 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017 brought to you by Cisco. Hello everyone, welcome to day two of theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco Systems, DevNet Create, their inaugural event where they're putting the foray into the developer community in the open source community, really looking at DevOps, cloud native with data. Great move by Cisco, we're going to analyze it again here on the opening day and review yesterday a little bit and talk about what we think is happening here and give you the take on it, our angle, extracting the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Peter Burris for day two, head researcher, SiliconANGLE Meet also general manager of Wikibon.com, check out Wikibon.com, great research, some free, most of it, the good stuff is behind, subscription firewall, be a client, check it out, your business will do great because of it. Peter, quick plug there, get that out of the way, but let's talk about Cisco. We said yesterday and kind of played out, Cisco has an opportunity to transfer and grow their core development community DevNet, which is only three years old, is very robust, it's the heartbeat of Cisco right now, it's the core constituency for Cisco Systems. We're talking tier one elite networking guys, the plumbers, packet movers, whatever you want to call them, they've been designing networks from internet scale to today, everything from voice over IP, you name it, they've been doing it and the network has been the center of the action and the data center, it's been the most critical asset for availability, operational support, and stable, but not very adaptive, not very agile. So, you know, now we're- Almost by definition. And that's the purposes, the network guys choose to drive the network and enable opportunities, but now that shift has happened, it's DevOps, application developers are driving change to the network. And the big conversation is, what does it mean for Cisco, what does it mean for their communities? And we were saying that this is an opportunity to extend. We had the folks, the person from Red Hot on yesterday, talking about how when you have things come together, there's opportunities. There could be a collision or there could be an opportunity. So, these data science and computer science coming together, that is now big data that's changed the game in the world. Cisco now has DevOps and networks coming together, applications and infrastructure. This is an opportunity for Cisco. Your take from yesterday, do you feel it? Do you think it's real? What's your take? Well, it's real, digital transformation's happening because people can now do things with data that they couldn't do before and they're starting to. So, that's the basis of digital transformation, but the reality is, in a digital business, you're going to be by definition, almost inherently, highly networked. And your ability to move data where it needs to be, when it needs to be there to, whom it needs to be, so they can consume it, is emerging as an essential capability. But you're not going to do that manually everywhere. You're not going to do it manually in the infrastructure. It's just too complex. And you're certainly not going to do it manually in the applications. And so, you're absolutely right. Being at that edge, being at that margin between how the network does things, how the network is the basis for a very high-quality capability for distributing application componentry and how the data then flows over that network under control by applications is really where the next five years are going to be, a lot of the new values are going to be created. And it's great to see so many developers here that are actually creating code at a conference that's being sponsored and put forward by Cisco. The AppDynamics, certainly a forcing function for Cisco. Great acquisition. They paid a pretty penny for it. But it could have been more, had they gone public, given the market that's in. So, AppDynamics comes in, Cisco now has a cloud-native direction. Still work to do, but they're doing it in a way that's not all Cisco. They're not coming in with Cisco washing, hey, you know, this is Cisco. They're really doing it right. They come in, 90% of the sessions are not Cisco at all. It's all community-based. Is this a working strategy for Cisco? Do you see, and what would you advise them? Because this is important. They have to do this, in my opinion. I think it's a great move, personally. But now, the innovators dilemma is DevNet's exploding. You got DevNet's beautiful communities growing. It's growing really fast. But now you got DevNet create. What do they do? Well, so let's talk about the AppDynamics acquisition just for a second. As with everything, talking about a big company acquiring a company of any size, you always have to observe and see how it's going to play out. But it's got a lot of potential. One of the places I think it's got a significant potential is in that AppDynamics, as a technology, does a great job of capturing metrics about application performance on networks. And as we think about how the market and technology is going to be reconfigured so that networks can be better, more planful, more predictive about what kinds of things the applications are going to need, being able to surface that kind of data is going to be really, really crucial to setting up the next round of conventions. And that leads to the answer for your question. If we think about where the market needs to go, we have full stack developers, we have networks. They talk to each other, but they don't engage in a meaningful way as often as they should. And I think it's time for us to start thinking about above layer six. That layer seven, start breaking down layer seven and saying, well, that's where that full distributed stack development's going to take place. So that we can start seeing how data will be reused, application services will be reused, components will be reused across a variety of different use cases. And having that kind of a new structure defined and laid out so that it is built on the presumption that there's going to be a significant network in the middle of it, I think is going to be really important. Doing everything with RESTful APIs is really important, but I think the industry needs to get a lot more intelligent about how we're really going to build these things and not just presume that there is no network connection. There is network connection. There has to be one and we have to build that into the architectures that we put forward in the future. So programmable infrastructure is the DevOps ethos. That's what Cisco's proposing and saying they will and are becoming. I get that. I think that's the winning formula. But let's take that concept with what you just said. You're implying that, okay, with now distributed infrastructure at scale with app dynamics and other things, the notion of a developer changes because now Cisco folks and their developer community now is not just by itself, it's integrating in with the rest of the communities. That changes the notion of full stack developer because when you go higher, I need to hire a full stack developer. This is absolutely at the database or how low does it go? So I think you brought this up yesterday, not on camera, but after when we were kind of talking is that this is an opportunity to reconfigure the new definition of a full stack developer. Yeah, I think so, John. And one of the things we did talk about with Susie when Susie was on camera yesterday was the idea that, yes, we can as we introduce software to find infrastructure, the infrastructure becomes programmable. And so we now see Cisco, CLI type people thinking about programming instead of just doing command line work. We see it happening in the server world and the cod world, et cetera. So there's no question that that notion of programmable infrastructure is becoming very real. What we're talking about is stepping it up and having it be available to developers in new and different ways, but utilizing new conventions that start to suggest that for time purposes, latency purposes, security purposes, think about organizing your application componentry in new ways so that the underlying network and infrastructure can provide even more robust capabilities and more consistent capabilities so that we can see further future ways of integrating these things together. And I think that's where this ends up. Interesting point about the network opportunity is that Cisco and networking guys are not as strange as the services. Network services have been around for a while. When you look at what came out of yesterday's conversation this is consistent with a lot of our CUBE interviews we've done with cloud native players like Amazon and everyone else like AWS and VMware and everyone else. Is everything's a service? So the question that I have, the Cisco world is can they move quickly enough to a services model in this notion of a new network engineer, network developer, infrastructure developer? How well can they get transitioned over while preserving their core base of developers? I think they have to, and it's a great question and we're not going to have the answer from here but I think one of the things we do need to start seeing and we're starting to hear rumblings of it is the idea that the network has to become more intelligent in the context of the services that the application developer utilizes that run above it. And so the network doesn't necessarily have to be made explicitly or overtly available but it has to be intelligent enough so that it can provide new capabilities, new service levels, new security levels, et cetera in a response to the way the services are invoked and the patterns of operation. You know in many respects, we talked about this a little bit yesterday, John. I think we used to have infrastructure defined by hardware and that served the industry okay for a long time. And in the last 10 years we started talking about software-defined infrastructure. We moved from hardware-defined infrastructure to software-defined infrastructure and that's kind of where we are today with the idea of the network becoming more programmable. I think as a consequence of big data and recognition where digital business is going, where data really is the asset and the idea that we're not going to build applications and then find data, we're going to start with data and then decide what we need to do with that data through big data and other types of things. We're literally talking about in the next five years about something that we might call data-defined infrastructure where the data, the characteristics of the data, the location of the data, the way it's used, the way it creates value for the business, having a dominant impact on how the infrastructure gets configured. And I think that has enormous opportunity for Cisco. Pat Galsinger talks about the software-defined data center still part of the VMware strategy. This is kind of where it's going. So I'm going to put you on the spot. Yes, after yesterday's interviews, what did you learn? What did you walk away with this? Either net new information to you or something that validates something that you've been thinking about or have been researching and analyzing? Well, the first thing I'll note in somewhat self-servicing is Wikibon is known for being at the vanguard. We tend to be a little bit out in front and imagining how technology disruption is going to play out in response to the new use cases and business issues. And it's always good to talk to people that are smarter than I am to start validating some of our positions. So we heard a lot of yesterday that was pretty strong validation at a technical level on a couple of big vendors that are along the lines of what we're talking about. So that was very easy. What did they validate? What specifically? Well, this notion of, for example, the notion of data defined infrastructure. The idea that data in the future is going to be seminal to help, to thinking about how infrastructure is intelligently configured based on the needs described within the data and the metadata. So we heard that from a couple of different people. Another thing that we heard was that there is a, that this is not just, that Cisco's vision here of having developers and network jocks coming together to thinking about what the impact's going to be ultimately on how we create business value out of technology is something that's not just a Cisco pipe dream. We had four or five partners on yesterday, including a number of them who are quite sizable. Red Hat, for example, who trumpet and reflect and are promoting similar types of concepts. And the other thing that I heard, I'm particularly going back to the PubNub conversation we had. It's really nice to see technology that has been around for a while, that works well, be reconceived to be able to do new and different things. And in particular, PubNub was talking about a deterministic PubSub network infrastructure. Very interesting stuff. It's going to be really important. So, and the reason why I think that's important is because the lessons that we've learned in the past are not necessarily dead because we're going through the transformation. One of the biggest things I think we all need to take away from this is that we think about a computer, think about, you know, my iPad, your Mac, a Dell machine, whatever else it is. We think about that as a computer. We think about a server as a computer. But the reality is if you think about what we're trying to do through conferences like this is internet-scale computing. Where we look at the entire internet as a computer. Any data, any process, anywhere. The network is the essential element of it because that's what weaves the whole thing together. And I think what we learned yesterday is the lessons of the past, some are going to be gone and we have to get rid of them. But a lot of them have more to do with business models. This is still, we're still talking about computers and we're still talking about computer science. Great, great, great, great summary of your learnings. I learned just to wrap up our intro segment. I learned a couple things. Observations that just popped out at me. One is Cisco has a lot of women in tech, engineers. So that was a very cool thing for me because we always look at our index and the CUBE interviews over the thousands of people interview, still only 18% have been women interviews. We love to do more. That's our kind of passion. But they're smart and they're really knowledgeable and it's really awesome to see great women being featured. Certainly Susie's a rock star leader at CTO. On the other thing that I learned in talking to Abby, current executive director at Cloud Foundry and Dan at Cloud Native. His open source is changing significantly and open source communities used to be, my community, we're winning. And it's always been a gamer mentality or win-lose. And I think now with the horizontally scalable cloud, you're starting to see a cross-pollination of players, cross-pollinating and participating in multiple horizontal communities that together is an expansion of the overall open source ecosystem. I think this is a new next generation dynamic that takes the tier one open source position, which really, it's our generation, we've seen open source become tier one, not tier two. It's a tier one software where people's business models are now in open source, MuleSoft, these companies are going public, multiple IPO's since Red Hat, just recently going public. I think you're going to see more business models in open source and open source is changing. I think Cloud is a big part of that. I think it's a great point, John. And the only thing I'd add to it, since this is a great summary, is that we also heard yesterday that the very notion of leadership in the open source universe is starting to change. As people come up with new business models, they're also exploring with new ways of providing leadership that doesn't violate the basic precepts of open source. Because if there has been an issue in the open source universe, it's been that open source does a great job of if you have a convention and a statement about what a product is, like an operating system, open source can do an equal or better job of it. If you start talking about use cases and a lot of business uncertainty and how open source can sometimes spend its time looking at other projects and filling holes in between projects and not getting to that use case. We've known for a while, it's not new to us that open source with the innovation is, and that's certainly seen companies have their employees there, and that's a little recruiting is going on as well. But I'm being more specific. I think the changing game in the open source community is going to be one that's going to reflect the structure of the industry. And I think Cisco jumping in with this event will change the game and the makeup of open source in projects because if you believe that the network is programmable and that the cloud is one big computer operating system, then you have to believe that that's going to be a new domino that drops and falls. And I think the impact of Cisco making programmable internet, programmable networks, two developers will have a cascading effect that will ripple on, I think. So you're predicting a lot of new open source projects and Cisco's house to come along. I'm predicting some turmoil that could be positive. Again, is it a collision? Or is it edges coming together? And that's a chaos theory. You've talked about that. It's a good prediction. So I think it's a lot of good stuff. We'll be watching and covering it, of course, play-by-play action on theCUBE, more day two coverage of theCUBE after the short break. I'm John Forrier with Peter Burris after the short break, stay with us. Hi, I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior Director of Strategy and Planning for Cisco Dev.