 Live from Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE. Covering DevNet Create 2019, brought to you by Cisco. Hi, Lisa Martin with theCUBE. We are live at the Computer History Museum for Cisco DevNet Create 2019. John Furrier is my co-host and we're pleased to welcome back to theCUBE Mandy Whaley, Senior Director of Developer Experience for DevNet. Mandy, this event is bursting at the seams. This is the third DevNet Create, but you've been involved for the last five years or so from the beginning when this was really groundswell. Before we kind of talk about the history of DevNet, tell our audience what DevNet is, what DevNet Create is as well. Absolutely, so DevNet is Cisco's developer community. So anywhere that Cisco has APIs or SDKs, anywhere that people can build on top of our platforms, DevNet is the community that enables those developers. So we do a lot of connecting of people within the community. We also do a lot of developer enablements, sample code, documentation, blogs, learning resources, in-person workshops, online workshops. I lead our developer experience team, which is our developer advocates who are being the voice of the developer, helping the developers get inspired and build things. Also our DevNet Sandbox team, so hosted labs. If you want to use some networking APIs, you may not have an extra network laying around that you can program against an experiment. So we offer reserved hosted labs that anyone can use free by becoming a DevNet member. And then the other part is our developer content and support. So really getting the information out there and supporting the developers. So DevNet is our community that enables everyone to build on top of Cisco. And this community is now, sorry John, we're both very excited. As Susie was announcing this morning, over 585,000 members strong, and the energy and the excitement in the room this morning with the keynote, people are chomping at the bit. When you guys talked about Y56, I loved the examples that you gave. This community is engaged. That is one of the things that's really exciting to about working with the DevNet community is that I feel like the energy that we put in, we get back multiple fold from the community, right? And it's great to see people who started with us maybe five years ago who have made their first API call, started down this path, and now they're building full applications and they're here sharing that information by presenting with the community and giving back. And that excitement, that engagement is really one of the funnest parts of my job. So. DevNet Create, good background on that. Tell the story, I know I've been there with you guys since the beginning of theCUBE. So I know a little bit about it, but I want you to tell the story because it was a genesis that came out of what you guys were seeing in the DevNet community where cloud was really becoming part of it. Tell me where the DevNet Create portion came on and what it means for the DevNet community and developers at large. Yes, absolutely. So I started working with DevNet before DevNet had a name. So before it was actually DevNet, that was the five years ago. And we started building the community. We have a developer event within Cisco Live. So we have the DevNet zone and we offer a lot of our content and classes and workshops there. We started getting requests from that audience saying we would like a smaller event with more ability to have deeper conversations, more one-on-one, and just focused on the developer community. And this was when multi-cloud was really starting to become a big piece of the Cisco strategy. Our developers were just trying to figure out how to work in that space. Cloud Native was taking off. And that was the first DevNet Create, which was three years ago. It was a very small venue in San Francisco and it was our very closest and deepest engaged set of members that came to that first year. But we had such great engagement, some of that energy that you mentioned, and everyone helped build it towards the second year, which we had last year at the Computer History Museum, so same venue. And what's special about DevNet Create is we really try to get the two parts of our DevNet community together. The application developers and our infrastructure, automation, DevOps teams, right? And we try to bring them together at this one event where they can really exchange ideas, get to be talking the same language. This morning we had conversations around Wi-Fi 6 from the application developer side, like what does it enable for the application developers, new things you can build, and then how is that also interesting to the networking side of our community? And demos are a big part of it. You got the hackathon camp, you got the camp experience, you got the camp create, right, the tools. But the event's not your classic event. It's not like, let's get the numbers up, let's get the tenants, let's make some money. This is not about that vibe. This is a different vibe. It's more of let's make it intimate, somewhat structured, but disorganized enough to be collaborative. Yes, it's definitely collaborative and it's definitely a community focused event. Over, I think over 75% of the content this year came from the community. So they're here giving back and presenting their workshops. It's also very hands on. Hands on is actually kind of a core DevNet value. We like to always give people the ability to code something, try something, build something. So you mentioned camp create. That is our, we call it a buildathon because it's a little more structured than a free form hackathon. We start with some use cases, we make the technology available, and they actually started yesterday before the conference even began. Those teams started building solutions and they'll be presenting them on Thursday. And then in the conference, we have hands on workshops in small groups with eight people. So you can really take the time to actually get in, run the code, do the work, ask questions right to the presenter. And we really want that collaborative sharing ideas feels very intentional part of building this conference. So I'd love to ask you some probing questions around the future of where you see this going because you have the key ingredients that are coming together, you mentioned them. So scaling this up is going to be a challenge because you have DevNet, you have the DevNet zone at Cisco Live, which is the Cisco proper, then you kind of have this elite community, that's my words, I guess it's the best of the best, but it's really a cross-section of unique profile, a persona. Is the intention to have these guys then go back to their communities or within the communities? Is that the scale point? And because how do you run these intimate events? And not lose the spirit of the ethos. So that's something we're putting specific thought into because we do want to keep the spirit, we've actually heard that from some of our kind of core community members that they really want to keep that aspect. So a couple of things that we are planning to help with that. One is you may have seen this morning, we gave the DevNet Creator Awards. So those are awards for people who contribute to the community. And a lot of those are people who have come and learned skills, taken it back to their organizations and been able to scale that out to their organizations. So that's something that we're really actively working with people to do and do that in a very organic and community led way. The other thing that we have been working with is a program called DevNet Express. So this is actually where we take a small part of our DevNet content, we kind of package it up and make it available for anyone to run in their region. So they can have it in a different country, they can have some of the same feeling that we have here, some of these same workshops. We've had those in, we've had about 250 of those events in 49 countries. So kind of a template and ingredient book kind of thing. Yes, exactly. It's a physical event, so it's not just SaaS on site services. That's right. It's a portable physical event. And they do workshops just like they are here. We inject some of the same fun kind of activities. And then we provide all the infrastructure through our sandbox. So if you hologram in there, I mean, you're so popular, you can't attend all of them. No, I cannot, but I love to see on Twitter, you can look up DevNet Express and see what's happening all over the world at the same time, which is really fun. And how are those folks that are doing these DevNet Express events, how are they able to collaborate with you guys, provide feedback from what they're experiencing in the field to help create more, no pun intended, help create more. Definitely. Exactly, more opportunities and really help you guys with this larger event so that they feel like, hey, we're in this community of 595,000. There's only about 400 here that can fit in person. What's that symbiosis like? So one of the things we do is, while we're here at DevNet Create, we do live stream a lot of the content. So it was really fun today. When we finished the keynote, I heard from some people that told me, I was in the keynote, I was watching and I started texting my friends, hey, you got to get on the live stream. And that's a great thing to hear from the community because you're giving away for those people to join in. We also have on DevNet our community chat room. It's on every page, chat with us DevNet. It gets you right into a room with the developer advocates on our team and other community members. And we see the community there answering each other's questions, giving us feedback, letting us know what they need to move ahead in their careers and their projects. So that community chat room is really key. Man, give us some highlights on what's changed since Cisco Live, Barcelona, what are some of the important notable successes and work areas that you guys are doing at DevNet and DevNet Create? Right, so we, as we mentioned in the keynote, our community growth, we've reached 585,000. So that registered DevNet members, that is, it's great to see that growing. And then we also see those members, you know, growing their engagement with DevNet, going deeper into the material, building more content and taking it back to their organizations and things like that. Right now we are building up to Cisco Live US, which is coming up in San Diego. In June, we'll have our full DevNet zone there. So a lot of exciting activities that we're planning for there. We hope everybody can come and can see us there. And then another thing is Code Exchange. So Code Exchange, we actually announced it at DevNet Create last year and launched it a little bit after DevNet Create. Code Exchange is the place for the community to share their projects. So they can, anything that is open source, they can share it by sending us their GitHub link. We curate that into a Cisco relevant sort of catalog. If you're looking for a sample to use DNA Center and you want to see it in Python, you can go search for exactly that and get back some projects that the community have submitted. So we're excited to announce this week that we've reached over 400 projects in Code Exchange of those curated projects that have gone through the process and been posted there. So that was a really exciting milestone, looking back to create from last year. So it's working. Yeah. So what's the vibe internally at Cisco? I know Susie and team have been kind of getting a lot of press and praise, press externally, praise internally at Cisco as the big battleship of Cisco kind of gets on that cloud wave coming. You mentioned multi-cloud hot area. It is. So one of the things that is really exciting is we are seeing APIs be available across our whole portfolio. So in every area that Cisco has products and up and down the stack at the device layer, at the controller layer, at the cloud layer. So that's very exciting from a DevNet perspective because it gives us more for our community to work with, more opportunity for developers. And that change at Cisco is very palpable. It's very exciting. And we're bringing the DevNet community into that as much as we can. And from the creativity too, we saw the demo for Atisha about the virtual realities, gave it a first peek at Barcelona. But here, amplifying that with Wi-Fi 6.2, you can just, with virtual reality, look at it devisously, see all the stats, see with the network coverage, new way to do work. Yeah, exactly. And to me, that demo is a great, example of this applications meeting infrastructure message, which is really what DevNet Create is about. We wrote an augmented reality application running on a mobile device, but you can check literally seeing the signal strength from all your access points. So that's just a great example of those two things coming together. Speaking of coming together, one of the things, and you touched on this a minute ago, but in the keynote this morning, when I was looking at the Meraki demo of the other things that you guys were doing and the evolution of Cisco, I just thought, what cart horse, which one's which? Has DevNet been really kind of fueling Cisco's evolution? Looking at all of the APIs available, as you mentioned, across the product portfolio, Cisco's been around a long time. Is it fair to say that DevNet has kind of been a fuel for that? And Cisco's going, wow, we've got this phenomenal community, we're evolving because our customers are and we need to. Yeah, I think it is very much hand in hand. We work really closely with our product teams and we work hard to be that voice of the developer with our product teams in Cisco. And it's been a journey that started five years ago where we knew that the APIs were going to come. We knew that there would be APIs across the portfolio. And within DevNet, we really believed in that and our DevNet community believed in it. And we've been building it very stepwise and very intentionally since then. So it's really been a great partnership and a really exciting time to be at Cisco and being a part of that transition. Well, I just signed up to chat with you guys since you brought it up earlier. Go to developer.cisco.com, they get a little chat with us on every page, signing, I signed up with my GitHub handle, so. Perfect, yeah, you can just log in with your GitHub handle. You can share some of the code and check it into the. Code exchange, you're going to post something? That'll be great. That'll be a Florentin one, so thank you, I'm going to pry. Mani, exciting, it's been great to watch you guys. You've got the Maraki Green jacket on. That's for a Maraki demo today. Maraki's been a big part of DevNet and the success and within the community has been, the reaction has been very positive. It's not in the classic portfolio of collaboration. It's really going to have a different, what does Maraki mean for the developer? What has it done? What has it enabled? Why is it important? Yeah, so Maraki has been great because it's, one, as Todd mentioned today, they really have this mission of simplifying their experience. And they've done that in their UI and they've brought that to their developer experience as well, which is really exciting for me. Maraki is cloud managed network, cloud managed wifi, and then they have a very API driven approach where you can automate almost everything you can do through the APIs. And then there's additional services that you can get from Maraki, like indoor location data and things like that. So it really opens up opportunities for both of our parts of our DevNet audience. Application developers who might be writing an indoor location-based application or doing something with the cameras that we saw today. And then the infrastructure automation side who can very, very efficiently manage and deploy their networks. It's nice connective tissue for the developers. It kind of gives you best of both worlds, wireless on the front end, back end network connections. So it really becomes a big part then, it seems like. It is, and that's another reason why we were so excited about the new Maraki developer hub that Todd announced today on DevNet. Because it really is a place where we can show that connective aspect of it and have all the code and use cases that really connects those two audiences. Well, Todd would be very excited to know that some of your community members actually have Maraki devices at their house. There you go. So, you know you're doing good when they're running their cameras at their homes and everything on Maraki. That's right. So being, I think I saw on the web, one of the if not the only conference community that brings together the app developers, those girls and guys, the infrastructure folks. What's one of your favorite stories that really shows these two worlds coming together, understanding each other, communicating? Anything that really sticks out in the last few years for you? Gosh. There's many and a lot of them are just hallway conversations that I might stop by and hear people connecting and kind of learning about, what each person works on and learning to kind of speak the same language and get together. One story that I think really stands out as a big success is around a partner that we work with who does indoor location applications and they're a pure software company, right? They write mobile applications that do indoor location and but they need a network underneath that and so we have had a great coming together of some of our main Cisco loyal people who go out and install the networks connecting with partners like that who come from the pure software side who have written applications. And so that's a great one and that is really something that we see replicating in many places and I feel like some of the hallway conversations here are starting the next stories that happen like that. Those are some of the best because they're natural organic conversations, they're not scripted, it's not reading slides. Well I wish we had more time but we'll have to see you back at Cisco Live in about six weeks or so. Yes, it's coming up quick. Well Mandy, congratulations on this success bursting at the seams and we appreciate you taking some time to talk with John and me today. Absolutely, thank you so much. Our pleasure. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Cisco DevNet Create 2019. Thanks for watching.