 Live from Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2019, brought to you by Cisco. Welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with John Furrier live at Cisco DevNet Create 2019 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. John and I are pleased to welcome to theCUBE Jeff Levinsailer, Collaboration Engineer from Presidio. Jeff, it's great to have you joining us today. Yes, great to be here. So lots of energy, you can hear all this noise behind us. We heard this morning in the keynote that the DevNet community is now well over half a million strong. You mentioned before we went live, this is your second DevNet Create. So before we get into Presidio and Cisco, tell me a little bit about your involvement in the DevNet community. So I got started just looking for support and it's not like it's a supported product. This is a new venture for everybody. So you go out and you find these little avenues to get questions answered and WebEx Teams has a great community support and you just ask a question. Ended up answering more questions than I was asking and that kind of like got me started down this path of people with bounce ideas off each other. So really this is a homecoming and it's just people inspiring each other. If you really want to learn in deep dive, obviously I'm a self learner so I'll just sit down and really get into it but I come here to get inspired and the keynote just so. Blew you away. Yeah. What was the highlight for you on the keynote? What was that? Anything Ashutosh has to talk about. So Ashutosh is on the, I guess the incubator side. He comes up with these things and his job is to get people excited about the APIs. So today he had an augmented reality app with his phone and he would go around and show network coverage of a Wi-Fi hotspot. You can go up to an access point and troubleshoot network of problems by seeing if an access point's registered or not. So my mind I'm thinking how many times do I go in the data center and look I have to plug in a laptop to look to see what VLAN's on a port. Now I can take that same approach to put my phone out in a data center and okay this switch has this VLAN's here I could plug it in. I don't even need to plug my laptop in. I mean he first introduced the beginning of that demo at Cisco Live in Barcelona. Totally blown away, he's a demo god first of all. He's amazing. But it shows the automation right and also shows the new kind of experiences. I think to me what's inspiring to me about this community and I'd love to get your reaction to this is that it kind of shows a new way to do work. And it's all about making life easier but it's also more capability. You can see all the configurations and then ultimately writing new apps. This seems to be the theme. Create DevNet Curiosity with all these capabilities. Is that kind of something that you're seeing as well? What's your reaction to that that kind of this new way of doing things? Wow I mean it's, we have a code competition at our Presidio called Shark Tank and it's really just to inspire people. Tell me a business use case for this. Use case is really 90% of it. You can find help. You can find mentors at your work but really just finding a use case and stuff like this coming here. Just thinking about new ways to do things and new things to create. In collaboration what are some of the things that you see that are low hanging fruit use cases of either mundane tasks or stuff that just needs to be kind of like abstracted away. What are some of the things? I have a ton of those. So somebody came to me, a law firm that had these attorney secretary assignments and they wanted secretaries to be able to schedule meetings for attorneys. You can do that in a GUI but we're seeing more and more as away from the GUI and it's becoming this API first. So anything that's not in the GUI it's in the API. So that's where our values integrators has really become this gap between the GUI and the API. So what we did or what I did is go in Active Directory and have some fields filled out because they're already populated in one thing for this. I read from that and then I go to a WebEx API and I populate it and that runs a nightly basis. So you automate that away, piece of cake. But this is the trend, this is kind of what we're seeing happening with the cloud. The question that comes up in the enterprise is look at, hey, we've been doing this thing for a long time. It's the way we do it. We, 10 years ago we built out this system. Don't touch it. But I love the new stuff. How do I get the new stuff in? How do I deal with the old stuff, the legacy? And now we got containers, you got some new stuff. APIs are a big part of this integration fabric, composing apps. I think you have to show the business value. It's saving time, it's saving people hours and it's really checking code into Git is something you wouldn't think about or checking network configs into Git is something you wouldn't really think about just a year ago. But that's really becoming the trend and having testable code and you know, kind of if something goes wrong, you have a backup. You have somebody you know exactly who did what. Before it was just people hacking away. So let's talk about unlocking value for a second. When you were talking with John and me about what, some of the things that blew your mind during this morning's keynote, what I was hearing from you in one sense is, wow, how much easier certain functions of your job are going to be because of this. What value are you seeing that even just a few things that were announced this morning is going to bring to, not just you and your business, but for city-owned Cisco's customers? Wow, I mean, so for instance, the Meraki thing. They release bulk actions. So APIs typically, if you write the code one at a time, that's going to limit your ability to do certain functions, having all these APIs in one endpoint, immediately I'm thinking cloud formation templates in Amazon, but as a Meraki solution. So you can take this entire network and copy and paste it as one slice of code. That's tremendous. What's the community vibe here, DevNet? I mean, big, you mentioned- It's a homecoming. I know all these people. I've met so many people from other areas and people, competitors, we're all friends here, and it's not a marketing venture at all. You don't see a lot of people scanning badges and bugging you on email later. This is all about just people nerding out about what they've done. It's an adult show and tell. I like that. It's not just the hackathons. Hey, we have an event. They throw a hackathon over it, and it turns to most of these events, turns to marketing events. It's completely unorganized. Unorganized as I would want it to be. There's conversations just passing by in the hallway, and I get just as much out of that as I do in a workshop. So you're giving a breakout session later today. Contact Center AI for more efficient governments. Yeah, so that's a 20-minute lightning talk on just a recent project I did and taking a non-premise solution and being able to do more by moving it up to the cloud. This is Amazon Connect. Could be another one, but just basically enabling, through the cloud, different functionalities. We're using a Lexbot. We're using Elasticsearch. We're using Lambda. And we're taking the top 10 tickets that this help desk would receive and trying to automate those. So I need to reset my pen. I need to transfer me to this person. That was an operator before in an Excel spreadsheet. So what we did was completely not change your workflow. They're going to upload an Excel spreadsheet into S3. It's going to kick a Lambda function to separate that spreadsheet into a Dynamo database. Elasticsearch is going to read that database. And then Lexbot is going to interact with Elasticsearch. And this is all in real time. It's all in real time. And the bot and the human. It's all natural language. Talking together. Or working together. Working together. Just all those customer problems. Or get, well that, and I guess get the customer the ticket routed appropriately. Yeah, so there's ticket lookups, ticket creation, ticket closure. Anything that you would typically, anything that you can automate, we've done it within the AVR. And we've measured containment rates. So. Jeff, this is exactly why we've been covering this our third year. Been here from the beginning at the creation of the event. Because what you just described is so valuable and so kind of basic if you think about it. The number one tickets that everyone that are stack ranked that happen over and over again. But if you break it down, this is going to database for this. I got a database for this. I got a database for this. In the old world, you'd have a waterfall process. You'd have a project manager. People would go in round trip meeting after meeting, arguing about schemas and databases. And I mean, what would it be like in the old days if you went through the old traditional models versus this agile, hey, let's just put it together. String up some APIs, sling the APIs, roll it up, wire it up. What's very exciting to me, moving from a static IVR to self service and then even more what I think, forget who coined this term, but selfie service, you know more about a user. You're able to predictively say, I see you have a ticket open or go a step further and say, I see you have email on this phone and we're having active sync issues and only alert those people of issues and not bother everybody else. I see you work out of this office and you're calling in. Are you calling about your office closure because we have a temporary office for you over here? So being able to get ahead of anything and predict, that's the next step. You know, this really also highlights what we tend to talk about in some of these data conferences where the underlying value being here is the creation and stitching together with solutions, but it's the data that's driving it, right? The tickets, the ranking, the tasks, getting into these reasoning aspect of reasoning with the data predictive or prescriptive is a personalization benefit. These are the things that are exposed on this new way of creating. There's some real exciting, very consumable APIs out there. One of them all named is Indico IO and this is something that you could just plug in some data and it'll make a prediction using just a bunch of learned data set that it already has. And I'll give you an example, a WebEx team space that we just chat away in for, I don't know, months and months. I've funded all that data to a simple API and it comes back and it tells me who's the angriest person, who's the happiest person. There's an API for, who's a conservative, who's a liberal. There's an API for the Myers-Briggs test. She can get all of this in front of us. What's the URL? What's the URL? Indico.io. Indico? Indico. I-N-D-I-C-O.io. Well, thanks for sharing that. On the API thing, I want to get your expert opinion on this because this comes up a lot recently at these conferences we go to, where we're so, oh, a new way to develop modern applications, blah, blah, blah, waterfalls going away, cloud, all that good stuff. Check, check, check. At the end of the day, the key ingredient of this is APIs. APIs are becoming the center point for one, data sharing, integration, coding, middleware, a new kind of middleware evolving. What's your view on this? Because this is an essential part of integration too. Like if someone wants to adopt a new product, I want to bring it in. It's really recognizing that your use case isn't everybody's use case. So you come from a static, fully functioning product to an API-first approach. You build the API and then you build things around it. So when WebEx Teams was released, for instance, it had certain functionality there and certain functionality wasn't there, but you could do it through the API. So it's partners and Cisco kind of competing at the same time to come up with a better solution. And anytime you compete, it's good. And anytime something is open, it's good. So you have these open APIs and you have a community trying to come up with the best solution and it's... And that's really where communities are shining too right now because communities are great at giving feedback. If something's not right, they'll raise their hand and they'll point it out. Very honest feedback, right? Yeah, competition. So Cisco telling Cisco something's not working. You know, you bring in some other people that maybe they're more apt to tell you when something's not working. They don't have any dog in the fight. They'll tell you if something's not working, they'll give you feedback and it really enables a better end product. And a product that's more form to tailor fit for that user, that use case. Which is exactly how it should be, right? So last question, Jeff, before we wrap up, you already talked about how excited you were with some of the things in the keynote. This is day one of two. Any kind of expectations or hopes and dreams for what you're going to learn the rest of today and tomorrow that will help evolve the Presidio Cisco partnership? I mean, one thing is just making connections out here. But learning, I think, so I'm a collab guy and I'm getting to be more of a developer and that's making me more of a generalist again because as a developer you have to interact with more than just collab APIs. I'm getting into wireless and enterprise and everything, security. So what I get out of conferences like this is going around and seeing what's happening in other technologies and other verticals and once again, competitive ideas. Seeing what other people are doing. Adding to that, telling them what I'm doing. What a collaboration, pun intended. Yeah, if you like puns, the keynote tomorrow is going to be amazing. Is it? Dot, dot, dot, we'll be waiting. Excellent, Jeff, thanks so much for joining John and me on theCUBE today. We appreciate your time. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Cisco DevNet. Create 2019, thanks for watching.