 Live from Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2019. Brought to you by Cisco. Hello and welcome to theCUBE's live coverage here in Mountain View, California, the Computer History Museum for Cisco's DevNet Create. I'm John Furrier, host. We're here with Lisa Martin. She's taking a break. She's out getting stories out around the floor. Our next guest is Paul Giblin, who's an enterprise architect at Presidio, formerly on theCUBE before. Cube alumni, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. It's great to see you as well. Thank you for having me. I was looking forward to this interview because last time we chatted, we were talking about cloud, hybrid cloud. Now, as an enterprise architect, you're in the middle of all the conversations around how enterprises and commercial businesses are leveraging the cloud, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, a lot of hype, a lot of reality, but the one thing that's clear is the cloud companies are blowing away their financial and operating performance as Amazon released their earnings today. Amazing financial performance. Amazon web services, half of the profit of all of Amazon, amazing since they only started in 2006. Microsoft changed their business plan from being an on-premise solution, software to cloud, trillion dollar market cap, it goes on and on and on, but it's a tell sign of the wave that's happening and that is computing, network architectures are all transforming, an application modernization tsunami is coming, renaissance of applications are happening. This is a big part of what you do when DevNet Created is Cisco's version of, hey guys, we got to create the future. This is the reality. What's your take on all these big waves and activity? Yeah, I think there's certainly a ton of activity going on around multi-cloud, especially with Amazon and Azure, GCP, and DevNet is really a hub for it from the perspective of Cisco. So if you look at the things that people are talking about here this year as opposed to last year, it's totally different. Last year people were talking about, how do I do my collaboration apps in a new way and how do I modernize my data center with Ansible and scripts and things like that and this year people are talking about blockchain, they're talking about multi-cloud, they're talking about machine learning, there's folks over there talking about graph databases and TensorFlow and things like that, so what I really like about this event is the fact that it's people who are on the bleeding edge and are thinking about the new thing today before it becomes mainstream. Yeah, that's a great point. Susie Wee was on earlier, she's the head of DevNet and DevNet Create and she's got a great team, but one of the things that she said to me and I'd love to get your reaction to this is, she's had research roles at HP, bit labs back in the day, so you have those research, this is the next big wave coming. Here it's really people on the bleeding edge who are making it real, so it's not just some wave that's coming, it's actually happening, so part of this event really kind of points to what's real. Now your job is you make stuff real, right? So you've got to kind of thread the line between bleeding edge, hype, reality, and kind of wire it up for customers with Presidio, so you're under a lot of pressure, you've got to do the right thing, you've got to architect it out, this is kind of where the game is right now. So what's the experience that you're seeing in the real world as this stuff starts to become real, as customers want to create better apps, better network architectures? Kind of a retrenching happening, what's your thoughts, what's the key highlights? I think people are struggling with decisions around what cloud do I put my workloads in? Do I put them in a cloud at all? What workloads do I keep on-premise? When I'm making these decisions, how do I get these apps to the different places they need to live? How do I have an app that might be stretched from my on-premise data center to Azure or to AWS? How do I keep that secure? How do I network that together? How do I make sure that I'm not the next big headline in the next big breach that comes around? So those are some of the challenges that are out there and they're all things that are difficult to navigate because every organization's a little bit different in terms of the skill sets that they have. So you've got some folks who are right at home, doing a 12-factor app and going full-on cloud native and putting stuff all out on Amazon and not thinking twice about it and then you've got a lot of organizations who maybe don't have mature dev shops and have a lot of legacy infrastructure folks who still need to retool and re-kit to get up to speed to bring everything together. So skill gap big time. Oh yeah. So that's where you guys come in. I want to get your thoughts. Before we came on to talk here live, we were talking off camera around the difference in enterprise and a commercial business and the distinction between their needs. Enterprise is obviously more complex, multi-campus, multinational potentially to commercial businesses. I won't say small businesses but people who are like the smallest scale. Can you just parse that out and talk about what we chatted about? The distinction between a commercial entity and the challenges and opportunities they have vis-a-vis say in enterprise. I think it comes down to a lot of the things that we do today are designed to make things simpler. That's not always the case. Sometimes in order to make it simple you have to do a very hard thing under the covers to get it that way in the first place and for a small commercial organization that's not always the easiest thing in the world. They're typically resource constrained and their business is not running IT. Their business is generating revenue through whatever it is that they do. Now an enterprise is a little bit different and enterprise has multiple different revenue streams coming in from multiple different businesses and they're typically much more invested and a much larger IT staff and have folks who are multi-disciplined, interface with their peers, have enough resources to really truly adopt a dev option. They got network teams, security teams, the whole nine yards, chief data officer and all that stuff. Commercial organizations now again, great opportunity for cloud on both fronts, right? You got enterprises that kind of have mixed of public cloud for cloud-native workloads, maybe clean sheet of paper, brand new use case, hybrid where they want to have operating on-premise and then multi-cloud they might have Azure for 365 Office and then run Amazon for this or there. So multi-cloud seems to be a reality on one front. The commercial organizations seem to have cloud on their mind but legacy apps that they've written software for that might have been written in order entry system or some sort of workflow that's tailored for the revenue. How do you advise those two scenarios? Yeah, I mean, if you've got a legacy app that you need to contend with, one of the first things you need to do is understand the app itself. We were having a conversation earlier and what we talked about was there's organizations out there who have these applications and the people who wrote those applications have long ago left. So you've got some new software developers who are coming in, they don't have contextual history and then you've got infrastructure people who are keeping the ship afloat but don't know how it floats. They don't understand displacement. So you've got these new folks coming in and they want to- And should we write our own? Should we get new apps, hire a team? Who do we hire? What do we even know to do? Exactly, exactly. So there's a decision that needs to be made. Do we continue to run this on-prem? Do we consider replatforming it and trying to move it out to the cloud? Do we start fresh and try and refactor? Do we do this in a house? Do we pull in an external third party? To try and do that for us. So they're all big challenges. Talk about their relationship with Cisco. Obviously you're partnering with them. You're here at DevNet Create. You're also a participant in the community. So they've got DevNet, which is their core developer community, a couple of years old. DevNet create, or five years old. DevNet creates kind of like brings in the creator side of it. As a practitioner, partner of Cisco here to learn and then bring that home to apply to Presidio. How does that work? Explain to folks, how does Presidio work with Cisco? How do you take stuff from DevNet, DevNet Create? How do you commercialize that for your business and what's the impact of the customer? Sure, so it's more organic than you might think. So we've got a whole contention of folks here, especially, and I'm going to give a big shout out to our women in tech who are here. And these folks are going and they're checking out the things that they're interested in. And like I said, there's a diverse group of sessions that are out there spanning machine learning to blockchain to, there's somebody right behind us here I think talking about. IOT? Yeah, it's not IOT, it's security. Ransomware attack. Ransomware, okay, air gap that thing. Yeah, yeah. So these folks are sitting in on the sessions that are of interest to them and they're going back to Presidio and we've got internal WebEx team spaces where all of our folks who are interested in any kind of Dev sit down and collaborate. And we are also maintaining our own internal code repositories where anybody who wants to go take a look at some of the intellectual property we're developing can go pull that asset, communicate with the person who's working on it, manipulate it, put it back, all that. We also have sponsorship from the top on down. So from the Google comments all the way down, we know that the next generation of engineers need to understand on some level programmability concepts and this is a great way to ingest that. And this is a strategic impaired management behind it. Programmability gives offers some advantages. What's your take on it? I know you talked about it in the last QB interview, I want to just come back to the automation opportunity because, you know, let's just face it. Command line interface is how we ran things in networks over the years, but now with programmability, there's more higher yield activities that architects and network guys and developers can work on than the mundane tasks that go on. Because now if you can program things certainly with Wi-Fi 6 and Meraki, it's all one network, so why not have that visibility to the data? Why not program stuff to make life easier? Your thoughts on this and how it's playing out? I think it's playing out slowly and in pockets. I think there's a lot of folks who are working on these kinds of concepts, but they tend to be isolated. So if I'm a network engineer and I come to an event like this, I'm probably going to go back to whatever my day job is and I might write some of my own code, but unless you have some of those facilities in place that I talked about us having at Presidio, it's difficult to share what you're doing with others. And if it's difficult to share what you're doing with others, you're kind of out on an island, right? So you might have efficiencies that you're gaining, but if you're not taking that and sharing it with other people, your company may not be deriving the full benefit. Now, I think as an individual, you can do a lot of good by automating the things that you do, which enables you as an individual to focus on even more, but when you look at some of the cool stuff that's out there that can be shared, like the Maraki demo for the AR, looking at access points, that's just phenomenal capability that brings great benefit to a lot of different people. So you guys had success with a lot of the sharing, the collaboration internally. Absolutely. With the tools you've built. What's the verdict? You guys mentioned you have some diverse folks here, women in tech. What's the presence here at Presidio like at DevNet Create this year? What's some of the key highlights for you guys? So I think we've got a couple of presenters. We have one new DevNet creator, Maybelline. So she's, I believe, second female DevNet creator and the first for Presidio. Jeff and I had taken those down last year and she's fantastic. She's running weekly courses for the women in our organization to teach them on these concepts and she's just a powerhouse, amazing. So we, like I said, we have that whole contingent of women in tech who are here. We've got a handful of gentlemen who are here as well, including Jeff Levinsailer, who you interviewed yesterday and Greg Ann Yuzelli, both of whom have multiple presentations going on, all standing room only. So we're definitely invested and definitely have a good time. Well, congratulations on the women in tech thing. I think that's huge. I think that's the inclusion thing that we'd love to see. And again, you know, the numbers are still at the percentages need a lot more work. I mean, just bringing more women and brings more action, more capabilities, more results. Absolutely. I'm all in on women in tech. I have three daughters. So I'm naturally invested. I'm trying to help create the world anyway I can where they can grow up and walk right into a meeting and not have to contend with some of the issues. I'm very close with you. Democratization of technology is really what it's all about. And, you know, you're not really anything in this community unless you have a Maraki hub at your house, running all your surveillance cameras. There you go. In fact, our team built a camera app that identifies sexual predators. So I'm going to have those hanging over my front door now. Everybody's coming anywhere near the house. And then that's a better than ring. Certainly go in the shark tank, pitch that, maybe sell it to Amazon. There we go. Paul, thanks for coming on. Great to see you again. And congratulations on your success. Distinguished engineer now at Presidio. Great company. Give a quick point for the company. What's going on at Presidio? What are you guys are doing? What kind of work you're doing and how do people contact you? I need to be the formal marketer to do any of this stuff. So, you know, Presidio is, It's authentic. It's real. We're a three billion dollar organization. We've got 3,000, some odd individuals, over half of whom are certified engineers. We do everything from cloud to IoT, to traditional infrastructure, collaboration. We've got a huge security practice, managed services practice. We do financing. So we really try to be a one stop shop for just about anything IT related. A lot of creation going on the community here. And I think one of the things that's great is this is all about making it real. Taking the way that's everyone's riding, getting it real, making it work. So congratulations. Thank you very much. Cube Coverage here, here in Mountain View. I'm John Furrier with the Cube, with Lisa Martin here, covering day two of DevNet Create. Stay with us for more live coverage after this short break.