 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Good morning, welcome to theCUBE's second day of coverage of Cisco Live 2019 from San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host is Stu Miniman and Stu and I have a couple of guests from Cisco's data center networking group with us. To my right, Thomas Scheiba, VP of product management. And to his right, Ranga Rao, Senior Director of Product Management. Guys, welcome to the queue, welcome back Ranga. Thank you very much. Thomas, great to have you. Happy to be here, yeah. So here we are in the DevNet zone. This is, Ranga, you were saying this is, this is probably one of the busiest locations within all of Cisco Live. It's been jammed since this morning. You have the ACI takeover going on right now. It is. Yes, yes. So with that said, Thomas, with ACI application-centric infrastructure, all these changes to the network, what's going on on day two? It's fun. It's actually, yeah, as you say, that's a lot of busier. We have a good set of news coming this week and yeah, you're going to hear more about, let me give a little bit of a hint here. So what we're doing, we talked about how do we extend ACI into the cloud with ACI Anywhere. We did this two or three months ago with AWS. We're following up with the same for Azure as well of having extension into the IBM cloud. So that's really, really exciting. Opens up a lot of capabilities not just for the networking teams, how to extend into the cloud. We also have some interesting things around how do we actually can start with ACI AnyCloud first for the app developers and then come back if you want to deploy either in the cloud or on-prem. So really an extension of what is doable for the networking team as well as actually for the app teams. So any ACI, any platform, any location, any workload? Any hypervisor, any container platform you want? Yeah, flexibility. That's what this is about. Ranga, I spoke with you earlier this year with one of your partner shows talking about all the latest AI, cognitive learning and all of those pieces there. Partner's obviously a big piece of the ACI story here. Thomas was given a little talk about some of the cloud provider. What more can you share about what's happening with how your product integrates with a vast ecosystem? Absolutely. When we built ACI, we sort of anticipated this momentum and this crowd in the definite area that we are seeing. Like from people shifting from a very CLI focused approach to a developer focused and a solution focused approach. So we built ACI as an open platform. We have 65 plus partners and with new integrations coming on like every so often, just this at Cisco Live, we are launching an integration with F5. F5 has built an app for the Cisco ACI App Center and a whole number of tools and integrations for developers. We have essentially built integrations with Ansible, Terraform and new Python modules. So these are all exciting new things coming at Cisco Live. So when you guys talk with customers, being in product management, I know you talk to customers all the time. There's presumably a very bi-directional symbiotic relationship. When you're talking with customers, Thomas, what are some of the values that they're looking for ACI to help them deliver? Especially as it relates to being able to get more value out of the data that they've got. Right. So there are a couple of things that are probably standing out. One is the, if you're talking to the networking team, it's all around network automation and segmentation. These are the two big things everybody's after. Particularly if you look as the data is more distributed, it's become harder and harder to do this all manually. You want to automate your day, one activity, as well as you want to make sure you can enforce segmentation of the data lifts in the cloud and on-prem all over the place. So these are the two big ones that really every network operation team is after. And then the second piece that we see obviously more and more is, what about day two? Give me better visibility, particularly as I said, if the data is so distributed, give me better visibility. What is going on? And then be able to tie this back to the user, which is the application team. Is there an impact on the application or not? And so there are a lot of interesting tools that we have and we're going to demo this all here. That is available for the networking team. The other piece really you asked for the values, as I said, the app team, right? What is today if an app team is developing, they're typically then handed over in production. This is where this friction happens. How long does it take to go from year to year? If I can shorten that one and just take the pluprons out of the app development process and map it directly to the automation capability of ACI, I can shorten the cycle to deploy. And so that's a tremendous value that we do see from customers. Great, lots of discussion in the keynote about the ever-changing architectures that are happening here. Give us the update. We've been down this path for ACI for a few years now. Where are your customers at? What are the new things that are causing them challenges and opportunities, Thomas? Yeah, I probably would use instead of ever-changing, I would say ever-expanding, but you're absolutely right. Because what we saw when we started this office roll-around, how do I automate my data center? How do I get a cloud experience in my data center? What we see changing, and what kind of thing is driven by this whole app refactoring process, that customers want to deploy apps maybe in the cloud, maybe develop in the cloud, and so they need an extension to the automated data center into the cloud. And so really what you see from us is an expansion of that ACI concept to Ranga's point. We actually really didn't change. We're just extending it to container development platforms to different cloud environments, but it's the same way here. How do I automate the end-to-end network reach, as well as the segmentation? Yeah, Ranga, maybe can you expand on some of that automated piece of it? Even, you know, I look at one of the things that jumped out at me this week is there's some changes to the CCIE program. It's not just, okay, I've done it, and I do my test. It's, well, we understand that things are changing year to year, and therefore how I get my certification, how I keep up on these is going to change. Where does automation play in our policies? Absolutely. I mean, when you think about automation, there are two key parts to it. One is the automation that happens within the fabric that the controller manages. And there's a lot of that to extend on like what Thomas was saying, right? In terms of how quickly the fabric can be brought up, how quickly applications can be deployed on the fabric, and so on. Beyond that, there's automation that we have built, leveraging the modern DevOps and CICD tools that are very popular among the developer community. Like I said, we have built integrations with Ansible, Puppet, Terraform, and so on, but we have also made rich APIs available across our platform. Every piece of information that the controller or the switches have is very much accessible for developers. That's really a path-breaking approach to networking, where developers have access to everything and can program to the network. So I think that's where the world is going, and that's what we plan to support with automation. Let me comment on this, because there's an interesting piece of what we did. We have this fabric controller called DAPEG. It's actually an app-hosting platform as well. And so what we're actually taking advantage of that, everything is code and ACI, and you can write as a partner customer apps right on top. And so like the F5 integration that we have done is literally an F5 written app residing there, right? And so it's really, really, really flexible to build workflows around what you want to do in the infrastructure for customers themselves or any partner themselves. Yeah, it's an interesting piece, because I think back in my career, how much of the network architect think about the applications, like, oh, okay, how much throughput, and sure, I needed to go from North South to East West, or oh wait, this thing needed some extra buffer credits, but usually the business owner, application owner, and the network people, they were throwing things over the wall between each other and tweaking some dials here. Now when I look around the show, we're talking about building applications at the core of it, and it's happening together. Can you speak a little bit to some of the activities going around and that trend? No, absolutely, it's actually exciting. I actually, because of my background as a, I did programming long, long time back, and it's actually- That's when you called it programming, not coding. Correct. You called it programming. It is actually exciting to see, and I can tell you over the last four or five years, when we run these sectorials, we ask, is like, architecture and programming, how many people are interested in programming? And it used to be, I don't know, 10%, now it's literally as 60 to 7% of the people in the room are saying, we're using automation frameworks like Ansible, and they actually see what we're doing and the value and they want to learn more. So there's a significant shift in terms of what people expect, what they want to do with the network infrastructure, versus what it was in the past. It's just a reflection on, as I said, the agility that is needed out of the infrastructure and how to react to what the developers, the users want to do that put the apps on. So- In the spirit of Cisco's bridge to possible, which was the Barcelona theme, is this a bridge to IT and business working better together? Absolutely. I mean the way, I don't know what I can say much better. It's absolutely, how do I bridge, we call it initially, how do I bridge between what you call out the networking and application team? It's the bridge to possible. It's not like, oh, it's your problem, it's my problem. We can do it together or these two teams can do it together, absolutely. That's actually a very good reference. To add to that, like one by one in 2012, thinking about what should ACIB, everyone in the industry was somehow thinking that all the network engineers will magically become programmers, right? So programmability is a big part of what the network needs, but also being aware of the application and being able to respond to the right needs of the application at the right moment is a pretty big thing. And that's what we have built with ACI with the first class support for programmability. And the programmability that we're seeing and hearing about, Ranga, how was that a differentiator for Cisco? So I think first of all, like the network we have always believed is the nervous system of the enterprise. So a lot of really interesting information goes through the network. So unlocking the value of the network for these different use cases is what's made possible with the programmability approaches that we have taken, right? The only reason why we have 65 plus partners programming to our platform is because we have these open APIs. We have a ton of channel partners using the open APIs to build apps and to like support various different use cases for our customers with ad hoc automation or even using some of the automation frameworks. So it has really evolved the network from being CLI centric to being solution and programmability centric. Maybe one point to make since you set open APIs and I can't overemphasize this, we're truly open APIs, right? Because sometimes there's in this, not naming names, but people saying, oh, you have to be a certification to use these APIs. That is not the case for Cisco APIs on ACI. They are open, everybody, customers, partners, quite frankly, even competitors could use those to program. We're standing behind our APIs, they can be used as is. Yeah. So it is quite a big change. I mean, people know historically Cisco, it's like, well, Cisco solves customer problems and then they would drive it through the standards. Here, we've watched the ascendancy of the DevNet group and hundreds of thousands of people now helping to build code. It's the API economy. So, very much it's not the Cisco I thought about a generation ago. Thank you. We take this as a compliment. We're actually really excited to see how much development is possible by opening this platform up with APIs. And I think there's somebody else that is, so it's not on mine, but you're more APIs to have, you have, easier it is to integrate, the faster we jointly develop and actually achieve what we want. So that's the bridge. And the beautiful thing about APIs is, customers and other developers build things that we even haven't envisioned. We are seeing a lot of that. So that's another way of unlocking innovation for our customers and we are seeing a lot of that. So when we talk with any customer, any business, we always talk about speed scales, speed to innovation. With the wave of connectivity, the expansion of 5G, Wi-Fi 6, the proliferation of mobile data that's going to be traversing the networks the next few years. It's going to be video. How is an application-centric infrastructure going to allow customers to take advantage of the demands on the network, but that need for speed, so that your customers can be as competitive as they need to be? Let me try to kind of tune down to the essence there. What really is going on, you have all these different applications, as you pointed out, all of these are users and endpoints. And what you want to do is, you want to have an ability to correlate between what the user wants to run on the infrastructure and how the infrastructure has to behave. And then also, you want to be correlate back of the infrastructure issues who is impacted. And really what ACI was about is, not rebuilding application, it was about to provide this glue, this bridge between what's going on in the infrastructure to what the user experiences. And if I can do this, it becomes so much more efficient and it's so much easier to roll out all these new applications on an ACI infrastructure. Exciting stuff, guys. Thomas Ronga, thank you for joining Stu and me on theCUBE today. Lots of exciting stuff. We'll be listening for those announcements that you said are coming out later today. Okay, you will see them. Excellent, thanks guys, we appreciate your time. Thanks, same here, appreciate it. Our pleasure. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from our second day of coverage of Cisco Live from San Diego. Thanks for watching. Yeah.