and also CTO of Cisco DevNet and Ecosystem Success CX, all that great stuff. Mandy Whaley, who's the Director, Senior Director of DevNet Certifications, And Eric Thiel, Director of Developer Advocacy, Susie, Mandy, Eric, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you, John. >> So we're not in person >> It's great to be here. >> We don't, can't be at the DevNet Zone. We can't be on site doing DevNet Create, all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years. We're virtual, theCUBE virtual. Thanks for coming on. Susie, I got to ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you had has been awesome, but DevNet Create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the DevNet community. This ties into the theme of accelerating automation with DevNet, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service or XaaS as it's called (Susie laughs) and automation plays a critical role. Could you please share your vision because this is really important and still only five to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and programmability. What's your vision? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are coming online as, well I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud, as they're growing in new areas, as we're dealing with security, as everyone's dealing with the pandemic, there's so many things going on. But what happens is, there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking, it has security, it has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be able to, you know, really satisfy everything that businesses need? And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable. The infrastructure is programmable, and you don't need just apps riding on top, but now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation, you can rise to higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the stack by leveraging automation. >> You know, I remember a few years ago when DevNet Create first started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale, and we were talking about Meraki, you know, not to get in the weeds about you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about then, this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was at Cisco Europe in Barcelona before all the COVID hit. And you had >> Susie: Yeah. >> The massive cloud surge and scale happening going on, right when the pandemic hit. And even now more than ever the cloud scale, the modern apps, the momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing more innovation at scale because the pressure to do that, because the businesses need to stay alive. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> I just want to get your thoughts on what's going on in your world, because you were there in person. Now we're six months in, scale is huge. >> We are. Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is as all of our customers, as businesses around the world, as we ourselves all dealt with, how do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because you have to go home and then figure out how from home can I make sure that my IT infrastructure is automated? How from home can I make sure that every employee is out there and working safely and securely? You know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and be in kind of, you know, just, you know, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. So we had to extend business applications to people's homes in countries like, you know, well around the world, but also in India where it was actually not, you know, not, they didn't have rules to let people work from home in these areas. So then what we had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer, you know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home. So that put extra stress on automation. It put extra stress on our customer's digital transformation and it just forced them to, you know, automate digitally transform quicker. And they had to, because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers, you had to figure out how to automate all of that. And we're still in that environment today. >> You know one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, Kubernetes microservices. So those things, again, all DevOps and, you know, you guys got some acquisitions, you've bought ThousandEyes, you got a new one. You just bought recently PortShift to raise the game in security, Kuber and all these microservices. So observability super hot, but then people go work at home as you mentioned. How do you (chuckles) >> Yeah What are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's Zooms and Web Ex's and education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this in the app side? How are you guys looking at the, what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this programmability challenge and observability challenge that's such a huge deal? >> Yeah, absolutely. And you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right? You know, back when we talked to Todd before, he had Meraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use, this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place. And now he has Cisco's entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that bigger, at that bigger scale for Cisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation and the APIs into all of it. But when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. They had to build in. And what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people to work from home and how well you could reach customers. All of that used to be an IT conversation. It became a CEO and a board-level conversation. So all of a sudden, CEOs were actually, you know, calling on the Heads of IT and the CIO and saying, you know, "How's our VPN connectivity? Is everybody working from home? How many people are connected and able to work and what's their productivity?" So all of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure IT stuff became a board level conversation and, you know, once again, at first everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people working, but now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they are now building in automation and digital transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observability, you know, looking for those events, the dashboards, you know, so it really has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. >> Susie, I know you got to go, but real quick, describe what accelerating automation with DevNet means. >> (giggles)Well, you've been, you know, we've been working together on DevNet and the vision of the infrastructure programmability and everything for quite some time and the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that and you need the right skill sets and the programmability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people and it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people run things. Our DevNet community has risen to this challenge. People have jumped in, they've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. You know, we have, you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals, we have partners, you know, they're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerating automation, while it is about going digital. It's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications, of, you know, cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people, just as much as it is about automation and technology. >> And we got DevNet Create right around the corner, Virtual, unfortunately, won't be in person, but will be virtual. Susie, thank you for your time. We're going to dig into those people challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you've got to go, but stay with us. We're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric. Thanks. >> Thank you so much. Have fun. >> Thank you. >> Thanks John. >> Okay. Mandy, you heard Susie, it's about people. And one of the things that's close to your heart, you've been driving as Senior Director of DevNet Certifications, is getting people leveled up. I mean the demand for skills, cybersecurity, network programmability, automation, network design, solution architect, cloud, multi-cloud design. These are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >> Oh yes, absolutely. You know, what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers, that Susie was mentioning. Those are what's accelerating a lot of the technology changes and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like DevSecOps engineer, network automation engineer, network automation developer, which Susie mentioned, and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current scope and broaden out and take on new challenges. >> Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this piece of getting the certifications. First, before we get started, describe what your role is as Director of Developer Advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving. What's the state of it now because with COVID people are working at home, they have more time to contact Switch, and get some certifications and yet they can code more. What's your role? >> Absolutely. So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our, historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the DevNet Creates, the Cisco Lives and helping the community connect and to help share technical information with them, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? So that's had to pivot quite a bit. Obviously Cisco Live US, we pivoted very quickly to a virtual event when conditions changed. And we're able to actually connect as we found out with a much larger audience. So, you know, as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of, you know, how big the convention center is, we were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with our DevNet Day that was kind of attached onto Cisco Live. And we got great feedback from the audience that now we were actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it, but to your broader question of, you know, what my team does. So that's one piece of it is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We are always helping out build new sandboxes, new learning labs, things like that, that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the DevNet site. And then my team also looks after communities, such as the Cisco Learning Network where there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. We've seen a huge shift now in that group, that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the DevNet certifications and helping other people that are trying to get onboard with programmability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up the community with helping you answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the DevNet space as well, and are helping people with that set of certifications. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that. >> I got to ask you on the trends around automation, what skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Is there anything in particular, obviously network automation has been around for a long time. Cisco has been leader in that, but as you move up the stack as modern applications are building, do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What are people learning? >> Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned observability was big before COVID and we actually really saw that amplified during COVID. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observability now that we need it while we're virtual. So that's actually been a huge uptick and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that are now figuring out' how can I do this at scale? And I think one good example that Susie was talking about the VPN example. And we actually had a number of SEs in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up. And one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that IT departments might care about, about their firewalls, things that you didn't normally look at in the old days. You would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. And when that number went to 100%, things like licenses started coming into play, where they needed to make sure they have the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the SEs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use some open source tooling to monitor and alert on these things and then published it, so the whole community could go out and get a copy of it, try it out in their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that in trying to figure out, okay, now I can take that and I can adapt it to what I need to see for my observability. >> That's great. Mandy, I want to get your thoughts on this too, because as automation continues to scale, it's going to be a focus and people are at home and you guys had a lot of content online for you recorded every session in the DevNet Zone. Learning's going on, sometimes linearly and non linearly. You got the certifications, which is great. That's key, great success there. People are interested, but what other learnings are you seeing? What are people doing? What's the top top trends? >> Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time. They want to advance their skillset. And just like any kind of learning, people want choice they want to be able to choose what matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors leading them through a study plan. And we have two new expert-led study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do an immersive learning experience together with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kinds of team experiences called Automation Bootcamp. And then we're also seeing individuals who want to be able to, you know, dive into a topic, do a hands-on lab, get some skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. And so we have really modular self-driven hands-on learning through the DevNet Fundamentals course, which is available through DevNet. And then there's also people who are saying, "I just want to use the technology. "I like to experiment and then go, you know, "read the instructions, read the manual, "do the deeper learning." And so they're spending a lot of time in our DevNet sandbox, trying out different technologies, Cisco technologies with open source technologies, getting hands-on and building things. And three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD-WAN. There's a huge interest in people skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about. Security is a focus area where people are dealing with new scale, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways. and then automating their data center using infrastructure as code type principles. So those are three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing some more about that at DevNet Create. >> Awesome. Eric and Mandy, if you guys can wrap up this Accelerating Automation with DevNet package and virtual event here and also tee up DevNet Create because DevNet Create has been a very kind of grassroots, organically building momentum over the years. And again, it's super important cause it's now the app world coming together with networking, you know, end to end programmability and with everything as a service that you guys are doing, everything with APIs, I only can imagine the enablement that's going to create. >> Mandy: Yeah >> Can you share the summary real quick on Accelerating Automation with DevNet and tee up DevNet Create. Mandy, we'll start with you. >> Yes, I'll go first and then Eric can close this out. So just like we've been talking about with you at every DevNet event over the past years, you know, DevNet's bringing APIs across our whole portfolio, and up and down the stack and Accelerating Automation with DevNet , Susie mentioned the people aspect of that. The people skilling up and how that transforms teams, And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so what I think about Accelerating Automation with DevNet, it's about the DevNet community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community with those new skills. >> Eric, take us home here, Accelerating Automation with DevNet and DevNet Create, a lot of developer action going on in Cloud Native right now, your thoughts. >> Absolutely. I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for DevNet Day this year, for Cisco Live and we're seeing, we're able to leverage it even further with Create this year. So, whereas it used to be, you know, confined by the walls that we were within for the event. Now we're actually able to do things like we're adding the Start Now track for people that want to be there. They want to be a developer, a network automation developer for instance, we've now got a track just for them where they can get started and start learning some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. So I love that we're able to bring that together with the experienced community that we usually do from across the industry bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. So I'm really excited to bring that whole mix together, as well as getting some of our business units together too and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new APIs into their platforms? What problems are they hoping that customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So like I said, Cisco learning network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. >> Awesome. Thanks so much. >> I would >> Go ahead, Mandy. >> Can I add one more thing? >> Add one more thing. >> Yeah, I was just going to say the other really exciting thing about Create this year with the virtual nature of it is that it's happening in three regions and you know, we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions and content and speakers and the regions stepping up to have things personalized to their area, to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for DevNet Create that's going to be fantastic this year. >> Yeah, that's it. I was going to close out and just put the final bow on that by saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now during, with this virtual DevNet, virtual DevNet create virtual theCUBE virtual, I think we're learning new things. People are working in teams and groups and sharing content, we're going to learn new things. We're going to try new things and ultimately people will rise up and will be resilient. And I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And we'll ride the wave with you guys. >> So thank you so much (Susie laughs) for taking the time to come on theCUBE and talk about your awesome Accelerating Automation and DevNet Create Looking forward to it, thank you. >> Thank you so much, >> All right, thanks a lot. >> Happy to be here. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content and men, we stay virtual until we're face to face. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at DevNet Create. Thanks for watching. (upbeat outro) >> Controller: Okay John, Here we go, John. Here we go. John, we're coming to you in five, four, three, two. >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got a great conversation and a virtual event, Accelerating Automation with DevNet, Cisco DevNet. And of course we got the Cisco brain trust here. Cube alumni, Susie Wee, Senior Vice President GM and also CTO at Cisco DevNet and Ecosystem Success CX, all that great stuff. Mandy Whaley, who's the Director, Senior Director of DevNet Certifications, and Eric Thiel, Director of Developer Advocacy. Susie, Mandy, Eric, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you, John. So we're not in person. >> It's great to be here >> We don't, can't be at the DevNet zone. We can't be on site doing DevNet Create, all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years. We're virtual, theCUBE virtual. Thanks for coming on. Susie, I got to ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you had has been awesome. But DevNet Create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the DevNet community. This ties into the theme of Accelerating Automation with DevNet, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service or XaaS as it's called. And automation plays (Susie laughs) a critical role. Could you please share your vision because this is really important and still only five to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and programmability. What's your vision? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are coming online as ,well I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud, as they're growing in new areas, as we're dealing with security, as everyone's dealing with the pandemic, there's so many things going on, but what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking. It has security. It has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be able to, you know, really satisfy everything that businesses need. And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable. The infrastructure is programmable and you don't need just apps riding on top, but now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation. You can rise to higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the stack by leveraging automation. >> You know, I remember a few years ago when DevNet Create first started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we were talking about Meraki, you know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about then, this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was Cisco Europe in Barcelona before all the COVID hit. And you had this massive cloud surge and scale happening going on right when the pandemic hit. And even now more than ever, the cloud scale, the modern apps, the momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing more innovation at scale because the pressure to do that because the businesses need >> Absolutely. >> to stay alive. I just want to get your thoughts on what's going on in your world, because you were there in person now we're six months in scale is huge. >> We are. Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is, as all of our customers, as businesses around the world, as we ourselves all dealt with, how do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because you have to go home and then figure out how from home, can I make sure that my IT infrastructure is automated? How from home can I make sure that every employee is out there and working safely and securely, you know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and be in kind of, you know, just, you know, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. So we had to extend business applications to people's homes in countries like, you know, well around the world, but also in India where it was actually not, you know, not, they wouldn't let, they didn't have rules to let people work from home in these areas. So then what we had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer, you know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home. So that put extra stress on automation. It put extra stress on our customer's digital transformation and it just forced them to, you know, automate, digitally transform quicker. And they had to, because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers, you had to figure out how to automate all of that. And we're still all in that environment today. >> You know one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, Kubernetes microservices. So those things, again, all DevOps and you know, you guys got some acquisitions, you bought ThousandEyes, you got a new one. You just bought recently PortShift to raise the game in security, Kuber and all these microservices. So observability is super hot, but then people go work at home as you mentioned. How do you observe, what are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's Zooms and Web Ex's and education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this in the app side? How are you guys looking at the, what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this programmability challenge and observability challenges? It's a huge deal. >> Yeah, absolutely. And you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right? You know, back when we talked to Todd before he had Meraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use, this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place. And now he has Cisco's entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that bigger scale for Cisco and for our customers and he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation and the APIs into all of it. But when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. They had to build in. And what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people to work from home and how well you could reach customers. All of that used to be an IT conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually, you know, calling on the heads of IT and the CIO and saying, you know, how's our VPN connectivity? Is everybody working from home. How many people are you know, connected and able to work and what's their productivity? So all of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure IT stuff became a board level conversation. And, you know once again, at first everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people working. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they are now building in automation and digital transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observability, you know, looking for those events, the dashboards, you know, so it really has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. >> Susie, I know you got to go, but real quick, describe what Accelerating Automation with DevNet means. >> (laughs) Well, you know, we've been working together on DevNet in the vision of the infrastructure programmability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that and you need the right skill sets and the programmability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people and it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people run things. Our DevNet community has risen to this challenge. People have jumped in, they've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. You know, we have, you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals, we have partners, you know, they're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerating automation, while it is about going digital, it's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications, of you know, cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people just as much as it is about automation and technology. >> And we got DevNet Create right around the corner virtual, unfortunately won't be in person, but will be virtual. Susie, thank you for your time. We're going to dig into those people challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know got to go, but stay with us. We're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric. Thanks. >> Thank you so much. Have fun. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, John. >> Okay, Mandy, you heard Susie, it's about people. And one of the things that's close to your heart you've been driving is, as senior director of DevNet Certifications is getting people leveled up. I mean the demand for skills, cybersecurity, network programmability, automation, network design, solution architect, cloud multicloud design. These are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >> Oh yes, absolutely. You know, what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning. Those are what's accelerating a lot of the technology changes and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like DevSecOps engineer, network automation engineer, network automation developer which Susie mentioned, and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current scope and broaden out and take on new challenges. And this is why we created the DevNet certification. Several years ago, our DevNet community, who's been some of those engineers who have been coming into that software and infrastructure side and meeting. They ask us to help create a more defined pathway to create resources, training, all the things they would need to take all those steps to go after those new jobs. >> Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this piece of getting the certifications. First, before we get started, describe what your role is as Director of Developer Advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving. What's the state of it now because with COVID people are working at home, they have more time to contact Switch, and get some certifications and yet they can code more. What's your role >> Absolutely. So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our, historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the DevNet Creates, the Cisco Lives and helping the community connect and to help share technical information with them, doing hands-on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? So that's had to pivot quite a bit. Obviously Cisco Live US, we pivoted very quickly to a virtual event when conditions changed and we were able to actually connect as we found out with a much larger audience. So, you know, as opposed to in-person where you're bound by the parameters of you know, how big the convention center is. We were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with our DevNet Day that was kind of attached onto Cisco Live. And we got great feedback from the audience that now we were actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it, but to your broader question of, you know, what my team does. So that's one piece of it is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out build new sandboxes new learning labs, things like that, that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the DevNet site. And then my team also looks after communities such as the Cisco Learning Network where there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. And we've seen a huge shift now in that group that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the DevNet certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with programmability, they're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up the community with, you know, helping answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the DevNet space as well, and are helping people with that set of certifications. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that. >> Yeah, I mean, it's awesome, and first of all, you guys done a great job. I'm always impressed when we were at physical events in the DevNet Zone, just the learning, the outreach. Again, very open, collaborative, inclusive, and also, you know, you had one-on-one classes and talks to full blown advanced, (sneezes)Had to sneeze there >> Yeah, and that's the point. >> (laughs)That was coming out, got to cut that out. I love prerecords. >> Absolutely. >> That's never happened to me to live by the way. I've never sneezed live on a thousand--. (Eric laughs) >> You're allergic to me. >> We'll pick up. >> It happens. >> So Eric, so I got to ask you on the trends around automation, what skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Is there anything in particular? Obviously network automation has been around for a long time. Cisco has been a leader in that, but as you move up the stack, as modern applications are building, do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What are people learning? >> Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned observability was big before COVID and we actually really saw that amplified during COVID. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observability now that we need it while we're virtual. So that's actually been a huge uptick. And we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that are now figuring out how can I do this at scale? And I think one good example that Susie was talking about the VPN example. And we actually had a number of SEs in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up. And one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that IT departments might care about, about their firewalls, things that you didn't normally look at in the old days, you would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. And when that number went to 100%, things like licensing started coming into play, where they needed to make sure they had the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the SEs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, used some open source tooling to monitor and alert on these things and then published it, so the whole community could go out and get a copy of it, try it out in their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that in trying to figure out, okay, now I can take that and I can adapt it to what I need to see for my observability. >> That's huge and you know, you brought up this sharing concept. I mean, one of the things that's interesting is you've got more sharing going on. >> Controller: John, let's pause right here. Let's pause right here. I'm going to try and bring Eric and Mandy and everybody out. And then just start right from here to bring Eric and Mandy back in and close up. Stand by Eric just hold tight. >> All right, hold on >> Controller: just for one moment. Hold tight, we got Mandy back >> Controller: Standby. Standby. Standby. Standby, standby, standby. Hold hold hold.

>> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience brought to you by HPE. >> Hi everybody. Welcome back. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and this is our coverage of discover 2020, the virtual experience of HPE discover. We've done many, many discoveries, as usually we're on the show floor, theCUBE has been virtualized and we talk a lot at HPE discovers, a lot of storage and server and infrastructure and networking which is great. But the conversation we're going to have now is really, we're going to be talking about helping the world solve some big problems. And I'm very excited to welcome back to theCUBE Dr. Eng Lim Goh. He's a senior vice president of and CTO for AI, at HPE. Hello, Dr. Goh. Great to see you again. >> Hello. Thank you for having us, Dave. >> You're welcome. And then our next guest is Professor Joachim Schultze, who is the Professor for Genomics, and Immunoregulation at the university of Bonn amongst other things Professor, welcome. >> Thank you all. Welcome. >> And then Prasad Shastry, is the Chief Technologist for the India Advanced Development Center at HPE. Welcome, Prasad. Great to see you. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> So guys, we have a CUBE first. I don't believe we've ever had of three guests in three separate times zones. I'm in a fourth time zone. (guests chuckling) So I'm in Boston. Dr. Goh, you're in Singapore, Professor Schultze, you're in Germany and Prasad, you're in India. So, we've got four different time zones. Plus our studio in Palo Alto. Who's running this program. So we've got actually got five times zones, a CUBE first. >> Amazing. >> Very good. (Prasad chuckles) >> Such as the world we live in. So we're going to talk about some of the big problems. I mean, here's the thing we're obviously in the middle of this pandemic, we're thinking about the post isolation economy, et cetera. People compare obviously no surprise to the Spanish flu early part of last century. They talk about the great depression, but the big difference this time is technology. Technology has completely changed the way in which we've approached this pandemic. And we're going to talk about that. Dr. Goh, I want to start with you. You've done a lot of work on this topic of swarm learning. If we could, (mumbles) my limited knowledge of this is we're kind of borrowing from nature. You think about, bees looking for a hive as sort of independent agents, but somehow they come together and communicate, but tell us what do we need to know about swarm learning and how it relates to artificial intelligence and we'll get into it. >> Oh, Dave, that's a great analogy using swarm of bees. That's exactly what we do at HPE. So let's use the of here. When deploying artificial intelligence, a hospital does machine learning of the outpatient data that could be biased, due to demographics and the types of cases they see more also. Sharing patient data across different hospitals to remove this bias is limited, given privacy or even sovereignty the restrictions, right? Like for example, across countries in the EU. HPE, so I'm learning fixers this by allowing each hospital, let's still continue learning locally, but at each cycle we collect the lumped weights of the neural networks, average them and sending it back down to older hospitals. And after a few cycles of doing this, all the hospitals would have learned from each other, removing biases without having to share any private patient data. That's the key. So, the ability to allow you to learn from everybody without having to share your private patients. That's swarm learning, >> And part of the key to that privacy is blockchain, correct? I mean, you you've been too involved in blockchain and invented some things in blockchain and that's part of the privacy angle, is it not? >> Yes, yes, absolutely. There are different ways of doing this kind of distributed learning, which swarm learning is over many of the other distributed learning methods. Require you to have some central control. Right? So, Prasad, and the team and us came up together. We have a method where you would, instead of central control, use blockchain to do this coordination. So, there is no more a central control or coordinator, especially important if you want to have a truly distributed swamp type learning system. >> Yeah, no need for so-called trusted third party or adjudicator. Okay. Professor Schultze, let's go to you. You're essentially the use case of this swarm learning application. Tell us a little bit more about what you do and how you're applying this concept. >> I'm actually by training a physician, although I haven't seen patients for a very long time. I'm interested in bringing new technologies to what we call precision medicine. So, new technologies both from the laboratories, but also from computational sciences, married them. And then I basically allow precision medicine, which is a medicine that is built on new measurements, many measurements of molecular phenotypes, how we call them. So, basically that process on different levels, for example, the genome or genes that are transcribed from the genome. We have thousands of such data and we have to make sense out of this. This can only be done by computation. And as we discussed already one of the hope for the future is that the new wave of developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning. We can make more sense out of this huge data that we generate right now in medicine. And that's what we're interesting in to find out how can we leverage these new technologies to build a new diagnostics, new therapy outcome predictors. So, to know the patient benefits from a disease, from a diagnostics or a therapy or not, and that's what we are doing for the last 10 years. The most exciting thing I have been  through in the last three, four, five years is really when HPE introduced us to swarm learning. >> Okay and Prasad, you've been helping Professor Schultze, actually implements swarm learning for specific use cases that we're going to talk about COVID, but maybe describe a little bit about what you've been or your participation in this whole equation. >> Yep, thank. As Dr Eng Lim Goh, mentioned. So, we have used blockchain as a backbone to implement the decentralized network. And through that we're enabling a privacy preserved these centralized network without having any control points, as Professor explained in terms of depression medicines. So, one of the use case we are looking at he's looking at the blood transcriptomes, think of it, different hospitals having a different set of transcriptome data, which they cannot share due to the privacy regulations. And now each of those hospitals, will clean the model depending upon their local data, which is available in that hospital. And shared the learnings coming out of that training with the other hospitals. And we played to over several cycles to merge all these learnings and then finally get into a global model. So, through that we are able to kind of get into a model which provides the performance is equal of collecting all the data into a central repository and trying to do it. And we could really think of when we are doing it, them, could be multiple kinds of challenges. So, it's good to do decentralized learning. But what about if you have a non ID type of data, what about if there is a dropout in the network connections? What about if there are some of the compute nodes we just practice or probably they're not seeing sufficient amount of data. So, that's something we tried to build into the swarm learning framework. You'll handle the scenarios of having non ID data. All in a simple word we could call it as seeing having the biases. An example, one of the hospital might see EPR trying to, look at, in terms of let's say the tumors, how many number of cases and whereas the other hospital might have very less number of cases. So, if you have kind of implemented some techniques in terms of doing the merging or providing the way that different kind of weights or the tuneable parameters to overcome these set of challenges in the swarm learning. >> And Professor Schultze, you you've applied this to really try to better understand and attack the COVID pandemic, can you describe in more detail your goals there and what you've actually done and accomplished? >> Yeah. So, we have actually really done it for COVID. The reason why we really were trying to do this already now is that we have to generate it to these transcriptomes from COVID-19 patients ourselves. And we realized that the scene of the disease is so strong and so unique compared to other infectious diseases, which we looked at in some detail that we felt that the blood transcriptome would be good starting point actually to identify patients. But maybe even more important to identify those with severe diseases. So, if you can identify them early enough that'd be basically could care for those more and find particular for those treatments and therapies. And the reason why we could do that is because we also had some other test cases done before. So, we used the time wisely with large data sets that we had collected beforehand. So, use cases learned how to apply swarm learning, and we are now basically ready to test directly with COVID-19. So, this is really a step wise process, although it was extremely fast, it was still a step wise probably we're guided by data where we had much more knowledge of which was with the black leukemia. So, we had worked on that for years. We had collected many data. So, we could really simulate a Swarm learning very nicely. And based on all the experience we get and gain together with Prasad, and his team, we could quickly then also apply that knowledge to the data that are coming now from COVID-19 patients. >> So, Dr. Goh, it really comes back to how we apply machine intelligence to the data, and this is such an interesting use case. I mean, the United States, we have 50 different States with 50 different policies, different counties. We certainly have differences around the world in terms of how people are approaching this pandemic. And so the data is very rich and varied. Let's talk about that dynamic. >> Yeah. If you, for the listeners who are or viewers who are new to this, right? The workflow could be a patient comes in, you take the blood, and you send it through an analysis? DNA is made up of genes and our genes express, right? They express in two steps the first they transcribe, then they translate. But what we are analyzing is the middle step, the transcription stage. And tens of thousands of these Transcripts that are produced after the analysis of the blood. The thing is, can we find in the tens of thousands of items, right? Or biomarkers a signature that tells us, this is COVID-19 and how serious it is for this patient, right? Now, the data is enormous, right? For every patient. And then you have a collection of patients in each hospitals that have a certain demographic. And then you have also a number of hospitals around. The point is how'd you get to share all that data in order to have good training of your machine? The ACO is of course a know privacy of data, right? And as such, how do you then share that information if privacy restricts you from sharing the data? So in this case, swarm learning only shares the learnings, not the private patient data. So we hope this approach would allow all the different hospitals to come together and unite sharing the learnings removing biases so that we have high accuracy in our prediction as well at the same time, maintaining privacy. >> It's really well explained. And I would like to add at least for the European union, that this is extremely important because the lawmakers have clearly stated, and the governments that even non of these crisis conditions, they will not minimize the rules of privacy laws, their compliance to privacy laws has to stay as high as outside of the pandemic. And I think there's good reasons for that, because if you lower the bond, now, why shouldn't you lower the bar in other times as well? And I think that was a wise decision, yes. If you would see in the medical field, how difficult it is to discuss, how do we share the data fast enough? I think swarm learning is really an amazing solution to that. Yeah, because this discussion is gone basically. Now we can discuss about how we do learning together. I'd rather than discussing what would be a lengthy procedure to go towards sharing. Which is very difficult under the current privacy laws. So, I think that's why I was so excited when I learned about it, the first place with faster, we can do things that otherwise are either not possible or would take forever. And for a crisis that's key. That's absolutely key. >> And is the byproduct. It's also the fact that all the data stay where they are at the different hospitals with no movement. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Learn locally but only shared the learnings. >> Right. Very important in the EU of course, even in the United States, People are debating. What about contact tracing and using technology and cell phones, and smartphones to do that. Beside, I don't know what the situation is like in India, but nonetheless, that Dr. Goh's point about just sharing the learnings, bubbling it up, trickling just kind of metadata. If you will, back down, protects us. But at the same time, it allows us to iterate and improve the models. And so, that's a key part of this, the starting point and the conclusions that we draw from the models they're going to, and we've seen this with the pandemic, it changes daily, certainly weekly, but even daily. We continuously improve the conclusions and the models don't we. >> Absolutely, as Dr. Goh explained well. So, we could look at like they have the clinics or the testing centers, which are done in the remote places or wherever. So, we could collect those data at the time. And then if we could run it to the transcripting kind of a sequencing. And then as in, when we learn to these new samples and the new pieces all of them put kind of, how is that in the local data participate in the kind of use swarm learning, not just within the state or in a country could participate into an swarm learning globally to share all this data, which is coming up in a new way, and then also implement some kind of continuous learning to pick up the new signals or the new insight. It comes a bit new set of data and also help to immediately deploy it back into the inference or into the practice of identification. To do these, I think one of the key things which we have realized is to making it very simple. It's making it simple, to convert the machine learning models into the swarm learning, because we know that our subject matter experts who are going to develop these models on their choice of platforms and also making it simple to integrate into that complete machine learning workflow from the time of collecting a data pre processing and then doing the model training and then putting it onto inferencing and looking performance. So, we have kept that in the mind from the beginning while developing it. So, we kind of developed it as a plug able microservices kind of packed data with containers. So the whole library could be given it as a container with a kind of a decentralized management command controls, which would help to manage the whole swarm network and to start and initiate and children enrollment of new hospitals or the new nodes into the swarm network. At the same time, we also looked into the task of the data scientists and then try to make it very, very easy for them to take their existing models and convert that into the swarm learning frameworks so that they can convert or enabled they're models to participate in a decentralized learning. So, we have made it to a set callable rest APIs. And I could say that the example, which we are working with the Professor either in the case of leukemia or in the COVID kind of things. The noodle network model. So we're kind of using the 10 layer neural network things. We could convert that into the swarm model with less than 10 lines of code changes. So, that's kind of a simply three we are looking at so that it helps to make it quicker, faster and loaded the benefits. >> So, that's an exciting thing here Dr. Goh is, this is not an R and D project. This is something that you're actually, implementing in a real world, even though it's a narrow example, but there are so many other examples that I'd love to talk about, but please, you had a comment. >> Yes. The key thing here is that in addition to allowing privacy to be kept at each hospital, you also have the issue of different hospitals having day to day skewed differently. Right? For example, a demographics could be that this hospital is seeing a lot more younger patients, and other hospitals seeing a lot more older patients. Right? And then if you are doing machine learning in isolation then your machine might be better at recognizing the condition in the younger population, but not older and vice versa by using this approach of swarm learning, we then have the biases removed so that both hospitals can detect for younger and older population. All right. So, this is an important point, right? The ability to remove biases here. And you can see biases in the different hospitals because of the type of cases they see and the demographics. Now, the other point that's very important to reemphasize is what precise Professor Schultze mentioned, right? It's how we made it very easy to implement this.Right? This started out being so, for example, each hospital has their own neural network and they training their own. All you do is we come in, as Pasad mentioned, change a few lines of code in the original, machine learning model. And now you're part of the collective swarm. This is how we want to easy to implement so that we can get again, as I like to call, hospitals of the world to uniting. >> Yeah. >> Without sharing private patient data. So, let's double click on that Professor. So, tell us about sort of your team, how you're taking advantage of this Dr. Goh, just describe, sort of the simplicity, but what are the skills that you need to take advantage of this? What's your team look like? >> Yeah. So, we actually have a team that's comes from physicians to biologists, from medical experts up to computational scientists. So, we have early on invested in having these interdisciplinary research teams so that we can actually spend the whole spectrum. So, people know about the medicine they know about them the biological basics, but they also know how to implement such new technology. So, they are probably a little bit spearheading that, but this is the way to go in the future. And I see that with many institutions going this way many other groups are going into this direction because finally medicine understands that without computational sciences, without artificial intelligence and machine learning, we will not answer those questions with this large data that we're using. So, I'm here fine. But I also realize that when we entered this project, we had basically our model, we had our machine learning model from the leukemia's, and it really took almost no efforts to get this into the swarm. So, we were really ready to go in very short time, but I also would like to say, and then it goes towards the bias that is existing in medicine between different places. Dr. Goh said this very nicely. It's one aspect is the patient and so on, but also the techniques, how we do clinical essays, we're using different robots a bit. Using different automates to do the analysis. And we actually try to find out what the Swan learning is doing if we actually provide such a bias by prep itself. So, I did the following thing. We know that there's different ways of measuring these transcriptomes. And we actually simulated that two hospitals had an older technology and a third hospital had a much newer technology, which is good for understanding the biology and the diseases. But it is the new technology is prone for not being able anymore to generate data that can be used to learn and then predicting the old technology. So, there was basically, it's deteriorating, if you do take the new one and you'll make a classifier model and you try old data, it doesn't work anymore. So, that's a very hard challenge. We knew it didn't work anymore in the old way. So, we've pushed it into swarm learning and to swarm recognize that, and it didn't take care of it. It didn't care anymore because the results were even better by bringing everything together. I was astonished. I mean, it's absolutely amazing. That's although we knew about this limitations on that one hospital data, this form basically could deal with it. I think there's more to learn about these advantages. Yeah. And I'm very excited. It's not only a transcriptome that people do. I hope we can very soon do it with imaging or the DCNE has 10 sites in Germany connected to 10 university hospitals. There's a lot of imaging data, CT scans and MRIs, Rachel Grimes. And this is the next next domain in medicine that we would like to apply as well as running. Absolutely. >> Well, it's very exciting being able to bring this to the clinical world And make it in sort of an ongoing learnings. I mean, you think about, again, coming back to the pandemic, initially, we thought putting people on ventilators was the right thing to do. We learned, okay. Maybe, maybe not so much the efficacy of vaccines and other therapeutics. It's going to be really interesting to see how those play out. My understanding is that the vaccines coming out of China, or built to for speed, get to market fast, be interested in U.S. Maybe, try to build vaccines that are maybe more longterm effective. Let's see if that actually occurs some of those other biases and tests that we can do. That is a very exciting, continuous use case. Isn't it? >> Yeah, I think so. Go ahead. >> Yes. I, in fact, we have another project ongoing to use a transcriptome data and other data like metabolic and cytokines that data, all these biomarkers from the blood, right? Volunteers during a clinical trial. But the whole idea of looking at all those biomarkers, we talking tens of thousands of them, the same thing again, and then see if we can streamline it clinical trials by looking at it data and training with that data. So again, here you go. Right? We have very good that we have many vaccines on. In candidates out there right now, the next long pole in the tenth is the clinical trial. And we are working on that also by applying the same concept. Yeah. But for clinical trials. >> Right. And then Prasad, it seems to me that this is a good, an example of sort of an edge use case. Right? You've got a lot of distributed data. And I know you've spoken in the past about the edge generally, where data lives bringing moving data back to sort of the centralized model. But of course you don't want to move data if you don't have to real time AI inferencing at the edge. So, what are you thinking in terms of other other edge use cases that were there swarm learning can be applied. >> Yeah, that's a great point. We could kind of look at this both in the medical and also in the other fields, as we talked about Professor just mentioned about this radiographs and then probably, Using this with a medical image data, think of it as a scenario in the future. So, if we could have an edge note sitting next to these medical imaging systems, very close to that. And then as in when this the systems producers, the medical immediate speed could be an X-ray or a CT scan or MRI scan types of thing. The system next to that, sitting on the attached to that. From the modernity is already built with the swarm lending. It can do the inferencing. And also with the new setup data, if it looks some kind of an outlier sees the new or images are probably a new signals. It could use that new data to initiate another round up as form learning with all the involved or the other medical images across the globe. So, all this can happen without really sharing any of the raw data outside of the systems but just getting the inferencing and then trying to make all of these systems to come together and try to build a better model. >> So, the last question. Yeah. >> If I may, we got to wrap, but I mean, I first, I think we've heard about swarm learning, maybe read about it probably 30 years ago and then just ignored it and forgot about it. And now here we are today, blockchain of course, first heard about with Bitcoin and you're seeing all kinds of really interesting examples, but Dr. Goh, start with you. This is really an exciting area, and we're just getting started. Where do you see swarm learning, by let's say the end of the decade, what are the possibilities? >> Yeah. You could see this being applied in many other industries, right? So, we've spoken about life sciences, to the healthcare industry or you can't imagine the scenario of manufacturing where a decade from now you have intelligent robots that can learn from looking at across men building a product and then to replicate it, right? By just looking, listening, learning and imagine now you have multiple of these robots, all sharing their learnings across boundaries, right? Across state boundaries, across country boundaries provided you allow that without having to share what they are seeing. Right? They can share, what they have lunch learnt You see, that's the difference without having to need to share what they see and hear, they can share what they have learned across all the different robots around the world. Right? All in the community that you allow, you mentioned that time, right? That will even in manufacturing, you get intelligent robots learning from each other. >> Professor, I wonder if as a practitioner, if you could sort of lay out your vision for where you see something like this going in the future, >> I'll stay with the medical field at the moment being, although I agree, it will be in many other areas, medicine has two traditions for sure. One is learning from each other. So, that's an old tradition in medicine for thousands of years, but what's interesting and that's even more in the modern times, we have no traditional sharing data. It's just not really inherent to medicine. So, that's the mindset. So yes, learning from each other is fine, but sharing data is not so fine, but swarm learning deals with that, we can still learn from each other. We can, help each other by learning and this time by machine learning. We don't have to actually dealing with the data sharing anymore because that's that's us. So for me, it's a really perfect situation. Medicine could benefit dramatically from that because it goes along the traditions and that's very often very important to get adopted. And on top of that, what also is not seen very well in medicine is that there's a hierarchy in the sense of serious certain institutions rule others and swarm learning is exactly helping us there because it democratizes, onboarding everybody. And even if you're not sort of a small entity or a small institutional or small hospital, you could become remembering the swarm and you will become as a member important. And there is no no central institution that actually rules everything. But this democratization, I really laugh, I have to say, >> Pasad, we'll give you the final word. I mean, your job is very helping to apply these technologies to solve problems. what's your vision or for this. >> Yeah. I think Professor mentioned about one of the very key points to use saying that democratization of BI I'd like to just expand a little bit. So, it has a very profound application. So, Dr. Goh, mentioned about, the manufacturing. So, if you look at any field, it could be health science, manufacturing, autonomous vehicles and those to the democratization, and also using that a blockchain, we are kind of building a framework also to incentivize the people who own certain set of data and then bring the insight from the data into the table for doing and swarm learning. So, we could build some kind of alternative monetization framework or an incentivization framework on top of the existing fund learning stuff, which we are working on to enable the participants to bring their data or insight and then get rewarded accordingly kind of a thing. So, if you look at eventually, we could completely make dais a democratized AI, with having the complete monitorization incentivization system which is built into that. You may call the parties to seamlessly work together. >> So, I think this is just a fabulous example of we hear a lot in the media about, the tech backlash breaking up big tech but how tech has disrupted our lives. But this is a great example of tech for good and responsible tech for good. And if you think about this pandemic, if there's one thing that it's taught us is that disruptions outside of technology, pandemics or natural disasters or climate change, et cetera, are probably going to be the bigger disruptions then technology yet technology is going to help us solve those problems and address those disruptions. Gentlemen, I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE and sharing this great example and wish you best of luck in your endeavors. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having me. >> And thank you everybody for watching. This is theCUBE's coverage of HPE discover 2020, the virtual experience. We'll be right back right after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Jeff: Hello everybody, and thank you for joining us today for the virtual Vertica BDC 2020. Today's break-out session has been titled, "Migrating Your Vertica Cluster to the Cloud." I'm Jeff Healey, and I'm in Vertica marketing. I'll be your host for this break-out session. Joining me here are Sumeet Keswani and Chris Daly, Vertica product technology engineers and key members of our customer success team. Before we begin, I encourage you to submit questions and comments during the virtual session. You don't have to wait, just type your question or comment in the question box below the slides and click Submit. As always, there will be a Q&A session at the end of the presentation. We'll answer as many questions as we're able to during that time. Any questions that we don't address, we'll do our best to answer them offline. And alternatively, you can visit Vertica forums at forum.vertica.com to post your questions there after the session. Our engineering team is planning to join the forums to keep the conversation going. Also as a reminder that you can maximize your screen by clicking the double arrow button in the lower right corner of the slides. And yes, this virtual session is being recorded and will be available to view on demand this week. We'll send you a notification as soon as it's ready. Now let's get started. Over to you, Sumeet. >> Sumeet: Thank you, Jeff. Hello everyone, my name is Sumeet Keswani, and I will be talking about planning to deploy or migrate your Vertica cluster to the Cloud. So you may be moving an on-prem cluster or setting up a new cluster in the Cloud. And there are several design and operational considerations that will come into play. You know, some of these are cost, which industry you are in, or which expertise you have, in which Cloud platform. And there may be a personal preference too. After that, you know, there will be some operational considerations like VM and cluster sizing, what Vertica mode you want to deploy, Eon or Enterprise. It depends on your use keys. What are the DevOps skills available, you know, what elasticity, separation you need, you know, what is your backup and DR strategy, what do you want in terms of high availability. And you will have to think about, you know, how much data you have and where it's going to live. And in order to understand the cost, or the cost and the benefit of deployment and you will have to understand the access patterns, and how you are moving data from and to the Cloud. So things to consider before you move a deployment, a Vertica deployment to the Cloud, right, is one thing to keep in mind is, virtual CPUs, or CPUs in the Cloud, are not the same as the usual CPUs that you've been familiar with in your data center. A vCPU is half of a CPU because of hyperthreading. There is definitely the noisy neighbor effect. There is, depending on what other things are hosted in the Cloud environment, you may see performance, you may occasionally see performance issues. There are I/O limitations on the instance that you provision, so that what that really means is you can't always scale up. You might have to scale up, basically, you have to add more instances rather than getting bigger or the right size instances. Finally, there is an important distinction here. Virtualization is not free. There can be significant overhead to virtualization. It could be as much as 30%, so when you size and scale your clusters, you must keep that in mind. Now the other important aspect is, you know, where you put Vertica cluster is important. The choice of the region, how far it is from your various office locations. Where will the data live with respect to the cluster. And remember, popular locations can fill up. So if you want to scale out, additional capacity may or may not be available. So these are things you have to keep in mind when picking or choosing your Cloud platform and your deployment. So at this point, I want to make a plug for Eon mode. Eon mode is the latest mode, is a Cloud mode from Vertica. It has been designed with Cloud economics in mind. It uses shared storage, which is durable, available, and very cheap, like S3 storage or Google Cloud storage. It has been designed for quick scaling, like scale out, and highly elastic deployments. It has also been designed for high workload isolation, where each application or user group can be isolated from the other ones, so that they'll be paid and monitored separately, without affecting each other. But there are some disadvantages, or perhaps, you know, there's a cost for using Eon mode. Storage in S3 is neither cheap nor efficient. So there is a high latency of I/O when accessing data from S3. There is API and data access cost. There is API and data access cost associated with accessing your data in S3. Vertica in Eon mode has a pay as you go model, which you know, works for some people and does not work for others. And so therefore it is important to keep that in mind. And performance can be a little bit variable here, because it depends on cache, it depends on the local depot, which is a cache, and it is not as predictable as EE mode, so that's another trade-off. So let's spend about a minute and see how a Vertica cluster in Eon mode looks like. A Vertica cluster in Eon mode has S3 as the durability layer where all the data sits. There are subclusters, which are essentially just aggregation groups, which is separated compute, which will service different workloads. So for in this example, you may have two subclusters, one servicing ETL workload and the other one servicing (mic interference obscures speaking). These clusters are isolated, and they do not affect each other's performance. This allows you to scale them independently and isolate workloads. So this is the new Vertica Eon mode which has been specifically designed by us for use in the Cloud. But beyond this, you can use EE mode or Eon mode in the Cloud, it really depends on what your use case is. But both of these are possible, and we highly recommend Eon mode wherever possible. Okay, let's talk a little bit about what we mean by Vertica support in the Cloud. Now as you know, a Cloud is a shared data center, right. Performance in the Cloud can vary. It can vary between regions, availability zones, time of the day, choice of instance type, what concurrency you use, and of course the noisy neighbor effect. You know, we in Vertica, we performance, load, and stress test our product before every release. We have a bunch of use cases, we go through all of them, make sure that we haven't, you know, regressed any performance, and make sure that it works up to standards and gives you the high performance that you've come to expect. However, your solution or your workload is unique to you, and it is still your responsibility to make sure that it is tuned appropriately. To do this, one of the easiest things you can do is you know, pick a tested operating system, allocate the virtual machine, you know, with enough resources. It's something that we recommend, because we have tested it thoroughly. It goes a long way in giving you predictability. So after this I would like to now go into the various platforms, Cloud platforms, that Vertica has worked on. And I'll start with AWS, and my colleague Chris will speak about Azure and GCP. And our thoughts forward. So without further ado, let's start with the Amazon Web Services platform. So this is Vertica running on the Amazon Web Services platform. So as you probably are all aware, Amazon Web Services is the market leader in this space, and indeed really our biggest provider by far, and have been here for a very long time. And Vertica has a deep integration in the Amazon Web Services space. We provide a marketplace offering which has both pay as you go or a bring your own license model. We have many, you know, knowledge base articles, best practices, scripts, and resources that help you configure and use a Vertica database in the Cloud. We have several customers in the Cloud for many, many years now, and we have managed and console-based point and click deployments, you know, for ease of use in the Cloud. So Vertica has a deep integration in the Amazon space, and has been there for quite a bit now. So we communicate a lot of experience here. So let's talk about sizing on AWS. And sizing on any platform comes down to you know, these four or five different things. It comes down to picking the right instance type, picking the right disk volume and type, tuning and optimizing your networking, and finally, you know, some operational concerns like security, maintainability, and backup. So let's go into each one of these on the AWS ecosystem. So the choice of instance type is one of the important choices that you will make. In Eon mode, you know, you don't really need persistent disk. You can, you should probably choose ephemeral disk because it gives you extra speed, and speed with the instance type. We highly recommend the i3.4x instance types, which are very economical, have a big, 4 terabyte depot or cache per node. The i3.metal is similar to the i3.4, but has got significantly better performance, for those subclusters that need this extra oomph. The i3.2 is good for scale out of small ad hoc clusters. You know, they have a smaller cache and lower performance but it's cheap enough to use very indiscriminately. If you were in EE mode, well we don't use S3 as the layer of durability. Your local volumes is where we persist the data. Hence you do need an EBS volume in EE mode. In order to make sure that, you know, that the instance or the deployment is manageable, you might have to use some sort of a software RAID array over the EBS volumes. The most common instance type you see in EE mode is the r4.4x, the c4, or the m4 instance types. And then of course for temp space and depot we always recommend instance volumes. They're just much faster. Okay. So let's go, let's talk about optimizing your network or tuning your network. So the best, the best thing you can do about tuning your network, especially in Eon mode but in other modes too, is to get a VPC S3 endpoint. This is essentially a route table that makes sure that all traffic between your cluster and S3 goes over an internal fabric. This makes it much faster, you don't pay for egress cost, especially if you're doing external tables or your communal storage, but you do need to create it. Many times people will forget doing it. So you really do have to create it. And best of all, it's free. It doesn't cost you anything extra. You just have to create it during cluster creation time, and there's a significant performance difference for using it. The next thing about tuning your network is, you know, sizing it correctly. Pick the closest geographical region to where you'll consume the data. Pick the right availability zone. We highly recommend using cluster placement groups. In fact, they are required for the stability of the cluster. A cluster placement group is essentially, it operates this notion of rack. Nodes in a cluster placement group, are, you know, physically closer to each other than they would otherwise be. And this allows, you know, a 10 Gbps, bidirectional, TCP/IP flow between the nodes. And this makes sure that, you know, you get a high amount of Gbps per second. As you probably are all aware, the Cloud does not support broadcast or UDP broadcast. Hence you must use point-to-point UDP for spread in the Cloud, or in AWS. Beyond that, you know, point-to-point UDP does not scale very well beyond 20 nodes. So you know, as your cluster sizes increase, you must switch over to large cluster mode. And finally, use instances with enhanced networking or SR-IOV support. Again, it's free, it comes with the choice of the instance type and the operating system. We highly recommend it, it makes a big difference in terms of how your workload will perform. So let's talk a little bit about security, configuration, and orchestration. As I said, we provide CloudFormation scripts to make the ease of deployment. You can use the MC point and click. With regard to security, you know, Vertica does support instance profiles out of the box in Amazon. We recommend you use it. This is highly desirable so that you're not passing access keys and secret keys around. If you use our marketplace image, we have picked the latest operating systems, we have patched them, Amazon actually validates everything on marketplace and scans them for security vulnerabilities. So you get that for free. We do some basic configuration, like we disable root ssh access, we disallow any password access, we turn on encryption. And we run a basic set of security checks to make sure that the image is secure. Of course, it could be made more secure. But we try to balance out security, performance, and convenience. And finally, let's talk about backups. Especially in Eon mode I get the question, "Do we really need to back up our system, "since the data is in S3?" And the answer is yes, you do. Because you know, S3's not going to protect you against an accidental drop table. You know, S3 has a finite amount of reliability, durability, and availability. And you may want to be able to restore data differently. Also, backups are important if you're doing DR, or if you have additional cluster in a different region. The other cluster can be considered a backup. And finally, you know, why not create a backup or a disaster recovery cluster, you know, storage is cheap in the Cloud. So you know, we highly recommend you use it. So with this, I would like to hand it over to my colleague Christopher Daly, who will talk about the other two platforms that we support, that is Google and Azure. Over to you, Chris, thank you. >> Chris: Thanks, Sumeet, and hi everyone. So while there's no argument that we here at Vertica have a long history of running within the Amazon Web Services space, there are other alternative Cloud service providers where we do have a presence, such as Google Cloud Platform, or GCP. For those of you who are unfamiliar with GCP, it's considered the third-largest Cloud service provider in the marketspace, and it's priced very competitively to its peers. Has a lot of similarities to AWS in the products and services that it offers, but it tends to be the go-to place for newer businesses or startups. We officially started supporting GCP a little over a year ago with our first entry into their GCP marketplace. So a solution that deployed a fully-functional and ready-to-use Enterprise mode cluster. We followed up on that with the release and the support of Google storage buckets, and now I'm extremely pleased to announce that with the launch of Vertica 10, we're officially supporting Eon mode architecture in GCP as well. But that's not all, as we're adding additional offerings into the GCP marketplace. With the launch of version 10 we'll be introducing a second listing in the marketplace that allows for the deployment of an Eon mode cluster. It's all being driven by our own management consult. This will allow customers to quickly spin up Eon-based clusters within the GCP space. And if that wasn't enough, I'm also pleased to tell you that very soon after the launch we're going to be offering Vertica by the hour in GCP as well. And while we've done a lot to automate the solutions coming out of the marketplace, we recognize the simple fact that for a lot of you, building your cluster manually is really the only option. So with that in mind, let's talk about the things you need to understand in GCP to get that done. So wag me if you think this slide looks familiar. Well nope, it's not an erroneous duplicate slide from Sumeet's AWS section, it's merely an acknowledgement of all the things you need to consider for running Vertica in the Cloud. In Vertica, the choice of the operational mode will dictate some of the choices you'll need to make in the infrastructure, particularly around storage. Just like on-prem solutions, you'll need to understand the disk and networking capacities to get the most out of your cluster. And one of the most attractive things in GCP is the pricing, as it tends to run a little less than the others. But it does translate into less choices and options within the environment. If nothing else, I want you to take one thing away from this slide, and Sumeet said this earlier. VMs running, about AWS, Sumeet said this about AWS earlier. VMs running in the GCP space run on top of hardware that has hyperthreading enabled. And that a vCPU doesn't equate to a core, but rather a processing thread. This becomes particularly important if you're moving from an on-prem environment into the Cloud. Because a physical Vertica node with 32 cores is not the same thing as a VM with 32 vCPUs. In fact, with 32 vCPUs, you're only getting about 16 cores worth of performance. GCP does offer a handful of VM types, which they categorize by letter, but for us, most of these don't make great choices for Vertica nodes. The M series, however, does offer a good core to memory ratio, especially when you're looking at the high-mem variants. Also keep in mind, performance in I/O, such as network and disk, are partially dependent on the VM size, so customers in GCP space should be focusing on 16 vCPU VMs and above for their Vertica nodes. Disk options in GCP can be broken down into two basic types, persistent disks and local disks, which are ephemeral. Persistent disks come in two forms, standard or SSD. For Vertica in Eon mode, we recommend that customers use persistent SSD disks for the catalog, and either local SSD disks or persistent SSD disks for the depot and the temp space. Couple of things to think about here, though. Persistent disks are provisioned as a single device with a settable size. Local disks are provisioned as multiple disk devices with a fixed size, requiring you to use some kind of software RAIDing to create a single storage device. So while local SSD disks provide much more throughput, you're using CPU resources to maintain that RAID set. So you're giving, it's a little bit of a trade-off. Persistent disks offer redundancy, either within the zone that they exist or within the region, and if you're selecting regional redundancy, the disks are replicated across multiple zones in the region. This does have an effect in the performance to VM, so we don't recommend this. What we do recommend is the zonal redundancy when you're using persistent disks, as it gives you that redundancy level without actually affecting the performance. Remember also, in the Cloud space, all I/O is network I/O, as disks are basically block storage devices. This means that disk actions can and will slow down network traffic. And finally, the storage bucket access in GCP is based on GCP interoperability mode, which means that it's basically compliant with the AWS S3 API. In interoperability mode, access to the bucket is granted by a key pair that GCP refers to as HMAC keys. HMAC keys can be generated for individual users or for service accounts. We will recommend that when you're creating HMAC keys, choose a service account to ensure that the keys are not tied to a single employee. When thinking about storage for Enterprise mode, things change a little bit. We still recommend persistent SSD disks over standard ones. However, the use of local SSD disks for anything other than temp space is highly discouraged. I said it before, local SSD disks are ephemeral, meaning that the data's lost if the machine is turned off or goes down. So not really a place you want to store your data. In GCP, multiple persistent disks placed into a software RAID set does not create more throughput like you can find in other Clouds. The I/O saturation usually hits the VM limit long before it hits the disk limit. In fact, performance of a persistent disk is determined not just by the size of the disk but also by the size of the VM. So a good rule of thumb in GCP is to maximize your I/O throughput for persistent disks, is that the size tends to max out at two terabytes for SSDs and 10 terabytes for standard disks. Network performance in GCP can be thought of in two distinct ways. There's node-to-node traffic, and then there's egress traffic. Node-to-node performance in GCP is really good within the zone, with typical traffic between nodes falling in the 10-15 gigabits per second range. This might vary a little from zone to zone and region to region, but usually it's only limited, they're only limited by the existing traffic where the VMs exist. So kind of a noisy neighbor effect. Egress traffic from a VM, however, is subject to throughput caps, and these are based on the size of the VM. So the speed is set for the number of vCPUs in the VM at two gigabits per second per vCPU, and tops out at 32 gigabits per second. So the larger the VM, the more vCPUs you get, the larger the cap. So some things to consider in the NAV ring space for your Vertica cluster, pick a region that's physically close to you, even if you're connecting to the GCP network from a corporate LAN as opposed to the internet. The further the packets have to travel, the longer it's going to take. Also, GCP, like most Clouds, doesn't support UDP broadcast traffic on their virtual NAV ring, so you do have to use the point-to-point flag for spread when you're creating your cluster. And since the network cap on VMs is set at 32 gigabits per second per VM, maximize your network egress throughput and don't use VMs that are smaller than 16 vCPUs for your Vertica nodes. And that gets us to the one question I get asked the most often. How do I get my data into and out of the Cloud? Well, GCP offers many different methods to support different speeds and different price points for data ingress and egress. There's the obvious one, right, across the internet either directly to the VMs or into the storage bucket. Or you can, you know, light up a VPN tunnel to encrypt all that traffic. But additionally, GCP offers direct network interconnect from your corporate network. These get provided either by Google or by a partner, and they vary in speed. They also offer things called direct or carrier peering, which is connecting the edges of the networks between your network and GCP, and you can use a CDN interconnect, which creates, I believe, an on-demand connection from the GCP network, your network to the GCP network provided by a large host of CDN service providers. So GCP offers a lot of ways to move your data around in and out of the GCP Cloud. It's really a matter of what price point works for you, and what technology your corporation is looking to use. So we've talked about AWS, we've talked about GCP, it really only leaves one more Cloud. So last, and by far not the least, there's the Microsoft Azure environment. Holding on strong to the number two place in the major Cloud providers, Azure offers a very robust Cloud offering that's attractive to customers that already consume services from Microsoft. But what you need to keep in mind is that the underlying foundation of their Cloud is based on the Microsoft Windows products. And this makes their Cloud offering a little bit different in the services and offerings that they have. The good news here, though, is that Microsoft has done a very good job of getting their virtualization drivers baked into the modern kernels of most Linux operating systems, making running Linux-based VMs in Azure fairly seamless. So here's the slide again, but now you're going to notice some slight differences. First off, in Azure we only support Enterprise mode. This is because the Azure storage product is very different from Google Cloud storage and S3 on AWS. So while we're working on getting this supported, and we're starting to focus on this, we're just not there yet. This means that since we're only supporting Enterprise mode in Azure, getting the local disk performance right is one of the keys to success of running Vertica here, with the other major key being making sure that you're getting the appropriate networking speeds. Overall, Azure's a really good platform for Vertica, and its performance and pricing are very much on par with AWS. But keep in mind that the newer versions of the Linux operating systems like RHEL and CentOS run much better here than the older versions. Okay, so first things first again, just like GCP, in Azure VMs are running on top of hardware that has hyperthreading enabled. And because of the way Hyper-V, Azure's virtualization engine works, you can actually see this, right? So if you look down into the CPU information of the VM, you'll actually see how it groups the vCPUs by core and by thread. Azure offers a lot of VM types, and is adding new ones all the time. But for us, we see three VM types that make the most sense for Vertica. For customers that are looking to run production workloads in Azure, the Es_v3 and the Ls_v2 series are the two main recommendations. While they differ slightly in the CPU to memory ratio and the I/O throughput, the Es_v3 series is probably the best recommendation for a generalized Vertica node, with the Ls_v2 series being recommended for workloads with higher I/O requirements. If you're just looking to deploy a sandbox environment, the Ds_v3 series is a very suitable choice that really can reduce your overall Cloud spend. VM storage in Azure is provided by a grouping of four different types of disks, all offering different levels of performance. Introduced at the end of last year, the Ultra Disk option is the highest-performing disk type for VMs in Azure. It was designed for database workloads where high throughput and low latency is very desirable. However, the Ultra Disk option is not available in all regions yet, although that's been changing slowly since their launch. The Premium SSD option, which has been around for a while and is widely available, can also offer really nice performance, especially higher capacities. And just like other Cloud providers, the I/O throughput you get on VMs is dictated not only by the size of the disk, but also by the size of the VM and its type. So a good rule of thumb here, VM types with an S will have a much better throughput rate than ones that don't, meaning, and the larger VMs will have, you know, higher I/O throughput than the smaller ones. You can expand the VM disk throughput by using multiple disks in Azure and using a software RAID. This overcomes limitations of single disk performance, but keep in mind, you're now using CPU cycles to maintain that raid, so it is a bit of a trade-off. The other nice thing in Azure is that all their managed disks are encrypted by default on the server side, so there's really nothing you need to do here to enable that. And of course I mentioned this earlier. There is no native access to Azure storage yet, but it is something we're working on. We have seen folks using third-party applications like MinIO to access Azure's storage as an S3 bucket. So it might be something you want to keep in mind and maybe even test out for yourself. Networking in Azure comes in two different flavors, standard and accelerated. In standard networking, the entire network stack is abstracted and virtualized. So this works really well, however, there are performance limitations. Standard networking tends to top out around four gigabits per second. Accelerated networking in Azure is based on single root I/O virtualization of the Mellanox adapter. This is basically the VM talking directly to the physical network card in the host hardware, and it can produce network speeds up to 20 gigabits per second, so much, much faster. Keep in mind, though, that not all VM types and operating systems actually support accelerated networking, and you know, just like disk throughput, network throughput is based on VM type and size. So what do you need to think about for networking in the Azure space? Again, stay close to home. Pick regions that are geographically close to your location. Yes, the backbones between the regions are very, very fast, but the more hops your packets have to make, the longer it takes. Azure offers two types of groupings of their VMs, availability sets and availability zones. Availability zones offer good redundancy across multiple zones, but this actually increases the node-to-node latency, so we recommend you avoid this. Availability sets, on the other hand, keep all your VMs grouped together within a single zone, but makes sure that no two VMs are running on the same host hardware, for redundancy. And just like the other Clouds, UDP broadcast is not supported. So you have to use the point-to-point flag when you're creating your database to ensure that the spread works properly. Spread time out, okay, this is a good one. So recently, Microsoft has started monthly rolling updates of their environment. What this looks like is VMs running on top of hardware that's receiving an update can be paused. And this becomes problematic when the pausing of the VM exceeds eight seconds, as the unpaused members of the cluster now think the paused VM is down. So consider adjusting the spread time out for your clusters in Azure to 30 seconds, and this will help avoid a little of that. If you're deploying a large cluster in Azure, more than 20 nodes, use large closer mode, as point-to-point for spread doesn't really scale well with a lot of Vertica nodes. And finally, you know, pick VM types and operating systems that support accelerated networking. The difference in the node-to-node speeds can be very dramatic. So how do we move data around in Azure, right? So Microsoft views data egress a little differently than other Clouds, as it classifies any data being transmitted by a VM as egress. However, it only bills for data egress that actually leaves the Azure environment. Egress speed limits in Azure are based entirely on the VM type and size, and then they're limited by your connection to them. While not offering as many pathways to access their Cloud as GCP, Azure does offer a direct network-to-network connection called ExpressRoute. Offered by a large group of third-party processors, partners, the ExpressRoute offers multiple tiers of performance that are based on a flat charge for inbound data and a metered charge for outbound data. And of course you can still access these via the internet, and securely through a VPN gateway. So on behalf of Jeff, Sumeet, and myself, I'd like to thank you for listening to our presentation today, and we're now ready for Q&A.

>>live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the Cube covering Cisco Live 2020 right to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back to the Cisco Live 2020 show in Barcelona, Spain. It's the Cube's live coverage. Four days of action. I'm John Furrier with my co host, Dave Vellante. Stew Minimum is in the house. We've been really interview all the thought. Leads all the action here in the DEV. Net zone of Cisco. We're here with Susie Wee, who's the senior vice president, chief technology officer and general manager of Cisco's DEV. Net and C X ecosystem success. Susie, great to see you again, Thanks to you. With our third year we've been we've been watching the growth of definite explode and definite create a separate event for developers. Great to see you. >>Great to see you. Great to be here. >>So how does it feel to be on a wave of success? You've had quite an impact in the industry, and I think the biggest story that's going on in the industry is the role of developers. You guys have embraced that four years ago, brought it all together and really just been marching to the cadence of just humble training, education and programming, all the Cisco products enabling what it looks like to be the future of Cisco. >>Yeah, I mean, it's it's humbling, t So you know what's been really great? It's really all about our community. And, you know, I mean, you guys have jumped in, been with us on this journey. You've seen it like all around us in terms of how it's progressed. But what's interesting is that, you know, networkers the software developers, the Dev Ops pros that people who are coming into definite really progressing, they're getting to the next level. And then we have more and more new people coming in. And what happens is the technology keeps advancing right. So networking, security going toe intent based networking, multi domain. How do you integrate these things? Cognitive collaboration. I o t an edge, you know, edge computing. As all of this comes together, you get to a really interesting place. But what happens is we have to think about I t department networking departments like how do people use this to their advantage? Right. So there's actually users of people who install and run these things and how do they make that available and actually get a business advantage out of that infrastructure? That's what this is all about. >>And the big scene. Wendy on the opening keynote, kicked off before David came on. She had a slide that I thought encapsulate what I think the future of all business and you guys have been on and on and on, a reference that it was people in communities, business model and business operations almost like a three legged stool. You've been on this because your team Michael was on the Cube just now said people have been in their careers on Cisco. But Cisco is betting the business on the people, that ecosystem, it's developers. CC III is the certifications. This dynamic of the role of the people is critical, >>and they're driving >>the change >>it is. And you know what was tremendous about Cisco's business model and how Cisco was founded. So this was pre me, you know, and it's just the brilliance of the early folks is like Cisco made this router, you know? It was a little start up. It was like five people, right? And then it started flying off the shelf in the mid eighties in late eighties when the Internet started taking off, and then the way they scale that out was by growing the community, they didn't say We're going to hire people around the world to install these networks. We're gonna create a community of professionals who can go around and install these networks. And then we're going to create a partner ecosystem of partners who are going to build businesses around this, installing networks for customers. And so really, Cisco very early on, learn that we had to be very customer focused and build with an ecosystem of partners. And then we created Cisco Certification Program, and that started to take the people who are getting trained to do networking and give them certifications. And then they were able to get jobs in customers and partners and build their careers. And so now we move that to today, and we're continuing with that philosophy and doubling down. It's about them, except there's a shift in technology. So the network has changed. It's not the same old network like now. There's new capabilities that require software. It requires dev ops. It requires applications to hit the infrastructure it requires. I T and Infrastructure to solve business problems. But we need to bring the people along and doing that, and that is absolutely what we've been about. >>I said in my breaking analysis there were there were many things that helped Cisco rise with the three things like pointed out where the bet on I p, the M and A and then I was too narrow. I liked how you describe it as the community, but really talking about the Army of trained engineers that were advocates. And you're extending that to the partner ecosystem. What's interesting about watching this rise over the faster uses? Not only transformation of Cisco from hardware to software and now even business transformation is you see, I t go from a cost center to a profit center, but you're sort of following that track. I don't know if you're leading it are following it sort of incompetent what's going on. And, >>you know, I would say >>that we're doing both because, uh, obviously we're listening to customers and partners all the time to see what do you need? So we're listening, and that would make us leading as we're sorry. Following is >>we're >>listening and yet we're creating technology to enable them to do these new things right? So there's a reason that you can think about the network to be solving business problems. It's because we made the networking programmable and based on software. If we didn't make it software, it would still be running the old way. And it wouldn't be able to play in a Dev ops loop or be automated or anything there. So I would say that it's very combined. But Cisco takes a holistic approach right back there. We have an I T managers forum where there are people who are trying to say, Hey, you know, I've been leading technology teams in I T. But I need to learn how to talk to the business, right? So there's a transformation that needs to happen, which is okay, The technologist networkers I t folks themselves need to learn about software. But then also, these folks and their managers need to be able to talk to the business and think differently. So take some design thinking. Think about what are the business stakeholders problems where customers problems, how can I make my technology work for them? So we really have a lot going on Teoh building the kind of success of our ecosystem. >>Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned technology shift, and that's causing a lot of change is actually how people are certified business models. And it's interesting. When we were chatting years ago, Dev. Ops was actually out there. The hyper scales around you saw it evolving was pretty clear to a lot of the insiders. That's Dev Ops. Infrastructure is code. Then you kicked on something where programmable networks I heard this week, and this is kind of again goes to the next level and kind of connect the dots. Biz Dev. Ops. So the AB dynamics guys, look at this as OK. So this agile attitude yes, has been on for a while. Could you comment? I think >>a lot of people that >>are looking at Cisco trying to understand its evolution where it's gonna go >>yeah, >>is rooted in years ago. A shift in thinking, yes, and it's an agile It's a dev ops mindset, >>yes, but >>the Dev ops notion from whether it's pure Dev ops, cloud native or Dev ops or Biz Dev ops >>for what's next? So this is a It's been around for a while. You just share your Yeah, Absolutely. So >>I have a slide and we don't show slides here, which is a good thing. But it was called it the hamburger slide. So the hamburger slide, where there would be infrastructure and the applications. And then there's this other layer appear business, you know. And basically, what happens is the infrastructure became programmable, so as opposed to the infrastructure and the applications being separate, the I T teams did the infrastructure of the app Dev did. The businesses did the APS. Then now that the infrastructure's family can get into a dev ops workflow. So for cloud applications, the APS and the infrastructure can really mix. And now the network is programmable. So there's Net Dev ops. And it's not just compute that can get into Dev ops. But you know, the network can too. But then, now that business layer can flow into this. And so what happens is once again, you could say that cloud enables business, right? And so, if you know, a business is trying to say, how do I compete like a retail store? How my completing with a cloud competitors. Well, you have to embrace it. Take your traditional infrastructure, your customer data your stores, but then mix that with cloud offerings. That's a huge transformation that needs to happen. But now there's even more capabilities. As you're saying, Hey, I'm like a coffee shop and I'm rolling out all of these stores. How do I make sure my business applications get there? How do I get customer intelligence and business intelligence together so my workers can serve my customers with the right knowledge and information they need so you can actually use the infrastructure and APS as an advantage in how you serve your business? And you wouldn't even be able to do those things if you didn't know about the technology. So I would say that there's like a workforce trend where technology is enabling business and it can grow your business in different ways. But we need to make sure that we can express that because the technologist doesn't usually talk in terms of the business. But that's where all the value >>on the application has always been. That point of business value in connection to the business when the APP is the infrastructure has been removed from that now that the infrastructure's becoming programmable. It's embedded into that application, and developers can now add value on top of it. I mean, the striking thing to me was just behind us, to seeing a number of your customers lining up to learn how to code in Python. And then I o t was off the charts. And I've always been saying that Look at the edge is going to be one by developers E. I think you really got that right. I'm curious as to why you think just really is the one company in a large, established player. That is, I think, figured it out that I've said that many have tried throwing money at the problem, reaching out to developers fallen flat. I mean, even very successful software companies were struggling. Why do you think Cisco has had successes? Is a culture is at the leverage of that certification and community that you talked about earlier? >>Yeah, it's while it's really hard to say, like one reason why, because these air tricky things, like so taking on a new business strategy, getting everybody aligned in a big company, even in a little company, is hard, but it takes like everybody pushing towards the direction and what happens is different. People get it at different times. So obviously with Dev net, we're trying to push something along. The CEO Chuck Robbins. He got it and he was pushing it. And then the businesses and product teams. Some of them had a P I first, and some of them did not. But now more and more on almost all of them do. Now. All the products have AP eyes and they're getting more AP I first and now what we're doing is aligning AP eyes across the portfolio. You need to get your sales teams to understand and to engage. Like the regions. We have people in Italy who are engaging with the Italian community. We have our seas around the world that are basically engaging the people in each of their countries to evangelize it in tow, work with customers and partners in their local language is using this material to get them on board. So, you know, when we started, Definite Way had different ways we could take it. No one defined a developer program for a company like Cisco before, like a networking company, but we actually didn't do it by saying, Oh, we're only gonna talk to application developers and ignore those old networkers We said we're going to make them core and bring them along and bring in the captives and bring them together. I wouldn't say we're gonna, like, forget about the old Cisco products We said we're gonna work with them as they add AP eyes and make that better. We're gonna ignore our sales guys and the ones that we're going to bring them along and make them our evangelists and advocates to work with the region. So we kind of use the whole fabric along with it and just I kind of gained. The community >>recognized the appetite for building, and some people are like, >>I'm going to jump in and give this a try because I think it's important and something like, I'm gonna wait and see and they're like, Oh, it's something now, Okay, now I'll jump in and we're like, >>That's right, >>you're totally We do a lot of Cuban. It is many different events here at Cisco over the years. It's interesting to see when people get in and you can see it when their eyes pop up. Oh, I get it. It is a progression of whether they're orientation, what their background is. But it seems to me the early people who click it on it is our systems thinkers. Most of the techies, they're systems systems, folks. Yeah, they see as a system not as one thing. Yes, As you said, it's not just absent infrastructure. So a lot of the system guys get it first. And then on the business side, they see it from more of the making money. So you see the impact of the application changing the business model. It's a retail app or whatever they get it. That that's gonna be the future. Yeah, it depends on where you're coming from. >>It does. It does. And what's interesting is to >>see how this community has evolved and actually, how we've evolved to be able to support people along the way. So as you remember, when you were first year, it was really some techies who realized they needed to learn something new. So is about learning about software and AP eyes. And then we evolved. It became about coding. So how do we use a definite automation exchange in code exchange to use a software based model to build community code around networking use cases because they wanted to use it and get it into use cases. And then now we have people are like, Okay, I'm doing it, I get it. But I can't get my business leaders to understand. So now we're actually helping them express the business case and create use cases that solve business problems more directly, so >>your access to customer success >>and customer success. So now explain that piece. What is that? How >>to be successful at training is everything >>customer direction. What is that piece? So s >>o me and my team were Cisco employees, and sometimes I mean, this doesn't get represented, but we move around the York, so you know, as different things change. And so there's a recent move where it has been in the engineering team. I've now moved into the customer experience organization. We're doing a transformation like a customer experience, customer success, transformation for Cisco and so you know, as we think about that. Well, first of all, Cisco's always been customer oriented, But what does this mean in a world of software in world of partners? ecosystems with the products and opportunities we have now. And so, as we're gearing towards this kind of customer success and customer experience model, is that, you know, they're trying to do a transformation, and it's actually very similar to what Dev Net has already done, which is specifically, let's see. So when you engage with a company on new technology, we can say Okay, come here to the DEV Net Zone and learn about the AP eyes, you know. But as you're working with a customer and you say, Hey, you know you're from the customer, let's go on this journey together. Did you know that we have AP eyes? Let's learn about AP eyes. >>And did you know that >>this product performs this function? But it also has AP eyes. So let's teach you about those. Then you learn a different aspect of the product that you might not have thought about before because you're like, Oh, it can be a platform and then you say, Hey, and you know you need to solve automation. This can be used to solve automation, and so then you're like, Oh, I'm thinking about automation, but how do I do it? so you can't have just one product. That's >>that's a progression that depends on what the customer's orientation is, whether environment looks like >>so it >>means, like start to evolve and think about their problem. Actually, their problem is automation. Their problem is not using this product right. They're trying to solve a bigger product and hopefully this is a bigger business problem or an automation problem. And this product is a piece of the puzzle into it. So we want to kind of engage in the full discussion from what is your need, an automation and then work backwards toe like, How can this product help? And so it's kind of like turning things upside down and ensuring the customer uses. And, you know, we understand their business problem. We're helping them solve it. And this is how these products can play a role in helping you achieve that >>in every business is looking at that from the corner office. They all want to drive automation into their business. They're looking at okay, if the economy turns out more automation, whether it's you know, you see an R P. A takeoff is the cloud is supporting that, Yeah, it's a big trend >>is huge, and it's, you know, and actually moving to an automation infrastructure. It's not like buy a new product and you've automated and you're done. It's actually very hard, and it requires an architectural shift. It means, like I'm going to start to build telemetry, analyze data and get insights from it. Well, if you don't have that implemented somewhere, then you need to architect for them. And then once you start building into that and seeing dashboards and then connecting that into other business APS, then you start to go further and further so every step along the way, we want to get them closer to an automation architecture. But that takes work, >>and it's cultural as well as people hear automation. If it well, that's my job and so >>little >>education. And then once they see it, Oh, you mean I could get rid of all these things I don't like to do, and I can do this instead. Then they really lean in and create new value. >>Yeah, So what we're getting at is this, like, really interesting. I'll call it a new technology trend of looking at kind of automation, plus Ai together, right? And so I've been talking about it out here in some places, which is now we've been talking about automation. We've been talking about AI. You look at these together. There's a set of people who are like, Let's think about what automation means. It could mean Oh my gosh, someone's going to take my job away. I don't need people anymore That would be called like autonomous. And there's some things that you do want to make autonomous and work themselves. But then you can also look at kind of assisting humans. Right? So assisting like, what are you trying to do? Roll out configurations across different places and get them set up where we can automate that and you can assist a human? And being able to do it on this next age is augmenting humans. What is there that a person really couldn't do that they can do now in a night? Example of that is, you know, you take a look at threat intelligence and security going around the world. Cisco has products around the world that are looking for security threats. You put those together, you can see a threat before it comes to a customer environment and say, Hey, we found this threat. We better shut it down over in your system to make sure you're blocked and protected from it. You've augmented human capability, you know, using automation and AI. >>You know, one of the things a lot of companies do is they focus on a big wave and they focus on it. They get on that new wave. Cisco's on a lot of different ways. You got I, O. T. And Security, which you were talking about. This kubernetes and Cloud native is like all these collaboration. They're all their own big waves coming. So I have to ask you because you've been so successful, definite and then a great leader in the industry with all your experience. What's your vision as this comes in? Because Cisco is that one of the benefits uniquely positioned with all the complexity, all the opportunities to the Dev ops, like across the board up and down the stack, these waves are coming. It's not just one. You have a focus on kubernetes. You got a focus on security. There's all these different big things that you guys are working on. What's your vision >>on how >>this all plays out >>like so while there's different, there's different things going on kubernetes and cloud. You know, we're doing networking. What's going on in I O. T and Edge Computing and the Future of Cognitive Collaboration and AI and ML, And you know all of this kind of thing a security I don't actually view them as separate. Actually view them is all part of a bigger system, right? They're part of a platform that's trying to solve a bigger problem, >>and the secret is AP ice. So it's actually a >>combination of architecture in AP eyes and how this works is a fabric together and you know there's benefit. Like if you're trying to do security, sure, you can use security products to do security. But why don't you also use network segmentation to do security, like literally segment out pieces of the network and, you know, data and APS that should not be talking to other places and use that for security? So, you know, I kind of view it is all working together towards a bigger architecture because you're using Ap eyes. You can start to put these things together and start to apply policies across these different domains. So this kind of whole new area, another new technology trend, is looking at multi domain opportunities and cross architecture. So that's really key >>in the data that you get out of that as well, right? Data and metadata that you can analyze and then act upon. Yes, Dr. Inside >>multi domain, multi clouds Having >>data models, right? Look at how do you take, you know, so that all these different systems are adding up to a everything you need to create data models that these different applications can kind of pour into >>that used to be locked inside of a box. Sitting in >>these types of application would have its own >>kind of model, But we're really all working towards the bigger thing in software that lets you down in >>the silicon is a great thing to get so looking One coming, Yes, moving from the box of the chip. Yeah, not a bad strategy. >>Super interesting. So, yeah, >>if you look at, you know, where are the bottlenecks in this? And this is where you need to rethink what your business strategy is. And it's just like you down in the optics down at that layer is where the big opportunities are. And if we can differentiate and provide value in that space, then that's what we've done. We >>were riffing the other night in the taxi came in I said, The day of Digital and digital, which is the Internet's all digital. Now the business model is the killer app, and we're just more of a provocative statement like, What are you trying to dio with that? What all this is? What's the purpose of all this? >>Yeah, I >>have a business model that actually works. >>It is, But it is, Yeah, >>and what's interesting about the business model? Also, to think about that? It's not just your own business model. It's again. That's where that's why I called our new group ecosystem success. It's what you do, you know. And there's this whole model of success, meaning you your customer, your supply chain up above you and then how you deliver. But it's east west now, too, right? It's like, How does your innovation work with your partner's innovation? Another area that and how did this all happen together? Like, how do you take trends in security and advances there and, you know, in workforce and people. And as you take a look at, you know, everything that's happening in cloud and then intersect so that we're all successful >>and it's enabled by what you're saying before automation and AI obviously supported by Cloud AP eyes and data across that system that you guys were talking >>about, I think that I think the bumper sticker for Cisco's Cisco connects businesses because that's really what you're doing. >>There we go way >>shut up for the 1st 500 >>Yes, yes, yes. So yes. So some of the big news over here is that well, in this >>world of where the infrastructure becomes programmable. So what Cisco's had a long time is Cisco's sort of certification program. So we have ccn a Cisco Certified Network Associates. Si Si n Pi's CC III is the expert level, and that's been an industry standard for the last 26 years, and people have job roles. They've gotten promotions, they get recognized, their certified for delivering quality, and what we've introduced is the definite certifications. So, in addition to the engineering certifications or the software certifications and Devon, it's kind of growing to the next level. By so far, everybody who's been in here has been into definite because of their hearts and because they knew they had to learn anything. But now we're giving them a certification so they can be recognized as their efforts, and we're expanding Cisco certification to cover it. Now. This represents the move of engineering plus software together in your I T teams and together for your technology teams and the new certifications. The definite set of Cisco Live February 24th the 1st 500 people to earn a definite certification. We're going to call the definite 500. And >>so they want to be the first >>ones who are really stepping forward in this new industrial shift towards combining engineering and software, making the world of the infrastructure talking to business and driving business happen. >>Well, we'd love to be First, get a list of >>thousands of people 500 seats that will take. We'll take the 501st 10,000 in the 1,000,000 I dive >>Heard Susie. Some Cisco VP's want to get into that 500. >>They yes, Gamification. >>Always a good strategy, Susie. Great to watch your successes with folks watching, seeing definitely come from an idea execution and now core to the business model's been quite an evolution. Congratulations. Always success. >>Thank you. And thank you for joining us on this journey. >>So we've been working together on it. >>We've learned a lot. It's been so much fun. We're in the DEV Net zone. I'm John Furrier Dave Vellante with Susie Wee, the chief of the definite team and the big zones gets bigger every year. And the cube's getting big air thanks to you and the team. Appreciate it is to keep more live coverage from Barcelona. Cisco live 2020 after this short break. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2020. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-hosts Stu Miniman, John Furrier is also in the house. We're here with Ryan Rose, Technical Program Manager at Cisco Devnet. Ryan, great to see you. What's goin' on? >> Hey, thank you so much. I'm really glad to be here. >> You know, we have a soft spot in our heart, for Devnet, because of course, we're in the Devnet zone, Devnet is the reason why theCUBE originally came to Cisco Live, and so it's been awesome seeing the evolution and the ascendancy of DevNet. It's now mainstream, you get a lot of love on the main stage, and really, it is the linchpin of the next generation of training and certifications for the engineers, the network engineers. So, tell us, give us a little quick history of Devnet, You've been here since the beginning, you remember the first Devnet. >> Oh yeah, in fact, so during my time at Cisco, like I was originally in learning at Cisco and being able to move over into Devnet, but I remember the very first Devnet experience that I had, and it started back when Devnet started about five years ago now. It was at Cisco Live San Francisco. At the time, they had split us across two streets, you know, they were trying to put, Cisco was trying to put a lot of activities going on in San Francisco. And they put Devnet in this walkway that was next to the Moscone Center, and, inside the Moscone Center. And when you went in there, it was packed. I mean, it was just shoulder to shoulder. Everyone there was just so excited because everyone was trying to learn, like, what is Devnet? And now, to look back on that, it's just so crazy how people have just been so quick to embrace the Devnet mission, the Devnet philosophy. Really getting into automation and programmability. And it's so exciting for us every year to be coming back, seeing you at theCUBE, being here in the Devnet zone, and being able to help people continue on that journey. Yeah, it's been great. >> Yeah, so, and we got some hard news to talk about today, I said in my breaking analysis this week that Cisco, when it rose, it pulled a number of levers, and one of them was really creating the role of the Network Engineer, the CCIE, and the certifications. People have really understood the challenges of what Stu calls the dark art of networking. And now you're bringing that sort of hardware certification to software, so let's get right into the news. What are you guys announcing today, and why is this important? >> Thank you so much for letting us talk about this because I think everybody has been really excited since Chuck came out in San Diego, announced the Devnet certification, said they were going to be, the new exams were going to be available February 24th, so we're about a month out from there. And to help people get started, we just announced here, about two big new offerings. The first is our Devnet Associate Fundamentals Training. Which we'll be launching on February 21st, so that way we can help individuals that are looking to start building up the skills and the exam readiness that they need to pursue a Devnet Associate Certification. We also announced our new Devnet Study Group Platform. Because we don't want people to just find the tools and the training that they need at Devnet, we want them to find each other. We want them to not just build together, but learn together. So we will now have a brand new Devnet Study Group Platform to help people have that type of interactivity. >> Ryan, I'm curious if you have much visibility into who's going to be taking these. You know, how many of them are the ones that, are the NetVets, the CCIE's that have done this year after year, and how many are new? >> Oh, I will tell you right now, we are actually getting this really wide and diverse audience, in fact, in the Devnet zone, we are providing a presentation on getting ready for Devnet certification four times a day, and it is packed every time we do it. And the audience is networking engineers, veteran networking engineers. When we ask people in the crowd how many of you have certifications, how many of you are CCIE's? We get a wide variety of CCIE's. This morning, we had a crew of software developers. So, we are getting people that are coming from kind of, all job roles, at all stages in their career. What they're embracing is that Devnet philosophy, around coding, around automation. They want to bring those practices back, whether that's DevOps, whether that's bringing a greater understanding of programmability, and so we're actually getting everyone, whether again, they're veterans or brand new. >> Yep, now I love that, because about 10 years ago there was this big movement, and they said, network engineers, your future is miserable, you all need to learn to decode, throw out what you learned, and fast forward to today, there's multiple paths to get there. As you were talking about, there's diverse backgrounds, there's lots of ways to be relevant to automation, of course, is hugely important. Coding is a major piece of it, but it's not, forget everything that you knew, it's how everything all works together. >> Yeah, I completely agree. I feel like, especially because the Devnet certifications aren't just the, are only one part of the launch on February 24th. In fact, the entire certification portfolio, and I know you're going to have other Cisco leaders on to talk about this, that is also being updated and launched on February 24th. And what I think you're going to see here is that flexibility that is in the program now, where you can actually have elements of automation baked into that network engineering journey. So you can still have the elements that people have been focusing on and building upon, except now you can stack on these new skills as you go. >> So, if I go back 10 years, maybe even a little bit more, but certainly 10 years ago, people were reticent to embrace automation. You know, you sort of alluded to that Stu, but now in this day and age, automation is fundamental. You can't scale without automation. And so the Devnet zone is really about taking beyond that existing skill set, going to the next level. Okay, so if you think about the network engineer and the training that they've gotten in the past, to deploy, manage, and optimize networks, automation comes in, simplifies all that. How do you describe what the future looks like for that engineer that's been Devnet certified? What are they doing? >> Oh, I think that now it's like, it opens up a brand new horizon of tasks and even efficiencies. New things that people have yet to even, or new job roles that even starting to emerge. A really good example, and one that we even talked about here at the Devnet zone, is the DevSecOps engineer, or the SecDevOps engineer. It's not that, and Susie has even talked about this as well too, Susie Wee, who leads Devnet. It's that jobs are changing, and roles are expanding, and so rather than just having this opportunity where you're looking at supporting a network or acting as a network administrator, now with automation, to your point, we actually can expand the opportunities of the roles themselves, and really open up things like, maybe you want to add those security automation elements, maybe you're interested in adding the collaboration automation elements, but whatever you are looking to do, the way that the program is built, post February 24th of 2020, you're able to actually have the opportunity to add in those skill validation exams, really build upon where you want to go. So I would say the horizon is wide and bright. >> So, to carry this up further, my question is, so the lines are blurring between, you know, Dev and Ops, right, and then, so a network engineer is going to become more Dev oriented, do you see them actually either contributing to or, certainly contributing to, but actually developing apps, say for instance, for the Edge? Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >> Well, we are actually encouraging, as we have more and more people join the Devnet community, we actually have two elements, two exchanges, our automation exchange and our code exchange, to really help people as they're moving through that. We're already starting to see that learners, individuals, are coming through Devnet, making that change themselves, and actually contributing code to our code exchange, but also adding use cases to our automation exchange. So that way they're able to show not only how they're implementing these cases, buy why they're doing it. And the types of business outcomes that they're achieving. So that's a practice that has already started to take off. And I think certifications and things like the automation exchange, they go hand in hand, building the skills, and then adding to the program. >> Well, you hear in the keynote today, all the talk about bringing IT and OT together. Again, part of that, I've always said that the edge is going to be won by developers. Because critical infrastructure needs to be secured. And, you know, developers, the DevSecOps role, and I think this crowd is actually going to be an important lever in terms of bringing those two worlds together, your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I actually think that that bridge is something that everyone is crossing right now. And, in fact, that's one of the motivations behind the updates to the certification portfolio. In fact, you'll find that we have parts of the portfolio that are shared between the hardware side and the software side. So that way we can have people as they're making that transition, as they're starting to move into that world, that larger world of network automation, we're actually having it be more of a clear journey for them, so they're able to work that into their own certification pouch. And I would say that these people that are here in the Devnet zone, they're the pioneers. They're the ones that are out there on that edge that are doing that exploration and building these new things, these new worlds that we are going to start experiencing in automation. >> And I guess Stu, it goes without saying, but it's worth saying, this is really all about programmable infrastructure, infrastructurous code, bringing the cloud operating model to your data, to your infrastructure, wherever it lives, right? >> Yeah, so Ryan, one of the things that struck us is not only is there so much enthusiasm, but the breadth of the offering here, everything from, here's some cool Meraki IOT things, to you, you talked about security, automation sprinkled throughout, can you just remind our audience a little bit as people get through the certifications, you know, what are some of the PaaS that they have for different parts of the portfolio? >> Oh, absolutely, so the certification journey that we have right now within Devnet, we actually align it to all of our five major technology tracks right now, so there are pathways within the portfolio around enterprise networking, security, collaboration, service provider, and also data center. But we also have pathways, as well, around application buildouts in IOT, and Edge computing, WebEx, and also, we have an entire practice that's now just dedicated to DevOps. And because DevOps is a concentration that can be, that is a horizontal throughout all of the certifications, this is something that you can now add to your journey. So we can actually have people here, and in fact, we've been answering this question more and more, how do I become more proficient at DevOps? A part of that is now in the certification journey. And so we've done that here. >> You should mention that we're in the IOT takeover right now in the Devnet zone. >> So Ryan, what about the partner ecosystem, talk to us about how, what impact do they have, how much of the ecosystem is getting involved in certifications too. >> Oh, well, I will say that we've actually, we've brought in a lot of people to help us develop this program initially. And I know that you're going to have additional Devnet leaders, they're going to be coming on, talking about partner ecosystems, so I don't want to take anything away from them, but I will say this. There is a lot of excitement because of the fact that when we brought the Devnet certifications out and what that would mean, for example, the new Devnet partner specialization. This is something that has been embraced by our partner community, but it's been embraced by the developers, whether they're our partner developers, they're our customers, or our networking engineers. Now that they have these as options for them to pursue, we have only been met with like positive enthusiastic engagement. And in fact, even now, we're starting to see a lot of people that aren't asking anymore, in fact, going back to San Francisco, when everyone was saying, what is Devnet, now they're asking how do I Devnet. And it is so great to be able to come and show them not only the certifications, but the associate fundamentals training, these new Devnet study group platforms that we have to show them you know the what now, here's the how. >> So, how challenging, cus I was talking to a lady on the floor yesterday, and we were chatting, and I said, "you were CCIE", she goes, "Oh, it's my dream, you know, I'm working my way there, it's very challenging, but I'm doing really well". Similar challenges, presumably, to get Devnet certified? >> Yes. >> How trivial. >> No, it is not trivial. It is a certification in the exact same hallmark that we hold CCNA, CCNP, and CCIE. The Devnet certifications are just as rigorous. And so we are giving people a lot of tools to help them get ready. And in fact, one of the things that we've done to help people on this journey take the initial steps, is we are not holding back any secrets. We've hosted every one of our exam topics for all 10 of our Devnet exams at developer.cisco.com/certification. There you can find out the exact skills we'll be testing you on for all of those exams. But we went a step further. We found every Devnet learning lab that you can take today for free to start getting ready on that exam journey. And so for every single exam, you can find training that you can engage with. So as people are starting this journey, if they want to get ready and just build their skills, especially if they're starting at zero, for example, if they think python is just a snake, we have a learning lab for them. So we have an entire plan that's built so they can start getting ready, and advance and move forward for that certification process. >> What should a college kid do to get prepared for this? If he or she wants to get into IT, become a network engineer, or Devnet is interested in them, what should they take, what courses should they be interested in? >> Oh man, that is a great question. We talk to a lot of people that are in a CS program, or computer science program, and so many young people that are moving through college now, they're already in the habit of programming. They've been working on things, they might have even been programming their own video games, or adding something to the new Mario games where you can actually build your own levels. What I would recommend to every young person, and in fact, to anyone that's on this journey, come to Devnet. We have an incredible amount of tools. At developer.cisco.com, just by signing up, you get access, not only to training that can take you from zero to coding, to making your first API call, to finding our Sandboxes, where you can take that theoretical knowledge and put it into practice using Cisco hardware and tools, and then you can also find use cases there too. I think everyone is often just looking for where can I start, how do I start. Devnet is gone so far as to even have a Start Now area on the Devnet main page. So when you come to Devnet, we're always trying to meet you where you're at. If you're a veteran networking engineer, if you're a veteran developer, or if you're just starting out, you're a college student, we've got a plan for you to be able to take. >> Awesome, right, check it out folks, you know, career builder, Cisco's always been renowned at that. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, it's great to have you. >> Oh, hey, thank you so much for having me. >> You're welcome, all right, keep it right there buddy, we'll be back with our next guest from Cisco Live in Barcelona. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering splunk.com 19 brought to you by Splunk. >>Hey, welcome back. Everyone's the cubes coverage here in Las Vegas for Splunk's dot com I'm John, the host of the cube. This is Splunk's 10th year user conference is the cube seventh year. We've been riding on the same wave with Splunk over the years and just watching the phenomenal growth and changes at the level of data at scale we've been covering. We can remember I said from day one data at the center of this, not just log files is now gone. Beyond that, we're here with Carrie Pailin, the CMO, chief marketing officer for Splunk. Welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. The folks that know us know about spunk. Notice the color changes in the background, the popping kink, burning yellow, orange underneath, new branding. You're new to Splunk story, career in technology. Um, this is exciting. And then portfolio, there's all the news is a phenomenal good news flow. >>Very relevant, right on Mark. Data is now creating value and datas like software. It's enabling value. Splunk software and solution platform has done that and this new new grounds to take. But you're now setting the agenda for the brand and the company tell us, I mean, it's a marketer's dream. What can I say? It's a, you know, I joined nine months ago and when I was interviewing for the role, I remember Doug Merritt saying to me, Hey, you know, we might be the only $2 billion enterprise software company that nobody's ever heard of. Amy said, I want to go solve for that. Right? Like the folks who know Splunk and our customers, they love us, our product is awesome and our culture is awesome, but the world doesn't know about us yet and we haven't invested there. So I want to go take the brand to the next level. >>And I want the world to understand what data use cases are out there that are so broad and so vast. And we believe that every problem ultimately can be solved through data or almost every problem. And we wanted to set the stage for that with this new brand campaign. Yeah. Just on a personal note. And following the journey of Splunk, a scrappy startup goes public and growth modes. When you're a growth Moe is hard to kind of lay down foundational things like branding and whatnot. But now sponsor leader, we did a poll within our community and for cloud and on premise security, Splunk's the number one supplier for just laws with workloads. And then now cloud security is kicking in. So the relationship to Amazon, Google cloud platform and Azure is a critical part of Splunk is now the leader. So leaders have to do things like make sure that their brand's good. >>This is what you're doing. Take us behind the scenes of the branding, the things you chose and data for everything. Yeah. D the little small nuance data to everything. Um, and the reason behind that was we believe you can bring and we can enable our customers to bring data to every question, every decision and every action to create meaningful outcomes. And the use cases are vast and enormous. We talked about some of them before the show started, but helping look at global law enforcement, get ahead of human trafficking through SPOHNC and spelunking. What's going on across all sorts of data sources, right? Helping zone Haven, which is our first investment from Splunk ventures, which startup that's actually helping firefighters figure out burn burn patterns with fire wildfires. But also when temperatures and humidity change where sensors are, they can alert firefighters 30 to 45 minutes earlier than they would usually do that. >>And then they can also help influence evacuation patterns. I mean it's, it's remarkable what folks are doing with data today and it's really at the, at the core of solving some of the world's biggest issues. It's hard to tell a story for a company that solves some of the use cases. Yes. Because depending on who you talk to, that's the company. This is what we should be telling them. I know you do this over here, so when you're horizontally creating this kind of value, yeah, it's hard to kind of brand that because it will get a lot of opinions because you're doing a lot of different things. There's not like one vertical. That's right. So this is the challenge that most B to B marketers will fall on the trip. We do this because we have a lot of customers in this one segment. But yes, you guys are hitting so much more. >>How did you deal with that? Ha, we had a lot of talks about it, a lot of discussions, a lot of debate and I love diversity of thought. It usually drives the right outcomes, but we had a lot of this, this is not an easy answer. If it had been, it would have been done years ago and we really talked about setting the stage for where, you know, I love the Wayne Gretzky quote about skate to where the puck is going and that's what he always did and that's why he was so good. We believe there will ultimately be a data platform of platforms and we believe Splunk is that platform, right? And so that's where the industry's going. We wanted to cast a net that would take us there so that this is the beginning of a brand evolution for us and not a total rebrand, but it's setting the stage for a category creation that we believe is coming in the industry. >>A few. You guys are smart and I think my observation would be looking at some of our 10 years of reporting and sharing some on digital is that all the conversations around data is impacting the real world. Yes. You see Mark Zuckerberg and on Capitol Hill having the answer to the date of debacles, he has cybersecurity attacks, national security, um, ransomware taking down cities and towns. This is a real impact. Forest fires disrupting rolling blackouts. So technology's impacting real world lives. That's right. This is really new to tech. I mean usually behind the scenes, you know, coding, but not anymore. We're the front lines of real societal, global. Yes. Jade is at the forefront and it's really exciting. It's also frightening, right? Because we believe data presents the greatest opportunity for humanity, but also some of the greatest threats. And so hence our ability to really dig in on data security. >>It's important to do that while we're actually also surfacing data to solve real world issues. You've been in the industry for a while and when you came to Splunk, boasts a couple of things that surprised you as you, you had some thoughts going in, you knew Splunk. Yes. What are some of the things that surprised you when you got here? Oh, I mean, in such a good way. A few things, you know. Well, here's the story. Three days into being at Splunk, my dad got very ill and I wasted him to Austin for heart surgery and he actually didn't make it. Um, and so it's been a rough year to say the least. And uh, the way that Splunk's culture, I knew about it before I came, but the way that this company treated me, like I had been here 10 years, uh, when I'd really only been an employee three days was something I'll never forget. >>And it's, it's special. Um, and so I believe that companies are successful if they are smart and healthy and in Splunk has the healthy and droves and not just the compassion and the empathy, but you know, a very transparent culture. We debate things, we talk about things, we support each other. We are accountable. And I believe that's a big part of why we've grown so fast because our culture is incredibly healthy and very, um, collaborative as a team. I'm sorry for your loss. Thank you. Um, you mentioned the culture is a big part of Splunk. Yes. In talking to some of the folks that spoke over the years, there's no, I will, I'll totally say this. There's no shortage of opinions, so have not volunteered. These are robustness. Yes. Diversity of thoughts, very actionable communities. How do you, um, how do you look at that? Because that's a, could be a force, a force multiplier. >>Yes. For the brand. How are you going to tie in to everything with the community? How are you going to harness that energy? Yeah. So it's coming and the reality is data to everything is actually a set up to tell the stories of everyone who is using data today. And so the community is going to be one of the first places we go to surface. Some of those amazing stories. Um, and some of the things you see here at the show are actually showcasing that in the keynote today we heard from zone Haman and Porsche and so many others around their use cases. But the community is where it all begins and that's the lifeblood of our sort of spunkiness and a something that we don't take for granted once. One second. Sorry about the Barack Obama. Yeah. Directions with him and his interest in Splunk. Yeah. So we had our big re rebrand a reveal last month we had an event and it was for C suite type of folks. >>That was a very intimate event and we wanted somebody to keynote that and headline that that really brought to life the whole notion that you can bring data to everything. And president Obama was the first POTUS that actually use data in his campaign strategy. He's very open about that. He's the first president to appoint a chief data scientist to the white house. He's actually exceptionally geeky and very data-driven. And so when we asked him to come and headline this, he actually was really excited about it. Um, and you know, in, in great fashion, his communications team was really strict on curating the questions that we had for him. And he was so cute. He showed up to the event and he said, look, um, I'm so thrilled to be here. I love what you guys are doing and you can ask me anything. It's just like ready to go. >>And he was so wonderful and teed up this, this notion of day bringing data to everything so brilliantly. He's kicking, dig and be ad live all the time. He's very colorful as well as personality. Yes. He's kind of nerdy and you know, he was very open and OpenGov too. One of the things that I remember and when big data really started rolling into the scene around 2009, 2010 yes. You saw that opening up data registries from cities and towns and actually created innovation from health care medical supplies? Yes. Yes. So this has been a big part of it. Huge. You guys are doing some things out here and I see the exhibits we're using the day you're doing demos. How do you see you guys helping society with that? Because if you get to the next level, you've got some great use cases. Yes, the public sector is a big part of some news here. >>Fed ramp is one little technicality, but you got some certification, but government's modernizing now. So you know post Obama, you're seeing modernization of procurement roll with cloud, certainly cyber security. Amazon with the CIA, department of defense, role of data in the military and public sector. Yes, education. This is going to be a disruptive enabler for faults on the public impact. I mean, look, there's, you know, Doug touched on this a little bit this morning, the reality in our press conference, but the reality is if you do it right, opening up datasets to communities of people that can do better together and you can get this collective momentum going. For instance, in healthcare, I mean I'm a little bit of a health care nerd and I don't know if you've watched the PBS special on the Mayo clinic, it's spectacular. But one of the reasons the Mayo has been amazing for years is because their doctors all work off the same systems in every discipline in that facility and they can learn more holistically about a patient. >>And I think about the impact that data could have if we could open up those data sets across every health provider for one person or the same illness with every major institution across the U S collaborating and sharing and what we could actually do to make real impact and strides against some of the diseases that are really crippling society today. So I think that the good that we can do with data, if we open up those data sets and do it in a way that, that it's safe. It's remarkable the progress we can make. You know, one of the from machine learning has been a big success story. Machine learning toolkit. Customers are raving about it. Opening up the data creates better machine learning. AI creates better business value. That's right. That's that part of how you guys see things rolling out. Sure. I mean, as a marketer we use AI today and it's really more machine learning. >>It's sad pattern recognition. But we use, uh, you know, my last stand as a CMO, the last company I was at, we use an AI bot to augment our sales headcount for following up on leads. And it looked like a human being. I mean, same thing for Splunk. I mean, the more we can see pattern recognition, proffer up insights, the better off we are to help out our customers. And so Tim Teles team is driving that hard and fast into our innovation curve with everything that we do. Innovation culture, big time here, right? Huge, huge and one of the reasons I came to Splunk is when I interviewed with Tim and I said, Hey, how are you doing on recruiting engineers in the Valley? We all know that that is liquid gold, and he said that he had hired 370 odd engineers in less than a year and from really big brands like Airbnb and I thought, all right, there's some really cool innovation going on here. >>If some of the best engineers in the Valley really want to come work here and they want to work for a great leader, and Tim and his team are that. so.com is 10 years now this year has been riding the wave together. It's been fun. Your first, my very first dotcom. Yes. Your thoughts on this, on this community, this event. Share your, your thoughts. I mean I'm blown away and this is a team sport. I'm so proud of the events team, the creative team, the sales teams, everybody who's come together to make this event so spectacular. It's just sort of mind numbing that a company of our size can put on such an experience for our user community, but I'm also thrilled with the engagement. We have over 300 sessions this week and most of them are user and customer use, case driven and the stories they are telling are magnificent. >>They're doing this all with Splunk, so it's pretty special. And the ecosystem and the app showcase is pretty hot here. You're seeing real applications, people writing code on top of Splunk? Yes, it's, it's, I'm sorry I don't use this word often. I'm 48 but it's rad. It's so cool. Yes. Harry, thanks so much for coming on the cube and sharing your insights. Absolutely. Final thoughts for the people who aren't here at the event, watching on camera, what, how would you encapsulate.com this year? What's the top story that needs to be told? I mean, look, the reality is that we are bringing data to way more than just security and it ops, which has been our core use cases forever, and they will continue to be, but folks are that are not incredibly data literate or through Splunk bringing data to everything and solving some big gnarly issues in the world. And it's pretty exciting stuff. So check us out. All right. Thanks. Gnarly red. Cool. I need a surf board, Jerry. Thanks for coming on Friday. Thank you so much. Coverage here@thetenth.com I'm Jennifer with the cube, bringing you all the action here in Las Vegas. Three days of cubed wall to wall coverage. We've got one more after this short break.