 From around the globe, it's theCUBE, presenting Accelerating Automation with DevNet, brought to you by Cisco. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, coming to you from our Palo Alto studio with ongoing coverage of the Cisco DevNet event it's called Accelerating Automation with DevNet in the new normal. And we certainly know the new normal is not going away but we've been doing this in the middle of March or all the way to October. And so we're excited to have our next guest. He's Thomas Shivey. He's the vice president of product marketing and data center networking for the intent-based networking group at Cisco. Thomas, great to see you. Hey, good to see you too. Yeah. Yeah, and truly we're in a new normal as everybody can see in our background. Exactly, exactly. So Bob, I mean, I'm curious, we've talked to a lot of people, we talked to a lot of leaders, you know, especially like back in March and April with this light switch moment, which was, you know, no time to prep and suddenly everybody has to work from home, teachers got to teach from home. And so you got the kids home, you got the spouse home, everybody's home trying to get on the network and do their Zoom calls and their classes. I'm curious from your perspective, you guys are right there on the network, you're right in the infrastructure. What did you hear and see kind of from your customers when suddenly, you know, March 16th hit and everybody had to go home? Well, good point. A, I do think we all appreciate the network much more than we used to do before. And then the only other difference is I'm really more on Rebix calls and Zoom calls, but, you know, otherwise, yes. What I do see actually is that, as I said, network becomes much more obvious as a critical piece. And so before we really talked a lot about agility and flexibility, these days we talk much more about resiliency, quite frankly. And what do I need to have in place with respect to network to get my things from left to right and, you know, most to south and east to west, as we say in the data center. And that just is for most of my customers a very, very important topic at this point. Right. You know, it's amazing to think, you know, had this happened, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, you know, the ability for so many people in the information industry to be able to actually make that transition relatively seamlessly is actually pretty amazing. I'm sure there was some excitement and some kudos in terms of, you know, it is all based on the network and it is kind of this quiet thing in the background that nobody pays attention to. It's like a ref in the football game until they make a bad play. So, you know, it is pretty fascinating that you and your colleagues have put this infrastructure in that enabled us to really make that move with really no prep, no planning and actually have a whole lot of services delivered into our homes that we're used to getting at the office or used to getting at school. Yeah. And I mean, to your point, I mean, some of us did some planning. We're clearly talking about some of these trends and the way I look at this, trends as being distributed data centers and having the ability to move your workloads and access for users to wherever you want to be. And so I think that clearly went on for a while. And so in a sense, we preppers are not what we're prepping for. But as I said, resiliency just became so much more important. And, you know, one of the things I actually do, a little prep before a block I put out in the August around resiliency, if you didn't put this in place, you better put it in place because I think as we all know, we started in March, this is like maybe two or three months. We're now in October. And I think this is the new normal for some time being. Yeah, I think so. So let's stick on that theme in terms of trends, right? The other great trend is public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. There's all types of variants on that theme. You had in that blog post about resiliency in data center cloud networking, data center cloud. You know, some people think, wait, it's kind of an either or, I either got my data center or I've got my stuff in the cloud and I've got public cloud. And then as I said, hybrid cloud, you're talking really specifically about enabling both inner data center resiliency within multi data centers within the same enterprise as well as connecting to the cloud. That's probably counterintuitive for some people to think that that's something that Cisco is excited about and supporting. So I wonder if you can share, you know, kind of how the market is changing, how you guys are reacting and really putting the things in place to deliver customer choice. Yeah, no, it's actually to me, it's really not counterintuitive because in the end, what I'm focusing on and the company's focusing on is what our customers want to do and need to do. And that's really what, you know, most people call hybrid cloud or multi cloud. In the end, what it is, is really the ability to have the flexibility to move your workloads where you want them to be. And there are different reasons where you want to place them, right? You might have placed them for security reasons, you might have placed them for compliance reasons, depending on which customer segment you're after, if you're in the United States or in Europe or in Asia, there are a lot of different reasons where you're going to put your sinks. And so I think in the end, what an enterprise looks for is that agility, flexibility and resiliency. And so really what you want to put in place is what we call like a cloud on RAM, right? You need to have an ability to move sinks as needed. But the larger context action, which we see in the last couple of months, accelerating is really this whole theme around digital transformation, which goes hand in hand then with the requirement on the IT side really do an IT operations transformation, right? How IT operates. And I think that's really exciting to see and this is actually where a lot of my discussions I was customers, what does it actually mean with respect to the IT organization? And what are the operational changes is a lot of our customers are going through, quite frankly, accelerated going through. Right, and automation is in the title of the event. So automation is an increasingly important thing as we know and we hear all the time, the flows of data, the complexity of the data, either on the security or the way the network's moving or as you said, shifting workloads around based on dynamic situations, whether that's business security, et cetera. And to suffer to find networkings been around for a while, how are you seeing kind of this evolution in adding more automation to more and more processes to free up those kind of limited resources in terms of really skilled people to focus on the things that they should be focusing on and not stuff that hopefully you can get a machine to run with some level of automation. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. And it's the tech line I have, sometimes when my mind is really going from cloud ready, which I think most of our infrastructure is today to cloud native. And so let me a little expand on this, right? It's like the cloud ready is basically what we have put in place over the last five to six years. All the infrastructure that our customers have and network infrastructure, all the Nexus 9000, they're all cloud ready, right? And what this really means, you have APIs everywhere, right? Whether this is on the box, whether it's on the controller, whether this is on the operations tools, all of these are API enabled. And that's just a foundation for automation, right? You have to have that. Now, the next step really is what do you do with that capability, right? And this is the integration with a lot of automation tools. And there's the whole range, right? This is where the IT operation transformation kicks in different customers at different speed, right? Some just, you know, I use these APIs and use normal tools that they have in the network world just to pull information. Some customers go for inferencing. I want to integrate this with some CFDB tools. Some go even further than saying, this is like the cloud native piece of thing. Oh, I want to use, let's say Red Hat Ansible. I want to use HashiCorp, Terraform and use those things to actually drive how I manage my infrastructure. And so that's really the combination of the automation capability plus the integration with relevant cloud native enabling tools that really is happening at this point. We're seeing customers accelerating that motion, which really then drives us how they run their IT operations. And so that's a pretty exciting area to see. Given, as I said, we have the infrastructure in place. There's no need for customers to actually do change something. Most of them have already the infrastructure that can do this. It's just not doing the operation change, the process changes to actually get there. Right, and it's funny, we recently covered pager duty and they highlight, which you just talked about the cloud native, which is all of these applications now are so interdependent on all these different APIs, pulling data from all these different applications. So, A, when they work great, it's terrific. But if there's a problem, there's a whole lot of potential throats to choke out there and find those issues. And it's all being connected via the network. So, it's even more critically important not only for the application, but for all these little tiny components within the application to deliver ultimately a customer experience within very small units of time so that you don't lose that customer. You complete that transaction, they check out their shopping cart, all these things that are now created with cloud native applications that just couldn't really do before. No, you're absolutely right. And this is like, yes, I said, I'm actually very excited because it opens up a lot of abilities for our customers how they want to actually structure the operation, right? One of the nice things around this all, automation plus tool integration, cloud native tool integration is, you actually open this up and out as whole automation train, not just to the network operations person, right? You also open it up and can use this for the SecOps person or for the DevOps person or for the cloud ops engineering team, right? Because the way it's structured, the way we built this is literally as an API interface and you can now decide what is your process? Do you want to have a more traditional process? You have a request, network operation teams executes the request using these tools and then hands it back over. Or you say, hey, maybe some of these security things I got to hand over the SecOps team and they can directly call these APIs, right? Or even one step further, you can have the opportunity that the DevOps or the application team actually says, hey, I got to write a whole infrastructure as code kind of a script or template and I just execute, right? And it's really just using what the infrastructure provides. And so that whole range of different user roles in our customer base, what they can do with the automation capability that's available is just very, very exciting, right? Because it's really unleashes a lot of flexibility how they want to structure and how they want to rebuild the IT operations processes. That's interesting because the DevOps culture has taken over a lot, right? Obviously changed software programming for the last 20 years and I think there's a lot of just kind of the concept of DevOps versus necessarily the actual things that you do to execute that technique. And I don't think most people would think of network ops or net ops, whatever the equivalent is in the networking world to have kind of a fast changing dynamic kind of point of view versus a, you know, stick it in, you know, spec it, stick it in, lock it down. So I wonder if you can, you can share how, you know, kind of that DevOps attitude, point of view workflow, whatever the right verb is has impacted, you know, things at Cisco and the way you guys think about networking and flexibility within the networking world. Yeah, literally, absolutely. And again, it's all customer driven, right? There's none of this, none of this is really, actually, you know, a little bit of credit, maybe some of us where we have a vision, but a lot of this is just customer driven feedback. And yeah, we do have even network operations teams come to be saying, hey, we use Ansible heavily on the compute site. We might use this for seven, we want to use the same for networking. And so we made available all these integrations with the variety as a state, whether these are the switches, whether it's our ACI and DCNM controller or our multi-site orchestration capabilities. All of these has Ansible integration available, right? The other one, as I mentioned, Hashi from Terraform, we have integrations available. And you see the request for these tools to use that. And so that is the motion we're in for over a year now and another block actually that's out there, we just posted saying, you'll all set what you can do. And then in parallel to this, right, just making the integration available, we also have a very, very heavy focus on, definite and enablement and training. And a little plug, and I know, probably part of the segment, the whole definite community that Cisco has is very, very vibrant. And the beauty of this is, right, if you look at this, whether you're a net-ups person or a deaf-ups person or a sec-ups person, it doesn't really matter. There is a lot of like capability available to just help you get going or go from one level to the next level, right? And there's simple things like sandbox environments where you can, you know, without stress, try things out, snippets of code are there, you can do all of these things. And so we do see, it's a kind of a push and pull, a tremendous amount of interest and a tremendous time people spend to learn, quite frankly, and that's another side product of, you know, the situation we're in, people sit home and say, okay, online learning is the thing. So these tools are used very, very heavily. Right, right. That's awesome, because, you know, we've had Susie Wee on a number of times and I know she and Mandy and the team, right, really built this DevNet thing and it really follows along this other theme that we see consistently across other pieces of tech, which is democratization, right? Democratization of the access tool, taking it out of just a mahogany row with, again, a really limited number of people that know how to make it work and can make the changes and then opening it up to a software-defined world where now, you know, it's this application-centric point of view where the people that are building the apps to go create competitive advantage now don't have to wait for, you know, the one network person to help them out and put up these environments. Really interesting. And I wonder, you know, when you look at what's happened with Public Cloud and how they kind of change the buying parameter, how they kind of change the degree of difficulty to get projects started, you know, how you guys have kind of integrated that type of thought process to make it easier for app developers to get their job done? Yeah, I mean, again, it's, I typically look at this more from a customer lens, right? It's the transformation process. And it always starts as I want agility, I want flexibility and I want resiliency, right? This is where we talk to a business owner what they're looking for. And then that translates into an ITO operations process, right? Your strategy needs to map them, how you actually do this. And that just tries then, what tools do you want to have available to actually enable this, right? And the enablement, again, is for different roles, right? There is, you need to give sync services to the app developer and the platform team and the security team, right? To your point, so the network can act at the same speed. But you also give tools to the network operations teams because they need to adjust and we have the ability to react to some of these requirements, right? And it's not just automation. I think we focused on that, but there's also to your point, the need, how do I extend between data centers, you know, just for backup and recovery? And how do I extend into public clouds, right? And in the end, that's a network connectivity problem. And we have softness, we have made this available, we have integrations into AWS, we have integrations into Azure to actually make this very, very easy from a network perspective to extend your private domains, private networks into virtual private networks on these public clouds. So from an app developer perspective, now it looks like he's on the same network. It's a protective enterprise network. Some of it might sit here, some of it might sit here, but it's really looking the same. And that's really in the end, I think what a business looks at, right? They don't necessarily want to say I need to have something separate for this deployment or separate for that deployment. What they want is I need to deploy something. I need to do this resilient. In a resilient way, in an Android way, give me the tools. And so that's really where we focus and what we're driving, right? It's that combination of automation consistently and then DevNet tools available that we support, but they're all open. They're all standard tools as the ones I mentioned, right? That everybody's using. So you're not getting into this, oh, this is specific to Cisco. It's really democratization. I actually like your term. Yeah, it's a great term and it's really interesting, especially with the APIs and the way everything is so tied together that everyone kind of has to enable this because that's what the customer is demanding. And it is all about the applications and the workloads and where those things are moving, but they don't really want to manage that. They just want to deliver business benefit to their customers and respond to competitive threats in the marketplace, et cetera. So it's really an interesting time for the infrastructure to really support kind of this at first point of view versus the other way around is kind of what it used to be and enable this hyper fast development, hyper fast change in the competitive landscape or else you will be left behind. So super important stuff. Yeah, no, I totally agree. And as I said, I mean, it's kind of interesting is we started on the Cisco data center side. We started as probably six or seven years ago when we named that application centric. Clearly a lot of these concepts evolved, but in a sense it is that reversal of the role from the network provides something and you use to this is what I want to do and I need a service thinking on the networking side to expose service that can be consumed. And so that clearly is playing out on and as I said, automation is a key, key foundation that we put in place and our customers, most of our customers at this point are on these products. They have all the capabilities there. They can literally take advantage. There's really nothing that stops them at this point. Well, it's good times for you because I'm sure you've seen all the memes in social media, right? What's driving your digital transformation? Is it the CEO, the CMO or COVID? And we all know the answer to the question. So I don't think the pace of change is going to slow down anytime soon. So thanks for keeping the network up and enabling us all to get done what we have to get done and all the little magic that happens behind the scenes. Yeah, no, thanks for having me. And again, yeah, if you're listening and you're wondering how do I get started? Cisco definitely that's the place to go. It's fantastic, fantastic environment and I highly recommend everybody roll up your sleeve and the best reasons you can have. Yeah, and we know once the physical events come back we've been to DevNet create a bunch of times and it's a super vibrant, super excited, super really engaged community, sharing lots of information. It's still kind of that early vibe where everyone is still really enthusiastic and really about learning and sharing information. So, like I say, Susan and the team have really built a great thing and we're happy to continue to cover it and eventually we'll be back face to face. Okay, look forward to that as well. All right, thanks. He's Thomas, I'm Jeff. You're watching Continuing Coverage of Cisco DevNet Accelerating with Automation and Programmability. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.