 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live Europe 2019. I'm John Furrier, your host for theCUBE with Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante, also here doing interviews. Our next guests, two guests from the DNA Center platform, Cisco DNA Center platform team, Prakash Rajamani, director of product management, Cisco and Ronnie Ray, vice president of product management, Cisco. The DNA Center platform growing, 70% of the use cases, software, extractions, APIs, automation. Congratulations, great success. Thanks for joining us. Thanks John. Big fan of the DNA Center, you guys have made great progress. Take a step through us, the positioning, how things are rolling, what's some of the feedback, where's the DNA Center platform at right now for Cisco? So DNA Center was launched about 18 months back and it was probably one of the products in Cisco that has completely started to transform how we do the selling motion. So it is one of the key drivers of Cisco moving into licensing modes, which are more software led. Now, as part of how we do management, typically and traditionally, it has been very much a manual driven process. There's some reporting, but it is a lot of export led capabilities that you would need to have to do management of infrastructure. Data Center is kind of moving that access to where you can now do machine led management. Of course, it doesn't solve all the use cases, absolutely as you mentioned, they have more than 70%, but there's a whole host of new capabilities that need to be put on top, and that's where the developers come in, because this is a platform that's built for developers to be able to extend its capabilities to really look at solving problems for our customers. I think listening at the old announcements and 10 based networking, ACI anywhere, HyperFlex anywhere, data at the center of the value, data centered as you guys say is clever, but I think it highlights what you guys are doing because you're talking about programmability of the network. As two worlds collide, actually three worlds collide, cloud, on-premises, and edge into one network. You have a network, the network is key. It's getting bigger. It's got cross domains, it's a big theme here. These are hard problems that are being solved by Cisco. More complex, because there's more moving parts, but it still has to operate as one network. This is essentially highlights the success of the DNA platform. Am I kind of getting it right, or is that kind of in line with how you guys see it? Sure, and I think Cisco DNA center, I mean if you look at the evolution, we started in the network domain. You're absolutely right, we have kind of extended to the branch edge. There is now integrations that are happening with the data center, the integrations happening with the cloud, so you're absolutely looking at the fabric that we launched about 18 months back, extending and stretching to all of those domains, and wherever users connect and wherever users go to, it is the domain of Cisco DNA center. But think about that, as we kind of do that, yes, there is a change that's also required, not just in the product, but also in the IT process. Because earlier, companies had silos of things, and now those silos will be forced to work together. And CIOs want that, our network folks that support this, because clearly they want to see cross domain bring power to the organizations, but we are the enabler of making that happen. No brainer. Perkash, I'd love you to take us inside, we love looking at the product management piece here, because you've got a lot of constituencies, you've got the internal product teams, that all I'm sure want to get in, and mature and expand their use cases, you've got all your partners that are building the platform, you've got the customers asking for feedback, you've got a lot of options to choose from, which is a good thing, but you've obviously got limited resources. So take us inside that, what you've learned over the last year, how you helped prioritize and move this product forward so fast over the last 18 months. So one of the main things that we did when we started with DNA Center is to start thinking and having the vision to get to DNA Center platform. With that in mind, every feature, every capability that we built in the product was built API first, before we built a UI around it, right? That has helped us immensely in the last couple of releases, we've started delivering features as APIs, even before it had a phase to it. And I think that has helped us prioritize and make sure that we are able to meet the demands, growing demands of a customer or a partner. We had a customer who was like, I need this feature now. And we were hand strapped, we had a big backlog, we couldn't get things done. But the fact that we were able to get the APIs, we were able to work with the customer and say, hey, here you can wire these three APIs and you can get what you're looking for. And he was like, wow, that's so simple. And I'm on my own. He was happy, we are happy, be able to manage a backlog better. So I think the main strategy for us that's working is going API first on a product development basis. So this is us moving completely software driven as Ronnie was highlighting earlier in the development process that is helping us get there. And that has been- It's benefits customers a lot. I mean, they get to roll their own, if you will, without having to be customized. It's still standardized with the APIs. That's correct, right? I mean, the benefit is, as you start getting into the 30% use case where, hey, what's coming out of the box is not meeting exactly what I do today. We provide very granular APIs to very business driven, simplified intent APIs. The granular APIs allows the customer who wants to say, I want A, B, and then D and E to move forward compared to the intent-based API who is using the product in the simplicity and driving that from above. Ronnie, I'm wondering, we can actually up-level for a second here because feedback I've gotten over the last year. A year ago, we heard Cisco's moving heavily towards software. When I talked to a lot of the partners, both technology partners and channel partners, they said, this had a ripple effect inside Cisco. It's not so much, okay, here's the SKUs and here's the new boards and here's the products, but I need to sell a solution and therefore that's platforms that I have to have and therefore everything needs to work together and I have to think API first and like, it's a significant change as to how Cisco is. The joke I used to have is, Cisco is like 100 companies and some people would like, well, maybe it's 100, maybe it's 200, but today it's now something like platform is a unifying place. Is this solution set part of that driver and is that something you're seeing more broadly inside Cisco? Certainly and I think you're absolutely right that it has had a unifying effect if I might put it that way. Because there's so many different capabilities that existed in different tools that are coalescing on Cisco DNA Center and which is becoming part of the platform which is now customizable by our entire development community. But think of as that happens, now within the sales force, within Cisco as a company, there is no more cross domain knowledge that will be required because now it operates different parts, it can tune different things. That also means that this supports the change in business model because going into software and kind of bringing that together and it's increasing and the Cisco is obviously, it's for a into software subscriptions, this is a key product that's kind of supporting that. So in many ways it's not just the technology, it's not just the APIs, but it's also as a business process is changing Cisco just like it'll change customers. One of the things we're seeing is a lot of design thinking principles this year. Love the new positioning, bridge to the future, bridge to tomorrow, wherever it goes, but it's clean. Connecting the worlds are connecting together through the network, get that. What has been some of the challenges and opportunities that you guys are seeing around simplicity? Love this API exposing APIs, it allows for some customization, I love the broader intent-based templates are great, but it's hard to make things simple. Can you just elaborate on how you guys are thinking about the product short, medium, long-term in terms of continuing to work in the backlog? I'm sure the feature list is growing like crazy, but you got a challenge to make it simpler. Absolutely. How hard is it? What is it in tail? Share some insight there. So let's take the question two parts and Prakash can talk to the product simplicity because that is certainly something that we've got to manage very, very carefully. But think about also, when simple doesn't mean a usable product. It also means a product that can fit into the ecosystem and make the process simpler. So there's a lot of deeper understanding that we are developing through the learning that as we work with customers and how do we embed? How do we make customers' life easier? How do we make the process easier? And then I know for the goal is, how do we make their operational expenses lower? Because we want them to go faster, we want to go faster at lower cost. And so there is certainly both learning and investment that's happening there. On the product side, Prakash? On the product side, it's about how we used to build to how we are building right now. The way we used to do was a new feature comes in. It goes to the device layer first. The device team builds it, puts CLI around it, ships it off, sends it to the management team and the management team says, oh, I got to support this feature. They go, they wrap a UI around it, they support the feature, ships. Now we have flipped the thing completely around. We start with like, what is the customer workflow? What do they need to do? And how can we do it in the minimum number of steps? Once we identify that, we push that down to saying, here is what the user interface looks like. Here are the three steps that they need to do. That triggers down to saying, what we need as an API on the device layer to deliver that feature. So we have gone down from going a bottom-up way to build a product to a top-down customer-driven, use case-driven way to build a product. That means we are addressing the customer head-on from a simplicity perspective. And that's basically what has made us successful in moving the ball forward on this one. What has been some of the customer feedback? Can you share some anecdotes around some of the early customers who started rolling this out and what are the ones receiving on the receiving end today saying? So when you see from a simplicity feedback perspective, I have a large retail store rolling out maybe 60 APs in a single store overnight. And they've gone from having that be done over three nights to one person spending 20 minutes putting all the APs up, going to the tool, and the tool recognizing everything has come up and deployed. So it's a night and day transformation on how it used to be to how it is right now, right? So the simplicity is the key. Probably the old way was. Sounds like you stay the night in a day. Manually configure, go put a wireless ping to it. Yeah. The old way was like, yeah, you go, you plug the AP, you come back, you look at the tool, the AP is there. Check the channel, all this stuff goes on. Map it to the right controller, do all the mappings. Now you don't have to do anything. You just plug the APs and preload it to say these APs are going to the store. The tool takes care of the rest of the stuff. That's how simple it has become. I mean, it's almost like old way, new way. What, why are we doing that? And it's good when they have consistent environments with policies or stuff more expansion. I get that. What about other use cases? Wireless is one hot one. I can see that good branch office deployments. What are some of the popular use cases that you're seeing in the customer base? I know you got a broad base, but what are the ones that, what are the patterns that are emerging out of this? So let me start and then I'll have Ronnie chime around in the use case that he's seen. Some of the ones that are probably very transformational is around the policy based use case, right? We have companies turning around and creating small subdivisions within their organization. We have a large government in Asia who's deploying that. They have 20 divisions. Earlier to do that, it's extremely complex. They have to go in, they have to understand what division, who's using on which device, which ports map to them. Just planning that exercise is so huge. With the new policy driven approach that we have gone, they don't have to know about anything. They just need to know Prakash works for division A, Ronnie works for division B, assign me to the respective divisions. As I come in, my policy gets carried over to the network. I deploy the network as is, as I speak. That is basically the level of simplicity that has changed and that all ties back to doing your network from a policy perspective, not networking from a feature perspective. Got it. Ronnie, any comments on use case on your end? Yeah, absolutely. So think about, you know, we've talked about assurance. You know, we've launched segmentation that's doing very, very well, of course, you know, even with, you know, all of the public acknowledgement that goes with it. But an interesting use case that's come up in, which was, in fact, in the keynote this week at Cisco Live, is about IoT extensions. So TDS Center now is kind of extending to the factory floor, the production equipment and transportation. And these are tremendous new opportunities that are both for companies to kind of look at IT and OT and how this comes together. So again, going back to the unification, simplification theme that do many more things, but at the same time, you know, try to make it rationally much more operable. Okay, so a lot of progress in 18 months. Give us the roadmap going forward. At the beginning of 2019, what should we be looking for kind of high level? Show us what we should expect to see down the road. Okay, so from a roadmap perspective, it's, you know, think about that, you know, we've been very focused on getting to customer value. Now the lens is kind of shifting to how do we deal with large enterprise capabilities? So both the hardening of the system itself, how do we look at, for example, you know, multiple clusters opening up in diverse locations, really give us geo-diversity and support there from that perspective and high availability. So these are enterprise class features. Every large customer requires it. And as they move from smaller deployments to full-scale deployments, that is something that they'll absolutely need. Yeah, Prakash, when I heard you talking about things, I need to think a little bit differently. It's like, okay, I'm used to going into the deploy and it's going to take me three days. Wait, you know, how do I learn about the fact that I can do it now in a couple of hours? So what kind of training or retraining or education? Is that part of what you're doing in your team or where does that happen? That's part of the education, part of the videos that we develop and publish to customers so that they don't think about this as, I'm going to approach my same 20 steps and think that I'm going to do that through Dana Center, except that I'm going to do that through a user interface. The first thing that we tell them is like, you're not going to do 20. You're going to do two, right? So, and the immediate feedback is, oh, does it address everything that I want to do? And so, and that's the 70% use case model where they say, yes, it addresses. Only thing is we have simplified it, we have compressed it. So you don't have to go and go through all these 20 steps, but instead get it done in two. So the wads have helped, some of the trainings that we have done has helped. Even talking to from a sales process, the customer to know, hey, this is what I'm embracing. So when they come in, they don't come in with, I'm going to run my network the same way, but no, no, no, I'm going to run it differently, has helped us immensely to make the transition. Well, guys, congratulations on a great successful product. Big fan, I love it. I think it's going to be the future. I think a lot more headroom there as customers look at automation. Certainly the DevNet zone where we're in is showing massive growth, the appetite for automation, the appetite for configuration at scale and managing the complexity is a sweet spot. I think you guys had a nice formula here. Looking forward to it. Final question for you guys, Ronnie and Prakash, you can both answer it. Say something about DNA center platform that people should pay attention to, that they might not hear about in the mainstream chatter. That's important, that they should maybe, if they want to kick the tires or understand it further, an area that they should know about that they might not hear about or that they should know about what's the most important feature, share some insight. So again, just looking, peeking a little bit into the future Cisco DNA center platform. Right now we're kind of talking of APIs. There's capability that's coming in the future, that'll also deal with workflows. And the workflows will be built on something which is machine built. So there will be a lot of analytics. In fact, in a DNA center, not only does automation, but also extends into analytics. So a lot of cool stuff that'll come there. And again, we'll talk about it more as we get to the next Cisco life. Prakash, anything? I'm going to go a little bit more granular. People tend to talk about simplicity, talk about how we can do things very differently with DNA center. And people tend to forget that we have not forgotten the network engineer who's been managing the network. We have APIs for you to do the same thing that you've done all along. Create ACLs, create VLANs, do some of the basic networking stuff. So there's not about this, just the simple. We also have the more detailed breakdown of the APIs so that you can still continue to know the nuts and the bolts and other things as well, as much as the simplest stuff. So it's a power of flexibility. It's an empowering, all personas in the network. From network engineer, low level getting down and dirty to large scale automations, whatever the use case is. You've got the power of it. Yep, that's basically what I would like to. That's awesome. Well congratulations again, big fan, DNA center. Take over here in the DevNet zone. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman's Cube Coverage. Day two of three days. Stay with us for more after this short break.