 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here from theCUBE. We're at our Palo Alto studios, having a CUBE conversation today with Susie Wies. She's the VP and CTO of DevNet at Cisco Systems. So Susie, great to see you. Great to see you, Jeff. So before we jump in, DevNet, what is DevNet? DevNet, DevNet is Cisco's developer program. You probably didn't know that Cisco had a developer program. I didn't, but that doesn't surprise me because everybody's looking to engage developer these days, not a surprise. Yes, excellent. So yeah, with DevNet, we founded DevNet about three years ago. So Cisco had different products where they wanted to create developer and engage developers around them. But three years ago, we actually started a Cisco-wide developer program to really create good resources, solely focused on developers. And it actually spans all of Cisco's products. So starting from the infrastructure, with networkers that we've had going a long time, taking our networking equipment, our data center, our cloud products, getting into the internet of things, our collaboration products. So we really eat security. We go all the way from infrastructure up through applications. And really DevNet is all about giving developers the resources to learn. A lot of times they just want to learn coding 101 if you want to write a networking app. If you're a networker trying to get up there, or if you're already a coder writing a network app, you need networking 101. And then we deep dive into our APIs around network automation and orchestration and things there. We help people learn. So we actually have coding resources. Like if you want to write an application for a contact center, you would have to buy a contact center to test it out. But we have a sandbox, a DevNet sandbox, where we have all the kit running live so that a developer can test their app right in there. Or if you want to do something for software-defined networking, we actually have LiveKit of routers with a product called APIC-EM, which is our SDN network automation software. And you can have that running live and write your apps there. So the coding's really important in our sandbox. And then on the Inspire side, what we have is DevNet creations. Once someone's built something cool, then they can share what they've built and just kind of publish it. Say, this is a project I wrote. Here's the source code. Here's some demos. And then finally, we have allowed people to connect and connect through in-person events, through online communities. It's really about bringing the community together to solve the big problems of like, how is IoT really going to work in this next generation? How will networks really move to network programmability? How will collaboration take it to the next level? So why did you have to set up a separate thing, DevNet? I mean, I'm sure you've always had developer tracks. At Cisco Live and other Cisco conferences. Obviously, big investment you've got to see in your title for this. Why did Cisco, why did you guys decide that you had to do something different above and beyond to kind of having a developer track in your standard conferences? Yeah, well, before what happened was actually Cisco didn't even have a developer track in its conferences. Oh, they didn't. No, before three years ago. But we had a certain product and the product team would get really excited. Like, you know, Cisco had Jabber and said, hey, we're going to create it, we're going to have a hackathon, right? Or, you know, so just products there. So we created DevNet and then we started to have developer conferences at Cisco Live, our big event where, you know, 25,000 people come to Cisco Live US, you know, 20,000 in Europe, we have it in Mexico and in Australia. So we have these events around the world. And then we for the first time did have developer conferences there, all about Cisco's APIs, Cisco's products, teaching networkers about programmability and software so that the world of software-defined networking didn't just pass them by. So actually we've been getting quite a lot of momentum there and that's all awesome. So that's the DevNet zone at Cisco Live. But what we want to do now is we're creating a new venue, something that we call DevNet Create, which is our first standalone developer conference. And what we're trying to do is not actually just have this be about Cisco, but we're creating an industry-wide developer conference and the theme that we're focusing on is what I think is this big transformation going on in the industry right now about where applications meet infrastructure. Right, right. It's interesting, was there a catalyst that suddenly said, oh my gosh, we need to do more for developers, you mentioned about three or four years ago. I mean, what was the catalyst? It was kind of the wake up call that some smart people that maybe don't work inside Cisco's four walls that we want to engage. Well, is there a specific moment, a specific thing that happened? Well, what happened was Cisco was going around saying, and acknowledging that we need to really double down on a software strategy. And so it's all about software. We acknowledge that networking was going on and they're saying networking is moving to software to find networking. Does Cisco want that to happen or do they not? So there was kind of all of that question. And so, myself, I started in Rick Tawaniak, my co-founder of DevNet, we just started lobbying and just saying, okay, Cisco, you want to have a software strategy? Awesome, keep going on that. And yes, software with recurring revenue, that's all great. But the real reason you have a software strategy is because it's about the ecosystem. It's not just about your product, it's about how you interact with other products that are going on and how does that interaction happen? It happens through APIs. So you can't just build a product, build some APIs and they will come. You need to then really cater to developers or to networkers who want to use APIs, IT and OT guys. So it's really about providing resources for them and that's that whole learn, code, inspire, connect. As then we created DevNet and really provided a full set of resources for folks and it's actually changing people's lives. It's interesting because we cover a lot of shows, right? And everyone has a developer track in their show. That's pretty standard operating procedure because everybody wants to get to the developers and they're hard crew to get to, right? This is a competitive world. And last year we covered the GE Pritx Transform Event which was their first ever developer conference. So who would think GE is basically hosting a developer conference, but same thing, right? They wanted to get an ecosystem built around the Pritx cloud which is their little special IoT cloud. And it was a very successful thing and a key part of their strategy. So very similar to what you're talking about, right? You need to have an engaged development community. It's all about developers. And what happened is in the Fortune 100, I think it was something like 35% of Fortune 100 companies are now having developer sites and published APIs, which is incredible. So these are things like Visa and MasterCard, GE and others. So it's just real business, right? Right, so getting together for this, doing a little homework, I see you got a blog that you just recently put out talking about really the change in the way this whole world is working really. Where before you had your infrastructure and the app team had to build to that infrastructure, but now it's kind of flipped on its head right now. The apps are kind of dictating what happens to the infrastructure. And as you point out here, and we always joke about this too, that with IoT, all right, people are things too. So now you've got a whole different way to interact. The application has to interact beyond the simple kind of three horsemen of classic IT, which is storage, compute and networking, right? Because now you have things, you have people, IoT's coming down the pike. Mobile World Congress was last week. It's all about 5G, it's a big IoT enabler. Everybody loves seeing autonomous cars drive through the neighborhood. So it's a very different world, a very different application world that these developers are entering into. It's amazing, yeah. And I think that we haven't even reached the potential of what applications can do. Oh, barely guys. And it sounds so mundane because you're like, okay, an application. I use it on my computer, I have a keyboard and a mouse. Or then it got really exciting, like mobile apps. I have mobile apps on my device, which is awesome. I can take them anywhere. And you have that whole social mobile and all of everything changed there. But now you get to this world of IoT and cloud and apps take on this whole new meaning. So where, as you said before, an app just ran on top of the infrastructure. Now with cloud it changed because you started to get to DevOps. You're like, wait a minute, okay, so now an app develops but they develop and deploy and that has some kind of interaction. But you go even further and then what you have now is you have apps interacting with the infrastructure through DevOps and through APIs as well. And before, as you said, all the network, all the infrastructure did for you was provide network compute and storage. But when you think about the internet of things, all of a sudden things come on board and then you can all of a sudden get, create entirely new apps using the sensors and everything, you take this building and once this building gets digitized, then you have your HVAC system, your badging, your security cameras, that's all cool stuff, but imagine how to write an app on top of all that. So you have tons of kind of things and data and then with the place you can actually start to get indoor location, wireless access points are giving you location data. So you're in a shopping mall, you know where people are just because their wifi, even if you're not connected, the wifi network knows where you are just because it's searching for MAC addresses and things like that. You can all of a sudden get information that's really, really interesting for business. Where are people hanging out? How much time are they spending in different places? That's information any app developer would die for. So the infrastructure's not just providing connectivity, but it's providing really interesting information that an app developer wants to use. And from all over the place, public databases, proprietary databases, APIs here, APIs there, and... Absolutely, and that's crazy. Like so just the data is from all over the place, it's not just this nice contained here's the sensors on my device, but you're now bringing together data from around the world, you're working on a cloud infrastructure. There's data sovereignty issues in terms of where the data can be, there's kind of security issues. But you want, like the app developer just needs access to all of this, but you need to be very careful. And you need to architect your system so that it can really work well. And it has to be software-defined, right? Because sometimes you might not have a good connection, sometimes you might not have access to that data. There's so many parameters that define this kind of software interaction. That just a hardcore machine-to-machine wire connection isn't going to get it done if there's not software to be able to buffer and deal with all these various conditions. Absolutely, and so you think about, okay, why do you need software-defined networking or software-defined infrastructure? It used to be that, let's say that you're, again, taking a shopping mall and IoT enabling it, right? You're digitizing, you're putting in all these sensors, very cool. When you go home, you just kind of put it up and you put on your baby cam and all that kind of stuff, but you go to work and then all of a sudden you're like dealing with proprietary systems and things there, you have to really worry about security. If you go to a Tesla manufacturing plant, you need to worry about security, like who has access to the data. So when you start to put these things online, what matters is, you put a picture, your video surveillance cameras, your badging system, your HVAC system, and then just your video conferencing systems, they have very different security requirements about them. So how do you put them on your network in a secure way? You want to segment your network so that each of these is on different network segments. They have the right access, but an app developer doesn't want to deal with all that. So what you want is to be able to put them on, configure your network. What the software-defined nature lets you do is to do it in an automated way, like before you would set up your network, get it all configured, and never touch it again, right? But with the software-defined, you can just say, hey, create a secure network segment with this group of devices, get the data going across, right? And then now allow my applications to access it. So you can actually start to use all of these capabilities of software-defined infrastructure to help app devs, right? So this is such a huge category of stuff going on. I want to say attack surface, because we were at RSA a couple of weeks ago, but even really just opportunity surface in terms of the developers and where they can add value. What are you guys focusing on at DevNet? And we'll talk about it in a minute. You've got an event coming up in late May, which we're excited to bring to theCube there. I think it's your first one. But of all the things we've talked about, what are you and your team and what should people that go to DevNet create? What is your main focus? So our main focus there, it's actually two areas, but it's IoT, so the Internet of Things, and then just app developers wanting to create new IoT apps. But then we're looking at, how does that hit the infrastructure, right? So again, is how can you have IoT developers, cloud developers come together to really get the most out of this next generation of apps? We actually break that down in a few ways. So you said there's the Internet of Things. So it's kind of like, where do applications meet things? But in addition to me, it's where do applications meet people? It's where do applications meet places? It's all about, to me, the Internet of People, Places and Things in terms of how these things come together. So if you just kind of dive into each of those, it's, again, it's not easy to figure out how to write an app for a business that, again, is instrumented with IoT, that has location capabilities, that has kind of analytics throughout. But we want to talk about how to truly expose all that to app devs, so that you can really get not just kind of vertically closed proprietary system of apps, but you can really have the full world of app developers hacking on and building on all of this stuff. Right. Okay, so how do people get involved? So let's get to the full plug. So it's May 23rd and 24th, San Francisco. Yep. Do you have a venue? Yes, so DevNet Create is May 23rd, 24th, San Francisco at Beespoke, so it's in the Westfield Mall. Okay. It'll fit about 450 people, so it's a little bit more of a cozy atmosphere, but we're super excited because we want people to come, we want people to submit talks to be speakers in areas that you think are critical here. And we want it to be one where you can interact, right? You can interact with the speakers, you can interact with each other, because we totally want to jam on this area of where applications meet infrastructure and figure out together as a community. Okay, so what do people need to do to get involved? They can, you're looking for speakers? We're looking for speakers? Okay. You can actually go to devnetcreate.io, and that's where our whole site is. You can submit a talk, actually you can do more. You can submit a technical talk if you want to present, say, hey, here's a cool thing that I built, or here's a key technology issue that I solved, here's an API and platform that I used. Also, because we wanted about learning and hands-on coding, you can submit a workshop about your API or your platform that you think is really critical to make this work, and we'll actually have stations set up so people can do hands-on coding on your API if you want. You can create learning labs, so these are online learning labs that'll then be available to everybody forever. So to just get people up there and teach them about the platform and the API and teach them about some new technology topic, so all of those are possible for the venue itself. In addition, though, we actually want to start the conversation now, and so what we're doing is we've created a medium blog post, a blog publication on devnetcreate, and we actually invite everybody to submit their thoughts on where applications meet infrastructure and what it means to them. So just everybody's going to have different ideas. What's the hard technical problem? Is it changing? Do you believe that it's, you know, should they just continue to be separate? You know, what do the boundaries look like? Where does it matter? So I would love to get thoughts from you and from everybody about where apps meet infrastructure. We want to continue the conversation on theCUBE, but we'd love to get that conversation going now online as well, so if people can write some stuff, we'll bang around at it, we'll include your publication in our, you know, devnetcreate publication. Okay, great. And then when May comes, we'll continue talking in person. That's right, we've got a couple months. So have you already been collecting data or are you still kind of kicking this off so people get an opportunity to get in the door early? We're kicking it off now where you can submit your, you know, tech talk or workshop or learning lab now. You can submit a medium publication now, like just share your thoughts with us now, yeah. Awesome, all right, so we'll look forward to watching the content grow pre-show and then that'll really set us up for an awesome show there on late May. Excellent. All right, Susie, well thanks for taking a few minutes of your time to stop by and give us kind of the breakdown of devnetcreate. Should be exciting May 23rd, 24th at San Francisco. We'll be there, hopefully you'll be there. I know Susie'll be there. I'll be there. All right, thanks for stopping by. Thanks, Jeff. All right, Jeff Rik, here at theCUBE. Thanks for stopping by.