(bright music) >> Well, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We're here joined by Ian Buck, general manager and vice president of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA. I'm John Furrrier, host of theCUBE. Ian, thanks for coming on. >> Oh, thanks for having me. >> So NVIDIA, obviously, great brand. Congratulations on all your continued success. Everyone who does anything in graphics knows that GPU's are hot, and you guys have a great brand, great success in the company. But AI and machine learning, we're seeing the trend significantly being powered by the GPU's and other systems. So it's a key part of everything. So what's the trends that you're seeing in ML and AI that's accelerating computing to the cloud? >> Yeah. I mean, AI is kind of driving breakthroughs and innovations across so many segments, so many different use cases. We see it showing up with things like credit card fraud prevention, and product and content recommendations. Really, it's the new engine behind search engines, is AI. People are applying AI to things like meeting transcriptions, virtual calls like this, using AI to actually capture what was said. And that gets applied in person-to-person interactions. We also see it in intelligence assistance for contact center automation, or chat bots, medical imaging, and intelligence stores, and warehouses, and everywhere. It's really amazing what AI has been demonstrating, what it can do, and its new use cases are showing up all the time. >> You know, Ian, I'd love to get your thoughts on how the world's evolved, just in the past few years alone, with cloud. And certainly, the pandemic's proven it. You had this whole kind of fullstack mindset, initially, and now you're seeing more of a horizontal scale, but yet, enabling this vertical specialization in applications. I mean, you mentioned some of those apps. The new enablers, this kind of, the horizontal play with enablement for, you know, specialization with data, this is a huge shift that's going on. It's been happening. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah. The innovation's on two fronts. There's a horizontal front, which is basically the different kinds of neural networks or AIs, as well as machine learning techniques, that are just being invented by researchers and the community at large, including Amazon. You know, it started with these convolutional neural networks, which are great for image processing, but has expanded more recently into recurrent neural networks, transformer models, which are great for language and language and understanding, and then the new hot topic, graph neural networks, where the actual graph now is trained as a neural network. You have this underpinning of great AI technologies that are being invented around the world. NVIDIA's role is to try to productize that and provide a platform for people to do that innovation. And then, take the next step and innovate vertically. Take it and apply it to a particular field, like medical, like healthcare and medical imaging, applying AI so that radiologists can have an AI assistant with them and highlight different parts of the scan that may be troublesome or worrying, or require some more investigation. Using it for robotics, building virtual worlds where robots can be trained in a virtual environment, their AI being constantly trained and reinforced, and learn how to do certain activities and techniques. So that the first time it's ever downloaded into a real robot, it works right out of the box. To activate that, we are creating different vertical solutions, vertical stacks, vertical products, that talk the languages of those businesses, of those users. In medical imaging, it's processing medical data, which is obviously a very complicated, large format data, often three-dimensional voxels. In robotics, it's building, combining both our graphics and simulation technologies, along with the AI training capabilities and difference capabilities, in order to run in real time. Those are just two simple- >> Yeah, no. I mean, it's just so cutting-edge, it's so relevant. I mean, I think one of the things you mentioned about the neural networks, specifically, the graph neural networks, I mean, we saw, I mean, just go back to the late 2000s, how unstructured data, or object storage created, a lot of people realized a lot of value out of that. Now you got graph value, you got network effect, you got all kinds of new patterns. You guys have this notion of graph neural networks that's out there. What is a graph neural network, and what does it actually mean from a deep learning and an AI perspective? >> Yeah. I mean, a graph is exactly what it sounds like. You have points that are connected to each other, that establish relationships. In the example of Amazon.com, you might have buyers, distributors, sellers, and all of them are buying, or recommending, or selling different products. And they're represented in a graph. If I buy something from you and from you, I'm connected to those endpoints, and likewise, more deeply across a supply chain, or warehouse, or other buyers and sellers across the network. What's new right now is, that those connections now can be treated and trained like a neural network, understanding the relationship, how strong is that connection between that buyer and seller, or the distributor and supplier, and then build up a network to figure out and understand patterns across them. For example, what products I may like, 'cause I have this connection in my graph, what other products may meet those requirements? Or, also, identifying things like fraud, When patterns and buying patterns don't match what a graph neural networks should say would be the typical kind of graph connectivity, the different kind of weights and connections between the two, captured by the frequency of how often I buy things, or how I rate them or give them stars, or other such use cases. This application, graph neural networks, which is basically capturing the connections of all things with all people, especially in the world of e-commerce, is very exciting to a new application of applying AI to optimizing business, to reducing fraud, and letting us, you know, get access to the products that we want. They have our recommendations be things that excite us and want us to buy things, and buy more. >> That's a great setup for the real conversation that's going on here at re:Invent, which is new kinds of workloads are changing the game, people are refactoring their business with, not just re-platforming, but actually using this to identify value. And also, your cloud scale allows you to have the compute power to, you know, look at a note in an arc and actually code that. It's all science, it's all computer science, all at scale. So with that, that brings up the whole AWS relationship. Can you tell us how you're working with AWS, specifically? >> Yeah, AWS have been a great partner, and one of the first cloud providers to ever provide GPUs to the cloud. More recently, we've announced two new instances, the G5 instance, which is based on our A10G GPU, which supports the NVIDIA RTX technology, our rendering technology, for real-time ray tracing in graphics and game streaming. This is our highest performance graphics enhanced application, allows for those high-performance graphics applications to be directly hosted in the cloud. And, of course, runs everything else as well. It has access to our AI technology and runs all of our AI stacks. We also announced, with AWS, the G5 G instance. This is exciting because it's the first Graviton or Arm-based processor connected to a GPU and successful in the cloud. The focus here is Android gaming and machine learning inference. And we're excited to see the advancements that Amazon is making and AWS is making, with Arm in the cloud. And we're glad to be part of that journey. >> Well, congratulations. I remember, I was just watching my interview with James Hamilton from AWS 2013 and 2014. He was teasing this out, that they're going to build their own, get in there, and build their own connections to take that latency down and do other things. This is kind of the harvest of all that. As you start looking at these new interfaces, and the new servers, new technology that you guys are doing, you're enabling applications. What do you see this enabling? As this new capability comes out, new speed, more performance, but also, now it's enabling more capabilities so that new workloads can be realized. What would you say to folks who want to ask that question? >> Well, so first off, I think Arm is here to stay. We can see the growth and explosion of Arm, led of course, by Graviton and AWS, but many others. And by bringing all of NVIDIA's rendering graphics, machine learning and AI technologies to Arm, we can help bring that innovation that Arm allows, that open innovation, because there's an open architecture, to the entire ecosystem. We can help bring it forward to the state of the art in AI machine learning and graphics. All of our software that we release is both supportive, both on x86 and on Arm equally, and including all of our AI stacks. So most notably, for inference, the deployment of AI models, we have the NVIDIA Triton inference server. This is our inference serving software, where after you've trained a model, you want to deploy it at scale on any CPU, or GPU instance, for that matter. So we support both CPUs and GPUs with Triton. It's natively integrated with SageMaker and provides the benefit of all those performance optimizations. Features like dynamic batching, it supports all the different AI frameworks, from PyTorch to TensorFlow, even a generalized Python code. We're activating, and help activating, the Arm ecosystem, as well as bringing all those new AI use cases, and all those different performance levels with our partnership with AWS and all the different cloud instances. >> And you guys are making it really easy for people to use use the technology. That brings up the next, kind of, question I wanted to ask you. I mean, a lot of people are really going in, jumping in big-time into this. They're adopting AI, either they're moving it from prototype to production. There's always some gaps, whether it's, you know, knowledge, skills gaps, or whatever. But people are accelerating into the AI and leaning into it hard. What advancements has NVIDIA made to make it more accessible for people to move faster through the system, through the process? >> Yeah. It's one of the biggest challenges. You know, the promise of AI, all the publications that are coming out, all the great research, you know, how can you make it more accessible or easier to use by more people? Rather than just being an AI researcher, which is obviously a very challenging and interesting field, but not one that's directly connected to the business. NVIDIA is trying to provide a fullstack approach to AI. So as we discover or see these AI technologies become available, we produce SDKs to help activate them or connect them with developers around the world. We have over 150 different SDKs at this point, serving industries from gaming, to design, to life sciences, to earth sciences. We even have stuff to help simulate quantum computing. And of course, all the work we're doing with AI, 5G, and robotics. So we actually just introduced about 65 new updates, just this past month, on all those SDKs. Some of the newer stuff that's really exciting is the large language models. People are building some amazing AI that's capable of understanding the corpus of, like, human understanding. These language models that are trained on literally the content of the internet to provide general purpose or open-domain chatbots, so the customer is going to have a new kind of experience with the computer or the cloud. We're offering those large language models, as well as AI frameworks, to help companies take advantage of this new kind of technology. >> You know, Ian, every time I do an interview with NVIDIA or talk about NVIDIA, my kids and friends, first thing they say is, "Can you get me a good graphics card?" They all want the best thing in their rig. Obviously the gaming market's hot and known for that. But there's a huge software team behind NVIDIA. This is well-known. Your CEO is always talking about it on his keynotes. You're in the software business. And you do have hardware, you are integrating with Graviton and other things. But it's a software practice. This is software. This is all about software. >> Right. >> Can you share, kind of, more about how NVIDIA culture and their cloud culture, and specifically around the scale, I mean, you hit every use case. So what's the software culture there at NVIDIA? >> Yeah, NVIDIA's actually a bigger, we have more software people than hardware people. But people don't often realize this. And in fact, that it's because of, it just starts with the chip, and obviously, building great silicon is necessary to provide that level of innovation. But it's expanded dramatically from there. Not just the silicon and the GPU, but the server designs themselves. We actually do entire server designs ourselves, to help build out this infrastructure. We consume it and use it ourselves, and build our own supercomputers to use AI to improve our products. And then, all that software that we build on top, we make it available, as I mentioned before, as containers on our NGC container store, container registry, which is accessible from AWS, to connect to those vertical markets. Instead of just opening up the hardware and letting the ecosystem develop on it, they can, with the low-level and programmatic stacks that we provide with CUDA. We believe that those vertical stacks are the ways we can help accelerate and advance AI. And that's why we make them so available. >> And programmable software is so much easier. I want to get that plug in for, I think it's worth noting that you guys are heavy hardcore, especially on the AI side, and it's worth calling out. Getting back to the customers who are bridging that gap and getting out there, what are the metrics they should consider as they're deploying AI? What are success metrics? What does success look like? Can you share any insight into what they should be thinking about, and looking at how they're doing? >> Yeah. For training, it's all about time-to-solution. It's not the hardware that's the cost, it's the opportunity that AI can provide to your business, and the productivity of those data scientists which are developing them, which are not easy to come by. So what we hear from customers is they need a fast time-to-solution to allow people to prototype very quickly, to train a model to convergence, to get into production quickly, and of course, move on to the next or continue to refine it. >> John Furrier: Often. >> So in training, it's time-to-solution. For inference, it's about your ability to deploy at scale. Often people need to have real-time requirements. They want to run in a certain amount of latency, in a certain amount of time. And typically, most companies don't have a single AI model. They have a collection of them they want to run for a single service or across multiple services. That's where you can aggregate some of your infrastructure. Leveraging the Triton inference server, I mentioned before, can actually run multiple models on a single GPU saving costs, optimizing for efficiency, yet still meeting the requirements for latency and the real-time experience, so that our customers have a good interaction with the AI. >> Awesome. Great. Let's get into the customer examples. You guys have, obviously, great customers. Can you share some of the use cases examples with customers, notable customers? >> Yeah. One great part about working at NVIDIA is, as technology company, you get to engage with such amazing customers across many verticals. Some of the ones that are pretty exciting right now, Netflix is using the G4 instances to do a video effects and animation content from anywhere in the world, in the cloud, as a cloud creation content platform. We work in the energy field. Siemens energy is actually using AI combined with simulation to do predictive maintenance on their energy plants, preventing, or optimizing, onsite inspection activities and eliminating downtime, which is saving a lot of money for the energy industry. We have worked with Oxford University. Oxford University actually has over 20 million artifacts and specimens and collections, across its gardens and museums and libraries. They're actually using NVIDIA GPU's and Amazon to do enhanced image recognition to classify all these things, which would take literally years going through manually, each of these artifacts. Using AI, we can quickly catalog all of them and connect them with their users. Great stories across graphics, across industries, across research, that it's just so exciting to see what people are doing with our technology, together with Amazon. >> Ian, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. A lot of great content there. We probably could go another hour. All the great stuff going on at NVIDIA. Any closing remarks you want to share, as we wrap this last minute up? >> You know, really what NVIDIA's about, is accelerating cloud computing. Whether it be AI, machine learning, graphics, or high-performance computing and simulation. And AWS was one of the first with this, in the beginning, and they continue to bring out great instances to help connect the cloud and accelerated computing with all the different opportunities. The integrations with EC2, with SageMaker, with EKS, and ECS. The new instances with G5 and G5 G. Very excited to see all the work that we're doing together. >> Ian Buck, general manager and vice president of Accelerated Computing. I mean, how can you not love that title? We want more power, more faster, come on. More computing. No one's going to complain with more computing. Ian, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Appreciate it. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. You're watching Amazon coverage re:Invent 2021. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation vibrator this is Dave Volante and welcome to this special cube conversation as you know I've been running a CXO series now for several weeks really trying to understand how leaders are dealing and coping with the Cova 19 crisis today we want to switch gears a little bit and talk not only about how leadership has sort of navigated through this crisis but also start to imagine what it's going to look like coming out of it I'm going to introduce you to a company that have been talking about now for the last well six to nine months company called octave as you know from my previous breaking analysis this is a company that not only is in the security business they really kind of made their mark with identification management but also really there's a data angle normally when you think about security you thinking about auto security it means that less user flexibility it means less value from the user standpoint what what octa has done really successfully is bring together both endpoint security as well as that data angle and so the company is about six hundred million dollars in revenue they've got an eighteen billion dollar valuation which you know may sound kind of rich at 30 X a revenue multiple but as I've reported the company is growing very rapidly I've talked about the you know the rule of 40 octa is really a rule of 50 type of company you know by that definition they're with me here to talk about the product side of things as dia jolly who's the chief product officer yeah thanks so much for coming on the cube I hope you're doing okay how are things out in California things are going well good to meet you as well Dave I hope you're doing well as well yeah we're hanging in there you know the studios are rocking the cube you know continues our daily reporting I want to start with your role you're relatively new to octa you've got a really interesting background particularly understanding endpoints you're at Google Google home of Google Nest you spent some time you know worrying about looking after Xbox do you a good understanding of what's going on in the marketplace but talk about your your role and how specifically you're bringing that to enterprise sure so I drove about this I I say that I've done every kind of known product management imaginable the man at this point I'm done both Hardware Don software so dealt a lot with endpoints as you talked about that a lot with sass dealt with consumer dealt with enterprise and all over the place completely different sizes so after really my role as a chief product officer is to be able to understand and what our customers need right and what are the challenges they're facing and not just the challenges they're facing today but also what are the challenges that they'll face tomorrow that they don't even know about and then help build products to be able to overcome that both with our engineering teams as well as with our sales engineering team so that we can take it to market now my background is unique because I've seen so many identity being used in so many different ways across so many different use cases whether it's enterprise or its consumer and that given that we covered both sides spectrum I can bring that to bear yes so what I've reported previously is that that you guys kind of made your mark with with identification management but in terms of both workforce but also customer identification management which has been I think allowed you to be very very successful I want to bring up a chart and share something that I've I've shared a lot of data with our audience previously some guys if you bring that up so this is data from enterprise Technology Research our data partner and for those who follow this program you know we we generally talk in in two metrics a net score which is a measure of spending momentum and and also market share which really isn't real market share but it's it's pervasiveness in the survey and what you can see here is the latest April survey from over 1200 CIOs and IT practitioners and we're isolating on an octa and and we brought it back to July 15 survey you see a couple of points here I want to make one is it something to the right this is pervasiveness or market share so octa in the market is doing very very well it's why the valuation is so high what's driving the growth and then you can see in the green a 55% net net score very very strong it's one of the leaders in security but as I said it's more than than that so dia from a product standpoint what is powering this momentum sure so as you well know the world is working from home what after does is it provides Identity Management that allows you to connect to any technology and by any technology it primarily means technology technology that's not just on premise like your applications on-premise old-school applications or into software that's on premise but it also means technology that's in the clouds of SAS applications application infrastructure that's in the cloud etc and on the other hand it also allows companies to deploy applications where they can connect to their customers online so as more and more of the world moves to work from home you need to be able to securely and seamlessly allow your employees your partners to be able to connect from their home and to be able to do their work and that's the foundation that we provide now if you look at if you we've heard a lot in the press about companies like zoom slack people that provide online collaboration and their usage has gone up we're seeing similar trends across both octa as well as the entire security industry in general right and if you look at information recently since over to started phishing attacks have increased by six hundred and sixty seven percent and what we've seen in response is one of our products which is multi-factor authentication we've experienced in eighty percent growth in usage so really as Corvette has pushed forward there was a trend for people to be able to work remotely for people to be able to access cloud apps and but as ubered has suddenly poured gas on the fire for that we're seeing our customers reaching out to us a lot more needing more support and just the level of awareness and the level of interest raising let's talk about some of the trends that you guys see in the marketplace and like to better understand how that informs your product or you know roadmap and decisions you know obviously this cloud you guys have made a really good mark in the cloud space you know with both your your operating model your pricing model the modern stack the other is a reference that upfront which data talked a lot about digital transformation digital us data course the third is purity related to trust we've talked a lot on the cube about how the perimeter is there is no particular anymore the Queen is left her castle and so what are the big trends that you see the big waves that that you're riding and how does that inform your product directly sure so a few different things I think number one if you think about the way I've phrase this is or the way I think about it is the following any big technological trend you see today right whether it's the move the cloud whether it's mobile whether it's artificial intelligence intelligence you think about the neural nets etc or it's a personalized consumer experience all of that fundamentally depends on identity so the most important the so from a from being an identity provider the most important thing for us is to be able to build something that is flexible enough that is broad enough that it is able to span multiple uses right so we've taken from a product perspective that means we can follow two philosophies we can either the try and go solve each of these pain points one by one or we can actually try to build a platform that is more open that's more extensible and that's more flexible so that we can solve many of these use cases right and not only can we solve it because there's it extensible our customers can customize it they can build on top of it our partners can build on top of it so that's one thing that's one product philosophy that we hold dear and so we have the Octagon cloud which is a platform which provides both workforce identity as well as customer identity using the same underlying components the same multi-factor authentication we use for workforce we package up as an SDK so that our customer identity customers that's number one the second thing is you rightfully mention is data you can't really secure identity without data so we have very we have a lot of data across our customers we know when the users logging in we know what device they're logging in front we know the security posture on the device we know where they're logging in from we know their different behaviors were apps they go into or during wartime of the day etc so being able to harness all this data to say hey and apply ml model squared to say hey is the user secure or not is a very very core foundation of our product so for example we have what we call risk-based authentication you can not only do things like hey this user seems to be logging on from a location they've never logged on from but you could even do things like well you may not want to stop the user they may be traveling so instead of just asking them for a for a password you ask them for a multi-factor right so that's the other piece of it and in many ways data and security and usability are three legs of a triangle the more data you have the more you can allow a user you more security you can provide a user without creating more friction so it's sometimes helpful for the audience to understand a company in a edit Avant act in the landscape so the obvious platform out there is Active Directory now Microsoft with Azure Active Directory you know really you know trying to and and that's really been on their platforms but with api's you know Microsoft has got a thumbs in every pie how does octave differentiate from some of the other traditional platforms that are out there and and what gives you confidence that it and you can continue to do so going forward post kovat that's it that's a fantastic question Dave um so I think we divide if you think about our competitors on the workforce side we've got Microsoft and a couple of other competitors and on the customer Identity side really it's a bill versus buy story right most companies customer identity internally so let's take workforce first Microsoft is the dominant player there they've got Active Directory they've now got Azure Active Directory and from a Microsoft perspective I think Microsoft is always been great at building products or building technology that interconnected run the world is going to more there's more and more technology proliferation in the world and the way we differentiate is by becoming a neutral and independent platform so whether you're on a Microsoft stack whether you're on a Google stack whether you're on an amazon stack we are able to connect with you deeply we connect just as well with all 365 as they connect with Salesforce as we connect with AWS right and that has been our core philosophy and not only is that a philosophy for other when other vendors it's a philosophy for ourselves as well we have multi-factor authentication so do many other providers like duo if you want to use ours great if you don't want to use ours with our platform who use the one that's best for your technology and I think what we've always believed in from a product perspective is this independence this neutrality this ability to plug-and-play any technology you want into a platform to be able to do what you want and the technology that's best for your business's need so what's interesting what you said about the sort of make versus buy that's particularly relevant for the customer identification management because let's say you know I'm buying from Amazon I've got Amazon they know who I am but if I understand it correctly customers now are able to look across brands maybe cohort selling maybe make specific offers analyze the data that's an advantage that you bring that maybe do it yourself doesn't Frank maybe talk about that a little bit sure so really if you think about if you think about a bill versus buying even ten years ago life used to be relatively simple maybe 15 years ago you had a website you as your username your the password you weren't really using you don't have multiple channels you didn't have multiple devices as prevalent you didn't have multiple apps in a lot of cases connected to each other right and in that in that day and age password was fairly secure you weren't doing a lot of personalization with the user data or had a lot of sensitive user data so building a custom identity solution having your customer managing your customers identity yourself was fairly easy now it's becoming more and more hard number one I just talked about the phishing attacks they're an equal number of attacks on the customer identity side right so how do you actually secure this identity how do you actually use things like multi-factor authentication how do you keep up with all the latest in multi-factor authentication touch ID face ID etcetera and that's one the second thing we provide is scale for a number of companies we also provide the ability to scale dramatically which scaling identity and being being able to authenticate someone and keep someone authenticated in real time is actually a very big channel challenge as you get to more and more scale and then the last thing that you mentioned is this ability we provide a single view of the user which is super super powerful because now if you think about one of our customers Albertsons they have multiple different apps there are multiple different digital experiences and he don't have a siloed view of their customer across all these experiences here one identity for your customer that customer uses that one identity to log on to all your digital experiences across all channels and we're able to bring that data back together so if Albertsons wants to say hey somebody shot a in or bought something in one particular app but I know people that buy this particular object like something else that's available in another app they can give a promotion for it or they can give a discomfort that's so that makes a lot of sense I went into the PR platform get our data partner and I looked at which industries are really showing moment so remember this survey focus was run right in the heart of the the Cova 19 pandemic from from mid-march the mid April so it's a good of good current data point and there were four that stood out large companies healthcare and pharma telco which is courses this work-from-home thing and then consumer the example that you just gave from Albertsons is really you know sort of around that consumer there are a lot of industries that obviously been hit airlines restaurants hospitality but but these four really stood out as growth areas despite the kovat 19 pandemic I want to ask you about octane you just got it had your big user conference anything product specific that came out of that that our audience should know about I mean I'm an interested in access gateway I know that wasn't necessarily a new announcement but Cloud Gateway what were the highlights of some of those things from a product stamp yeah of course so we did we did made a very difficult decision to pivot octane virtually and we did this because a number of our customers are given what they're facing with the Kovach pandemic wanted to hear more around news around what our product launches are how they could use this with cetera and really I'd say there are three key product launches that I want to highlight here we had a number of different announcements and it was a very successful conference but the three that are the most relevant here one is we've always talked about being a platform and we've set this for the past four or five years I think and but over the last your and going into the next couple of years we're investing very very heavily in making our platform even more powerful even more extensible even more customizable and so that it can go across the scenarios you described right which is whether you're on Prem with Auto access gateway or you're in the cloud or in some kind of hybrid environment or you using some mix-and-match or work from home people in the office etc so really what we did this year over the last year was deepen our platform footprint and we started releasing the four components available in a platform which we call platform services so we have six components and we were directories that is customizable and and flexible so you can build your own emails except for N equals four users adds information related to them we have an integration platform that we've made available at a deep level where where our customers can use SDKs tools etc to be able to integrate with octa in a platform which we've talked a lot about and then we released three new platform services and one was what we call arc identity engine we had released we talked about this last year and this year we talked about it last year from a customer identity perspective this year we brought her into our workforce identity but also what that does is it allows you a lot more flexibility for situations like we're in right it allows you flexibility to define security policies at the parabola it so you could decide hey for my email I don't want my customers to have to use a multi-factor authentication for but for Salesforce I would definitely want them to use a multi-factor authentication if they're not in the office and it also allows you to have a lot more flexible factor recovery so for example if you forgot your password one of the biggest pain points of co-ed has been the number of helpdesk costs have been rising through the roof the phone calls are ringing nonstop right and one of the biggest reasons for helpdesk are says oh I can't login I got locked out either lost a factor or L forgot my password it helps with that um so that's one set of announcements the second set of announcements was we launched a brand new devices platform and personally this is my personal favorite but really what the devices platform allows you to do is the feature in it that we launched is called Fast Pass and what phosphorous allows you to do is it actually takes phosphorous to the next level it allows you to basically use logging into your device and us understanding the posture of the device and all the user context around you to be able to log you directly dr. then I imagine if you're on a Mac or a iOS device or an Android or a Windows device just being able to face match into your iOS or being able to touch ID into your Windows hello and you're automatically logged into lockdown right that is that and and the way we do that is we have this client on across all these operating systems that can really understand the security posture of the device it can understand of the device is managed if it's safe if it's jailbroken if it's unmanaged it can also connect with multiple signals on the device so if you have an EDR and MDM vendor we can ingest those signals and what they think of the risk we can also ingest signals directly from apps if apps things like um G suite and Salesforce actually track user behavior to determine risk they can pass those signals to us and then we can make a decision on hey we should allow the user to authenticate directly into octa because they've authenticated their device which we can make a decision that says no let's provider let's ask them to step up with a multi-factor authentication or we can say no this is too risky let's deny access and all of this is configurable by the IT admin they can decide the risk levels they're comfortable with they can decide the different risk levels by different apps so that was another major announcement and then and as a product person you rarely ever get the chance to actually increase security and usability at one time which is why it's my favorite you increase both security and usability together now the last one was action was a workflows engine we call it workflows lifecycle management and we it's really we launched a graphical no cord user interface identity is so important so many business processes for our customers there's so many business processes built an identity for example if someone joins her company you usually either have a script that allows them access to the applications they need to or you actually have an IT admin sitting in there trying to manually provide access or when they leave right what workflow lifecycle management or lifecycle management workflows allows you to do is it actually allows you to provide it actually provides you the no core graphical user interface where you can build all these flows so now you don't need someone that knows coding you can even have a business unit so for example I for me in the product for the product org I can have someone say hey building a business process similar it's something you would build in sort of like an iPad and allow everyone that comes in to be able to have access to fig mom because we use pigma a lot right those are the kinds of things you can do and it's super powerful and it takes the ability of our already existing lifecycle management product to the next level well thank you for that that's that summary dear so I want to kind of close with I mean those of you have been following the cube for a while there I think there's some similarities between octa and and and service now that obviously obvious differences but we started following you know ServiceNow pre-ipo is less than a hundred million dollar company and we've seen that company build out as a platform company and that's really what octa is doing here we're talking about a total available market that's yeah probably north of 50 billion so the the question I have he is you know what Frederic and pod started 11 years ago playing on the dynamics coming out of the financial crisis that got us to where we are today now you've got the challenge of you've achieved reached escape velocity now you've got this you know massive growth opportunity in front of you how do you see the product portfolio evolving expanding and I'm also interested in postcode with 19 you know no whiteboards no face-to-face contact not at least not for a while and how you're kind of managing through that but but how can we expect the product portfolio to expand over time what can you share with us so one of the given how pervasive identity has become and given how not just broad but at the same time deep it is there are multiple different places or product portfolio >> and a number of different places were thinking about right so one is you mentioned today we play in workforce identity and customer identity but we haven't even begun to talk about how we might play in consumer right one of the one of the biggest perk matter is consumers and consumers protecting their own identity so often an employee is not using their identity to lock the seals ports and you have an attack on a company and offered an employee actually logging into their Gmail their personal Gmail or their personal or some personal website that bank and they get and their credential get compromised in their fluency impossible so the more protective the more directly consumers the more we indirectly protect both enterprises from work from an employer as well as a customer perspective howdy we're an enterprise company so it doesn't mean that we are going to go direct to consumer there are ways to make employees more secure by what the director calls were so that's one the second thing is managing identities I think we've as the number of applications as the number of technologies are proliferate managing and an employee's life cycle who that governing that the life cycle is not administering etc is also fully stock also becoming very very challenging it was all well and good we'll never can ask and you were on that that's not true anymore an average company uses I think close to 200 applications and then if you broaden back to other resources like infrastructure there's a lot lock more so how do you actually build automated systems that based on the employee status based on their rule based on the project they're on provides them the right access for the right amount of time the third thing you mentioned is and you should pass on this initially but this is the there's this concept of zero security right and the perimeters disappeared how do you provide security so if you look at the industry at large today there are tons of different security vendors trying to provide security at each point if you talk to any see-saw out there it's really really hard to cobble all of this together and one of the things we were trying to do is we're trying to figure out how with our partners we can build a silly end-to-end solution for n - n zero trust for our customers so that's that's another area that the of the product portfolio we're pushing and then finally with the whole digital transformation and customer identity yes more and more companies want their customers to go back online yes more and more customers convenience of being able to interact online with Billy if you think about it the world has changed dramatically over the last three years with privacy laws with things like gdpr CCP etc how do you actually manage your customers obviously you actually manage their content how do you ensure that while you're using all this data from across these apps that we talked about here you and you're using for the first benefit how do you make sure that the minister private is secure and and how do you ensure your customers that's another major area that I think our customers are asking us for helping and so those are areas or so that you should be a big signature the next two to three years some of it will be through partnership that's generally that high-level directions we're headed in wealthy you so much for coming on the key on the key and sharing the product roadmap and some other details about the great company really interested in watching its continued ascendancy good luck in the marketplace and thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Villante you conversations we'll see you next time [Music]

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE here in San Diego for KubeCon CloudNativeCon, with John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, and happy to welcome to the program two guests, first time guests, I believe. Julio Tapia, who's the director of Cloud BU partner and community with Red Hat and Gou Rao, who's the founder and CEO at Portworx. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, happy to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> Alright, let's start with community, ecosystem, it's a big theme we have here at the show. Tell us your main focus, what the team's doing here. >> Sure, so I'm part of a product team, we're responsible for OpenShift, OpenStack and Red Hat virtualization. And my responsibility is to build a partner ecosystem and to do our community development. On the partner front, we work with a lot of different partners. We work with ISVs, we work with OEMs, SIs, COD providers, TelCo partners. And my role is to help evangelize, to help on integrations, a lot of joint solutions, and then do a little bit of go to market as well. And the community side, it's to evangelize with upstream projects or customers with developers, and so forth. >> Alright, so, Gou, actually, it's not luck, but I had a chance to catch up with the Red Hat storage team. Back when I was on the vendor side I partnered with them. Red Hat doesn't sell gear, they're a software company. Everything open-source, and when it comes to data and storage, obviously they're working with partners. So put Portworx into the mix and tell us about the relationship and what you both do together. >> Sure, yeah, we're a Red Hat OpenShift partner. We've been working with them for quite some time now, partner with IBM as well. But yeah, Portworx, we focus on enabling cloud native storage, right? So we complement the OpenShift ecosystem. Essentially we enable people to run stateful services in OpenShift with a lot of agility and we bring DR backup functionality to OpenShift. I'm sure you're familiar with this, but, people, when they deploy OpenShift, they're running fleets of OpenShift clusters. So, multi-cluster management and data accessibility across clusters is a big topic. >> Yeah, if you could, I hear the term cloud native storage, what does that really mean? You know, back a few years ago, containers were stateless, I didn't have my persistent storage, it was super challenging as to how we deal with this. And now we have some options, but what is the goal of what we're doing here? >> There really is no notion of a stateless application, right? Especially when it comes to enterprise applications. What cloud native storage means is, to us at least, it signifies a couple of things. First of all, the consumer of storage is not a machine anymore, right? Typical storage systems are designed to provide storage to either a virtual machine or a hardware server. The consumer of storage is now a container that's running inside of a machine. And in fact, an application is never just one container, it's many containers running on different systems so it's a distributed problem. So what cloud native storage means is the following things. Providing container granular data services, being application aware, meaning that you're providing services to many containers that are running on different systems, and facilitating the data life cycle management of those applications from a Kubernetes way, right? The user experience is now driven through Kubernetes as opposed to a storage admin driving that functionality so it's these three things that make a platform cloud native. >> I want to dig into the operator concept for a little bit here, as it applies to storage. So, first, Operators. I first heard of this a couple years back with the CoreOS folks, who are now part of Red Hat and it's a piece of technology that came into the Kubernetes ecosystem, seems to be very well adopted, they talked about it today on the keynote. And I'd love to hear a little bit more about the ecosystem. But first I want to figure out what it is and in my head, I didn't quite understand it and I'm like, well, okay, automation and life cycle, I get it. There's a bunch of things, Puppet and Chef and Ansible and all sorts of things there. There's also things that know about cloud like Terraform, or Cloudform, or Halloumi, all these sort of things here. But this seems like this is a framework around life cycle, it might be a little higher in the semantic level or knows a little bit more about what's going on inside Kubernetes. >> I'll just touch on this, so Operators, it's a way to codify business logic into the application, so how to manage, how to install, how to manage the life cycle of the application on top of the Kubernetes cluster. So it's a way of automating. >> Right, but-- >> And just to add to that, you mentioned Ansible, Salt, right? So, as engineers, we're always trying to make our lives easier. And so, infrastructure automation certainly is a concept here. What Operators does is it elevates those same needs to more of an application construct level, right? So it's a piece of intelligent software that is watching the entire run-time of an application as opposed to provisioning infrastructure and stepping out of the way. Think of it as a living being, it is constantly running and reacting to what the application is doing and what its needs are. So, on one hand you have automation that sets things up and then the job is done. Here the job is never done, you're sort of, right there as a side car along with the application. >> Nice, but for any sort of life cycle or for any sort of project like this, you have to have code sharing and contributing, right? And so, Julio, can you tell us a little about that? >> What we do is we're obviously all in on Operators. And so we've invested a great deal in terms of documentation and training and workshops. We have certification programs, we're really helping create the ecosystem and facilitate the whole process. You may be familiar, we announced Operator Framework a year ago, it includes Operator SDKs. So we have an Operator SDK for Helm, for Ansible, for Go. We also have announced Operator Life Cycle Manager which does the install, the maintenance and the whole life cycle management process. And then earlier this year we did introduce also, Operatorhub.io which is a community of our Operators, we have about 150 Operators as part of that. >> How does the Operator Framework relate to OpenShare versus upstream Kubernetes? Is it an OpenShift and Red Hat specific thing, or? >> Yes, so, Operatorhub.io is a listing of Operators that includes community Operators. And then we also have certified Operators. And the community Operators run on any Kubernetes instance. The certified Operators make sure that we run on OpenShift specifically. So that's kind of the distinction between those two. >> I remember a Red Hat summit where you talked about some bits. So, give us a little walk around the show, some of the highlights from Operators, the ecosystem, obviously, we've got Portworx here but there's a broad ecosystem. >> Yeah, so we have a huge huge ecosystem. The ISVs play a big part of this. So we've got Operators database partners, security partners, app monitoring partners, storage partners. Yesterday we had an OpenShift commons event, we showcased five of our big Operator partnerships with Couchbase, with MongoDB, with Portworx obviously, with StorageOS and with Dynatrace. But we have a lot of partners in a lot of different areas that are creating these Operators, are certifying them, and they're starting to get a lot of use with customers so it's pretty exciting stuff. >> Gou, I'd love your viewpoint on this because of course, Portworx, good Red Hat partner but you need to work with all the Kubernetes opt-ins out there so, what's the importance of Operators to your business? >> Yeah, you know. OpenShift, obviously, it's one of the leading platforms for Kubernetes out there and so, the reason that is, it's because it's the expectations that it sets to an enterprise customer. It's that Red Hat experience behind it and so the notion of having an Operator that's certified by Red Hat and Red Hat going through the vetting process and making sure that all of the components that it is recommending from its ecosystem that you're putting onto OpenShift, that whole process gives a whole new level of enterprise experience, so, for us, that's been really good, right? Working with Red Hat, going through the process with them and making sure that they are actually double clicking on everything we submit, and there's a real, we iterate with them. So the quality of the product that's put out there within OpenShift is very high. So, we've deployed these Operators now, the Operator that Portworx just announced, right? We have it running in customers' hands so these are real end users, you'll be talking to Ford later on today. Harvard, for example, and so the level of automation that it has provided to them in their platform, it's quite high. >> I was kind of curious to shift maybe to the conference here that you all have a long history. With organizations and both of you personally in the Kubernetes world and cloud native world. We're here at KubeCon CloudNativeCon, North America, 2019. It's pretty big. And I see a lot of folks here, a lot of vendors, a lot of engineers, huge conference, 12,000 people. I mean, any perspective? >> So I've been at Red Hat a little over six years and I was at the very first KubeCon many years ago in San Francisco, I think we had about 200 people there. So this show has really grown over the years. And we're obviously big supporters, we've participated in KubeCon in Shanghai and Barcelona, we're obviously here. We're just super excited about seeing the ecosystem and the whole community grow and expand, so, very exciting. >> Gou? >> Yeah, I mean, like Julio mentioned, right? So, all the way from DockerCon to where we are today and I think last year was 8000 people in Seattle and I think there're probably I've heard numbers like 12? So it's also equally interesting to see the maturity of the products around Kubernetes. And that level of consistency and lack of fracture, right? From mainstream Kubernetes to how it's being adopted in OpenShift, there's consistency across the different Kubernetes platforms. Also, it's very interesting to see how on-prem and public cloud Kubernetes are coexisting. Four years ago we were kind of worried on how that would turn out, but I think it's enabling those hybrid-cloud workloads and I think today in this KubeCon we see a lot of people talking about that and having interest around it. >> That's a really great point there. Julio, want to give you the final word, for people that aren't yet engaged in the ecosystem of Operators, how can they learn more and get involved? >> Yeah, so we're excited to work with everybody, our ecosystem includes customers, partners, contributors, so as long as you're all in on Operators, we're ready to help. We've got tools, we've documentation, we have workshops, we have training, we have certification programs. And we also can help you with go to market. We're very fortunate to have a huge customer footprint, and so for those partners that have solutions, databases, storage solutions, there's a lot of joint opportunities out there that we can participate in. So, really excited to do that. >> Julio, Gou, thank you so much, you have a final word, Gou? >> I was just going to say, so, to follow up on the Operator comment on the certification that Julio mentioned earlier, so the Operator that we have, we were able to achieve level five certification. The level five signifies just the amount of automation that's built into it, so the concept of having Operators help people deploy these complex applications, that's a very important concept in Kubernetes itself. So, glad to be a Red Hat partner. >> That's actually a really good point, we have an Operator maturity model, level one, two, three, four, five. Level one and two are more your installations and upgrades. But the really highly capable ones, the fours and fives, are really to be commended. And Portworx is one of those partners. So we're excited to be here with them. >> That is a powerful statement, we talk about the complexity and how many pieces are in there. Everybody's looking to really help cross that chasm, get the vast majority of people. We need to allow environments to have more automation, more simplicity, a story I heard loud and clear at AnsibleFest earlier this year and through the partner ecosystem. It's good to see progress, so congratulations and thank you both for joining us. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more here from KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019, thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Live from Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE! Covering DevNet Create 2019, brought to you by Cisco. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Cisco DevNet Create 2019, Lisa Martin with John Furrier, we've been here all day, talking about lots of very inspiring, educational, collaborative folks, and we're pleased to welcome to theCUBE Anne Gentle, developer experience manager for Cisco DevNet, Anne, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE today. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> So this event, everything's like, rockstar start this morning with Susie, Mandy, and the team with the keynotes, standing room only, I know when I was walking out. >> I loved it, yes. >> Yes, there's a lot of bodies in here, it's pretty toasty. >> Yeah. >> The momentum that you guys have created, pun intended. >> Oh, yes. >> No, I can't take credit for that, is really, you can feel it, there's a tremendous amount of collaboration, this is your second create? >> Second create, yeah, so I've been with DevNet itself for about year and a half, and started at Cisco about three years ago this month, but I feel like developer experience is one of my first loves, when I really started to understand how to advocate for the developer experience. So DevNet just does a great job of not only advocating within Cisco, but outside of Cisco as well, so we make sure that their voice is heard, if there's some oddity with an API, which, you know, I'm really into API design, API style, we can kind of look at that first, and kind of look at it sideways and then talk to the teams, okay is there a better way to think about this from a developer standpoint. >> It's great, I love the API love there, it's going around a lot here. DevNet create a cloud native vibe that's kind of integrating and cross-pollinating into DevNet, Cisco proper. You're no stranger to cloud computing early days, and ecosystems that have formed naturally and grown, some morph, some go different directions, so you're involved in OpenStack, we know that, we've talked before about OpenStack, just some great successes as restarts, restarts with OpenStack ultimately settled in what it did, the CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, is kind of the cloud native OpenStack model. >> Yeah, yeah. >> You've seen the communities grow, and the market's maturing. >> Definitely, definitely. >> So what's your take on this, because it creates kind of a, the creator builder side of it, we hear builder from Amazon. >> Yeah, I feel like we're able to bring together the standards, one of the interesting things about OpenStack was okay, can we do open standards, that's an interesting idea, right? And so, I think that's partially what we're able to do here, which is share, open up about our experiences, you know, I just went to a talk recently where the SendGrid former advocate is now working more on the SDK side, and he's like, yeah the travel is brutal, and so I just kind of graduated into maintaining seven SDKs. So, that's kind of wandering from where you were originally talking, but it's like, we can share with each other not only our hardships, but also our wins as well, so. >> API marketplaces is not a new concept, Apache was acquired-- >> Yes. >> By a big company, we know that name, Google. But now it's not just application programming interface marketplaces, with containers and server space, and microservices. >> Right. >> The role of APIs growing up on a whole other level is happening. >> Exactly. >> This is where you hear Cisco, and frankly I'm blown away by this, at the Cisco Live, that all the portfolio (mumbles) has APIs. >> True, yes, exactly. >> This is just a whole changeover, so, APIs, I just feel a whole other 2.0 or 3.0 level is coming. >> Absolutely. >> What's your take on this, because-- >> So, yeah, in OpenStack we documented like, two APIs to start, and then suddenly we had 15 APIs to document, right, so, learn quick, get in there and do the work, and I think that that's what's magical about APIs, is, we're learning from our designs in the beginning, we're bringing our users along with us, and then, okay, what's next? So, James Higginbotham, I saw one of his talks today, he's really big in the API education community, and really looking towards what's next, so he's talking about different architectures, and event-driven things that are going to happen, and so even talking about, well what's after APIs, and I think that's where we're going to start to be enabled, even as end users, so, sure, I can consume APIs, I'm pretty good at that now, but what are companies building on top of it, right? So like GitHub is going even further where you can have GitHub actions, and this is what James is talking about, where it's like, well the API enabled it, but then there's these event-driven things that go past that. So I think that's what we're starting to get into, is like, APIs blew up, right? And we're beyond just the create read. >> So, user experience, developer experience, back to what you do, and what Mandy was talking about. You can always make it easier, right? And so, as tools change, there's more tools, there's more workloads, there's more tools, there's more this, more APIs, so there's more of everything coming. >> Yeah. >> It's a tsunami to the developer, what are some of the trends that you see to either abstract away complexities, and, or, standardize or reduce the toolchains? >> Love where you're going with this, so, the thing is, I really feel like in the last, even, since 2010 or so, people are starting to understand that REST APIs are really just HTTP protocol, we can all understand it, there's very simple verbs to memorize. So I'm actually starting to see that the documentation is a huge part of this, like a huge part of the developer experience, because if, for one, there are APIs that are designed enough that you can memorize the entire API, that blows me away when people have memorized an API, but at the same time, if you look at it from like, they come to your documentation every day, they're reading the exact information they can give, they're looking at your examples, of course they're going to start to just have it at their fingertips with muscle memory, so I think that's, you know, we're starting to see more with OpenAPI, which is originally called Swagger, so now the tools are Swagger, and OpenAPI is the specification, and there's just, we can get more done with our documentation if we're able to use tools like that, that start to become industry-wide, with really good tools around them, and so one of the things that I'm really excited about, what we do at DevNet, is that we can, so, we have a documentation tool system, that lets us not only publish the reference information from the OpenAPI, like very boring, JSON, blah blah blah, machines can read it, but then you can publish it in these beautiful ways that are easy to read, easy to follow, and we can also give people tutorials, code examples, like everything's integrated into the docs and the site, and we do it all from GitHub, so I don't know if you guys know that's how we do our site from the back side, it's about 1000 or 2000 GitHub repos, is how we build that documentation. >> Everything's going to GitHub, the network configurations are going to GitHub, it's programmable, it's got to be in GitHub. >> Yes, it's true, and everything's Git-based right? >> So, back to the API question, because I think I'm connecting some dots from some of the conversations we had, we heard from some of the community members, there's a lot of integration touchpoints. Oh, a call center app on their collaboration talks to another database, which talks to another database, so these disparate systems can be connected through APIs, which has been around for a while, whether it's an old school SOAP interface, to, you know, HTTP and REST APIs, to full form, cooler stuff now. But it's also more of a business model opportunity, because the point is, if your API is your connection point-- >> Yes. >> There's potential business deals that could go on, but if you don't have good documentation, it's like not having a good business model. >> Right, and the best documentation really understands a user's task, and so that's why API design is so important, because if you need to make sure that your API looks like someone's daily work, get the wording right, get the actual task right, make sure that whatever workflow you've built into your API can be shown through in any tutorial I can write, right? So yeah, it's really important. >> What's the best practice, where should I go? I want to learn about APIs, so then I'm going to have a couple beers, hockey's over, it's coming back, Sharks are going to the next round, Bruins are going to the next round, I want to dig into APIs tonight. Where do I go, what are some best practices, what should I do? >> Yeah, alright, so we have DevNet learning labs, and I'm telling you because I see the web stats, like, the most popular ones are GitHub, REST API and Python, so you're in good company. Lots of people sitting on their couches, and a lot of them are like 20 minutes at a time, and if you want to do like an entire set that we've kind of curated for you all together, you should go to developer.cisco.com/startnow, and that's basically everything from your one-on-ones, all the way up to, like, really deep dive into products, what they're meant to do, the best use cases. >> Okay, I got to ask you, and I'll put you on the spot, pick your favorite child. Gold standard, what's the best APIs that you like, do you think are the cleanest, tightest? >> Oh, best APIs I like, >> Best documented? >> So in the technical writing world, the gold standard that everyone talks about is the Stripe documentation, so that's in financial tech, and it's very clean, we actually can do something like it with a three column layout-- >> Stripe (mumbles) payment gateway-- >> Stripe is, yeah, the API, and so apparently, from a documentation standpoint, they're just, people just go gaga for their docs, and really try to emulate them, so yeah. And as far as an API I use, so I have a son with type one diabetes, I don't know if I've shared this before, but he has a continuous glucose monitor that's on his arm, and the neat thing is, we can use a REST API to get the data every five minutes on how his blood sugar is doing. So when you're monitoring this, to me that's my favorite right now, because I have it on my watch, I have it on my phone, I know he's safe at school, I know he's safe if he goes anywhere. So it's like, there's so many use cases of APIs, you know? >> He's got the policy-based program, yeah. >> He does, yes, yes. >> Based upon where's he's at, okay, drink some orange juice now, or, you know-- >> Yes, get some juice. >> Get some juice, so, really convenient real-time. >> Yes, definitely, and he, you know, he can see it at school too, and just kind of, not let his friends know too much, but kind of keep an eye on it, you know? >> Automation. >> Yeah, exactly, exactly. >> Sounds like great cloud native, cool. You have a Meraki hub in your house? >> I don't have one at home. >> Okay. >> Yeah, I need to set one up, so yeah, we're terrible net nannies and we monitor everything, so I think I need Meraki at home. (laughing) >> It's a status symbol now-- >> It is now! >> We're hearing in the community. Here in the community of DevNet, you got to have a Meraki hub in your, switch in your house. >> It's true, it's true. >> So if you look back at last year's Create versus, I know we're just through almost day one, what are some of the things that really excite you about where this community of now, what did they say this morning, 585,000 strong? Where this is going, the potential that's just waiting to be unlocked? >> So I'm super excited for our Creator awards, we actually just started that last year, and so it's really neat to see, someone who won a Creator award last year, then give a talk about the kind of things he did in the coming year. And so I think that's what's most exciting about looking a year ahead for the next Create, is like, not only what do the people on stage do, but what do the people sitting next to me in the talks do? Where are they being inspired? What kind of things are they going to invent based on seeing Susie's talk about Wi-Fi 6? I was like, someone invent the thing so that when I go to a hotel, and my kids' devices take all the Wi-Fi first, and then I don't have any, someone do that, you know what I mean, yeah? >> Parental rights. >> So like, because you're on vacation and like, everybody has two devices, well, with a family of four-- [John] - They're streaming Netflix, Amazon Prime-- >> Yeah, yeah! >> Hey, where's my video? >> Like, somebody fix this, right? >> Maybe we'll hear that next year. >> That's what I'm saying, someone invent it, please. >> And thank you so much for joining John and me on theCUBE this afternoon, and bringing your wisdom and your energy and enthusiasm, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> For John Furrier, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from Cisco DevNet Create 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live, from Barcelona Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, here at Cisco Live! 2019 in Barcelona, Spain, I'm Stu Miniman, happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest, but someone I've known for many years, Jason Edelman, who is the founder of Network to Code. Jason, great to see you, and thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me, Stu. >> Alright, Jason, let's first, for our audiences, this is your first time on the program, give us a little bit about your background, and what led to you being the founder of Network to Code. >> Right, so my background is that of a traditional network engineer. I've spent 10+ years managing networks, deploying networks, and really, acting in a pre-sales capacity, supporting Cisco infrastructure. And it was probably around 2012 or 13, working for a large Cisco VAR, that we had access to something called Cisco onePK, and we kind of dove into that as the first SDK to control network devices. We have today iPhone SDKs, SDKs for Android, to program for phone apps, this was one of the first SDKs to program against a router and a switch. And that, for me, was just eye-opening, this is kind of back in 2013 or so, to see what could be done to write code in Python, Seer, Java, against network devices. Now, when this was going on, I didn't know how to code, so I kind of used that as the entrance to ramp up, but that was, for me, the pivot point. And then, the same six-week period, I had a demo of Puppet and Ansible automated networking devices, and so that was the pivot point where it was like, wow, realizing I've spent a career architecture and designing networks, and realizing there's a challenge in operating networks day to day. >> Yeah, Jason, dial back. You've some Cisco certifications in your background? >> Sure, yes, CCIE, yeah. >> Yeah, so I think back, when this all, OpenFlow, and before we even called it Software-Defined Networking, you were blogging about this type of stuff. But, as you said, you weren't a coder. It wasn't your background, you were a network guy, and I think the Network to Code, a lot of the things we've been looking at, career-wise, it's like, does everyone need to become coders? How will the tools mature? Give us a little bit about that journey, as how you got into coding and let's go from there. >> Yeah, it was interesting. In 2010, I started blogging OpenFlow-related, I thought it was going to change the world, saw what NICRO was doing at the time, and then Big Switch at the time, and I just speculated and blogged and really just envisioned this world where networks were different in some capacity. And it took a couple years to really shed light on management and operations of networking, and I made some career shifts. And I remember going back to onePK, at the time, my manager then, who is now our CEO at Network to Code, he actually asked, well, why don't you do it? And it was just like, me? Me, automate our program? What do you mean? And so it was kind of like a moment for me to kind of reflect on what I can do. Now, I will say I don't believe every network engineer should know how to code. That was my on-ramp because of partnership with Cisco at the time, and learning onePK and programming languages, but that was for me, I guess, what I needed as that kick in the butt to say, you know what? I am going to do this. I do believe in the shift that's going to happen in the next couple years, and that was where I kind of just jumped in feet first, and now we are where we are. >> Yeah, Jason, some great points there. I know for myself, I look at, Cisco's gone through so much change. A year ago, up on stage, Cisco's talking about their future is as a software company. You might not even think of us as networking first, you will talk to us about software first. So that initial shift that you saw back in 2010, it's happening. It's a different form than we might have thought originally, and it's not necessarily a product, but we're going through that shift. And I like what you said about how not everybody needs to code, but it's this change in paradigms and what we need to do are different. You've got some connections, we're here in the DevNet Zone. I saw, at the US show in Orlando last year, Network to Code had a small booth, there were a whole bunch of startups in that space. Tell us how you got involved into DevNet, really since the earliest days. >> Yes, since the early days, it was really pre-DevNet. So the emergence of DevNet, I've seen it grow into, the last couple years, Cisco Live! And for us, given what we do at Network to Code, as a network-automation-focused company, we see DevNet in use by our clients, by DevNet solutions and products, things like, mentioned yesterday on a panel, but DevNet has always-on sandboxes, too. One of the biggest barriers we've seen with our clients is getting access to the right lab gear on getting started to automate. So DevNet has these sandboxes always on to hit Nexus API or Catalyst API, right? Things like that. And there's really a very good, structured learning path to get started through DevNet, which usually, where we intersect in our client engagement, so it's kind of like post-DevNet, you're kind of really showing what's possible, and then we'll kind of get in and craft some solutions for our clients. >> Yeah, take us inside some of your clients, if you can. Are most of them hitting the API instead of the COI now when they're engaging? >> Yeah, it's actually a good question. Not usually talked about, but the reality is, APIs are still very new. And so we actively test a lot of the newer APIs from Cisco, as an example. IOS XE has some of the best APIs that exist around RESTCONF, NETCONF, modeled from the same YANG models, and great APIs. But the truth is that a lot of our clients, large enterprises that've been around for 20+ years, the install base is still largely not API-enabled. So a lot of the automation that we do is definitely SSH-based. And when you look at what's possible with platforms, if it is something like a custom in Python, or even an ANSEL off the shelf, a lot of the integrations are hidden from the user, so as long as we're able to accomplish the goal, it's the most important thing right now. And our clients' leaderships sometimes care, and it's true, right? You want the outcome. And initially, it's okay if we're not using the API, but once we do flip that switch, it does provide a bit more structure and safety for automating. But the install base is so large right now that, to automate, you have to use SSH, and we don't believe in waiting 'til every device is API-enabled because it'll just take a while to turn that base. >> Alright, Jason, a major focus of the conference this year has been around multi-cloud. How's that impacting your business and your customers? >> So, it's in our path as a company. Right now, there's a lot of focus around multi-cloud and data center, and the truth is, we're doing a lot of automation in the Campus networking space. Right, automating networks to get deployed in wiring closets and firewalls and load balancers and things like that. So from our standpoint, as we start planning with our clients, we see the services that we offer really port over to multi-cloud and making sure that with whatever automation is being deployed today, regardless of toolset, and look at a tool chain to deploy, if it's a CI/CD Pipeline for networking, be able to do that if you're managing a network in the Campus, a data center network, or multi-cloud network, to make sure we have a uniform-looking field to operations, and doing that. >> Alright, so Jason, you're not only founder of your company, you're also an author. Maybe tell us about the, I believe it's an update, or is it a new book, that recently got out. >> Yes, I'm a co-author of a book with Matt Oswalt and Scott Lowe, and it's an O'Reilly book that was published last year. And look, I'm a believer in education, and to really make a change and change an industry, we have to educate, and I think the book, the goal was to play a small part in really bringing concepts to light. As a network engineer by trade, there's fundamental concepts that network engineers should be aware of, and it could be basics and a lot of these, it could be Python or Jinja templating in YAML and Git and Linux, for that matter. It's just kind of providing that baseline of skills as an entrance into automation. And once you have the baseline, it kind of really uncovers what's possible. So writing the book was great. Great opportunity, and thank you to Matt and Scott for getting involved there. It really took a lot of the work effort and collaborated with them on it. >> Want to get your perception on the show, also. Education, always a key feature of what happens at the show. Not far from us is the Cisco bookshop. I see people getting a lot of the big Cisco books, but I think ten years ago, it was like, everybody, get my CCIE, all my different certifications updated, here. Here in the DevNet Zone, a lot of people, they're building stuff, they're building new pieces, they're playing in the labs, and they're doing some of these environments. What's your experience here at the show? Anything in particular that catches your eye? >> So, I do believe in education. I think to do anything well, you have to be educated on it. And I've read Cisco Press books over the years, probably a dozen of them, for the CCIE and beyond. I think when we look at what's in DevNet, when we look at what's in the bookstore, people have to immerse themselves into the technology, and reading books, like the learning labs that are here in the DevNet Zone, the design sessions that are right behind us. Just amazing for me to have seen the DevNet Zone grow to be what it is today. And really the goal of educating the market of what's possible. See, even from the start, Network to Code, we started as doing a lot of training, because you really can't change the methodology of network operations without being aware of what's possible, and it really does kind of come back to training. Whatever it is, on-demand, streaming, instructor-led, reading a book. Just glad to see this happen here, and a lot more to do around the industry, in the space around community involvement and development, but training, a huge part of it. >> Alright, Jason, want to give you the final word, love the story of network engineer gone entrepreneurial, out of your comfort zone, coding, helping to build a business. So tell us what you see, going forward. >> So, we've grown quite a bit in the past couple years. Right now, we're over 20 engineers strong, and starting from essentially just one a couple years ago, was a huge transformation, and seeing this happen. I believe in bringing on A-players to help make that happen. I think for us as a business, we're continuing to grow and accelerating what we do in this network automation space, but I just think, one thought to throw out there is, oftentimes we talk about lower-level tools, Python, Git, YAML, a lot of new acronyms and buzzwords for network engineers, but also, the flip side is true, too. As our client base evolves, and a lot of them are in the Fortune 100, so large clients, looking at consumption models of technology's super-important, meaning is there ITSM tools deployed today, like a ServiceNow, or Webex teams, or Slack for chat integration. To really think through early on how the internal customers of automation will consume automation, 'cause it really does us no good, Cisco, vendors, or clients no good, if we deploy a great network automation platform, and no one uses it, because it doesn't fit the culture of the brand of the organization. So it's just, as we continue to grow, that's really what's top of mind for us right now. >> Alright, well Jason, congratulations on everything that you've done so far, wish you the best of luck going forward, and thank you so much, of course, for watching. We'll have more coverage, three day, wall-to-wall, here at Cisco Live! 2019 in Barcelona. I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)