 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 studios with ongoing coverage of Cisco DevNet Create. We've been going to DevNet Create, I think since the very beginning, this year, of course, like everything else, it's virtual, so we're excited to cover it virtually and digitally, like we have a lot of other shows here in 2020, and we're excited to have our next guest. We've got Coon Jacobs, he's the director of systems engineering, for Cisco, good to see you, Coon. Thank you for having me. And joining him is Eric Nip, he is the VP of systems engineering for Cisco. Good to see you, Eric. Good to be here, thank you. Pleasure. So before we jump into kind of what's going on now in this new great world of programmability and control, I want to kind of go back to the future for a minute, because when I was doing some research for this interview, it was Coon, I saw an old presentation that you were giving from 2006 about the changing evolution of networking and moving from, I think the theme was a human centered network, and you were just starting to touch a little bit on video and online video. Oh my goodness, how far we have come, but I would love to get kind of a historical perspective, because we've been talking a lot, and I know Eric's son plays football, about the football analogy of the network is kind of like an offensive lineman where if they're doing a good job, you don't hear much about them, but they're really important to everything. And the only time you hear about them was when the flag gets thrown. So if you look back with the historical perspective, the load and the numbers and the evolution of the network as we've moved to this modern time, and thank goodness, because if COVID hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, all of us in the information space would not have been able to make this transition. So I just love to get some historical perspective, because you've been kind of charting this and mapping this for a very long time. Yeah, we absolutely have. I think what you're referring to was back in the data human network campaign, and to your point, the load, the number of hosts, the traffic, just overall the intelligence of the network has just evolved tremendously over these last decade and a half, 15 years or so. And you look at where we are now in terms of the programmable nature of the network and what that enables in terms of new degrees of relevance that we can create for the customers and how the role of IT has changed entirely, again, especially during this pandemic, the fact that it's now as a service and elastic is absolutely fundamental to being able to ensure, on an ongoing basis, a great customer experience. And so it's been a very interesting ride, indeed. Yeah, and then just to close the loop, one of your more later interviews talking to Sylvia, the whole question is, are you a developer or an engineer? So, and your whole advice to all these network engineers is just jump in and start doing some coding and learning. So the focus and really the emphasis and where the opportunity to differentiate is completely shifting gears over to the really software-defined side. Oh, absolutely. So, I mean, you look at how the software world and the network has come together and how we're applying now, basically the same construct of CICD pipeline to network infrastructure, look at network really as code and get all of the benefits from that and the familiarity of it. The way that our engineers have had to evolve in that is just quite significant in the skill set. And the best thing is jump in, dip your toe in the water, but continue to evolve that skill set and don't be shy. It's a leap of faith for some of us who've been in the industry a bit longer. We like to look at ourselves as the craftsman of the network, but now it's definitely software centricity and programmability. Right. So, Eric, you've got some digital exhaust out there too that I was able to dig up. Going back to 2002, 752 page book in the very back corner of a dark, dirty, dusty Amazon warehouse is managing Cisco network security. 752 pages. Wow. How has security changed from a time where before I could just read a book, a big book, you know, throw some protocols in and probably block a bunch of ports to the world that we live in today where everything is connected. Everything is API driven. Everything is software defined. You've got pieces of workloads spread out all over the place. And oh, by the way, you need to bake security in at every single level of the application stack. Yeah, no. So wow, Cucudos that you found that book. I'm really impressed there. So thank you, a little street cred. So I want to hit on something that you talked about because I think it's very important to this overall conversation. If we think about the scale of the network and Coon hit on it briefly, you talked about it as well. We're seeing a massive explosion of devices. By the, you know, it's estimated by the end of this year there's going to be about 27 billion devices on the global internet. That's about 3.7 devices for every man, woman and child of life. And if we extrapolate that out over the course of the next decade on the growth trajectory, we're on. And if you look at some of the published research on this, it's estimated there could be upwards of 500 billion devices accessing the global internet on a daily basis. And primarily that is IoT devices, that's digitally connected devices. Anything that can be connected will be connected. But that introduces a really interesting security challenge because every one of those devices that is accessing that global internet is within a company's infrastructure or accessing pieces of corporate data is a potential attack factor. So we really need to, and I think the right expression for this is we need to reimagine security. Because security is, as you said, not about parameters. You know, I wrote that book back in 2002, I was talking about firewalls and a cutting edge technology was intrusion prevention and intrusion detection. Now we need to look at security really in the guise of or under the realm of really two aspects. The identity, who is accessing the data, and the context, what data is being accessed. And that is going to require a level of intelligence, a level of automation, and technologies like machine learning and automated intelligence are going to be, our artificial intelligence rather, are going to be table stakes. Because the sheer scale of what we're trying to secure is going to be untenable under current, just current security practices. I mean, the network is going to have to be incredibly intelligent and leverage again, a lot of that AI type of data to match patterns of potential attacks and ideally shut them down before they ever cause any type of damage. Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, one thing that COVID has done amongst many things is kind of retaught us all about the power of exponential curves and how extremely large those things are and how fast they grow. We had Dave Renzen on at Google Cloud a couple of years ago, and I remember him talking about early days at Google when they were starting to map out kind of, as you described, kind of map out their growth curves and they just figured out they could not hire, if they hired everybody, they couldn't hire enough people to deal with it, right? So really kind of rethinking automation and rethinking about the way that you manage these things and the level, right? The old, is it a pet or is it part of a herd? And I think it's interesting what you talked about really the human-powered internet and being driven by a lot of this video, but to what you just said, Eric, the next big wave, right, is IoT and 5G. And I think, and you talk about 3.7 devices per person, that's nothing compared to all these sensors and all these devices and all these factories, because 5G is really targeted to machine to machines, which there's a lot of them and they trade a lot of information really, really quickly. So I want to go back to you, Coon, thinking about this next great wave in a 5G IoT kind of driven world where it's kind of like when voice kind of fell off compared to IP traffic on the network, I think you're going to see the same thing, kind of human-generated data relative to machine-generated data is also going to fall off dramatically as the machine-generated data just sky rockets through the roof. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think to also what Eric touched on, the visibility on that and they've been able to process that data at the edge, that's going to catalyze cloud adoption even further and it's going to make the role of the network, the connectivity of it all and the security within that, crucially important. And then you look at the role of programmability within that, we're seeing the evolution going so fast, you look at the element of the software-defined network in an IoT space, we see that we have hosts there that are not necessarily behaving like other hosts would on a network. For example, a manufacturing floor, a production robot or a security camera. And what we're seeing is, we're seeing partners and customers employing programmability to make sure that we overcome some of the shortcomings in terms of where the network is at but then how do you customize it in terms of the relevance that it can provide, bring on board those hosts in a very transparent way and then keep the agility of it and keep the speed of innovation going. Right, right. So Eric, I want to come back to you and shift gears kind of back to the people. We'll leave the IoT in the machines along for a minute. But I'm curious about, what has beat the boss? I mean, I go to your LinkedIn profile and it's just filled with congratulatory statements but everyone's talking about beating the boss. It's a really kind of interesting and different way to motivate people to build this new skill set in terms of getting software certifications within the Cisco world. And I just thought it was really cute the way that you clearly got people motivated because there's posts all over the place and they've all got their nice big badge of their certification. But at a higher level, it is a different motivation to be a developer versus an engineer and a technician and it's kind of a different point of view and I just wonder if you could share some of the ways that you're kind of encouraging kind of this transformation within your own workforce as well as the partners, et cetera and really adopting kind of almost a software first in this program kind of point of view versus I'm just wiring stuff up. Apparently a lot of people like to beat me. So I mean, that didn't of itself was a great success but if we take a step back, what is Cisco about as an organization? I mean, obviously if you look back to the very early days of our vision, it was to change the way the world worked, played, lived, and learned. And if you think about, and you hit on this when we were discussing with Coon, in the early days of COVID, we really saw that play out as so much shifted from in-person type of interactions to virtual interactions. In the network that our customers, our partners, our employees built over the course of the last three decades, really helped the world continue to do business for students to continue to go to school or clinicians to connect with patients. If I think about that mission, to meet programmability is just the next iteration of that mission, continuing to enable the world to communicate, continuing to enable customers, employees, partners to essentially leverage the network for more than just connectivity now to leverage it for critical insight. Again, if we look at some of the use cases that we're seeing for social distancing and contact tracing, the network has a really important place to play there because we can pull insight from it. But it isn't necessarily an out-of-the-box type of integration. So I look at programmability and what we're doing with DevNet to give relevance to the network for those types of really critical conversations that every organization is having right now. It's a way to extrapolate. It's a way to pull critical data so that I can make a decision. And if that decision is automated or if that decision requires some type of a manual intervention, regardless, we're still about connecting. And in this case, we're connecting insight with the people who need it most. The DevNet challenge we ran is really in respect for how critical this new skill set's going to be. It's not enough, like I said, just to connect the world anymore. We need to leverage the network for that critical insight. And when we created the beat the box challenge, it was really simple. Hey guys, I think this is important. And I am going to go out and I'm going to achieve the certification myself because I want to continue to be very relevant. I want to continue to be able to provide that insight for my customers and partners. So therefore I'm going for it. Anybody can get there before me? Maybe there's a little incentive tied to it. And the incentive, although it's funny, we interviewed a lot of our team who achieved it. The incentive was secondary. They just wanted to have the bragging, right? It's like, yeah, I'd be there. So hey, more fun you're doing. Right, absolutely. No, it's putting your money where your mouth is, right? If it's important, then you should do it too. And the whole, not asking people to do what you wouldn't do yourself. So I think it's a lot of good leadership, leadership lessons there as well. But I want to extend kind of the conversation on the COVID impact, right? Cause I'm sure you've seen all the social media memes who's driving your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO or COVID. And we all know the answer to the question, but you guys have already been dealing with kind of increased complexity around enterprise infrastructure world in terms of cloud and public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi-cloud and people are trying to move stuff all the way around. Now suddenly had this COVID moment, right? In March, which was really a light switch moment. People didn't have time to plan or prepare for suddenly everybody working from home. And it's not only you, but your spouse and your kids and everybody else. But now we're six months plus into this thing. And I would just love to get your perspective and kind of the change from, oh my goodness, we have to react to the light switch moment. What do we do to make sure people can get what they need, when they need it, from where they are. But then really moving from, this is an emergency situation, a stop gap situation to hmm, this is going to extend for some period of time. And even when it's the acute crisis is over, you know, this is going to drive a real change in the way that people communicate and the way that people, where they sit and do their jobs. And kind of how customers are responding accordingly as the, you know, kind of the narrative has changed from an emergency stop gap to this is the new normal that we really need to plan for. So I think you said it very well. I think anything that could be digitized, any interaction that could be driven virtually was. And what's interesting is we, as you said, we went from that light switch moment where, and I believe the stat is this, and I'll probably get the number wrong, but like in the United States here, at the beginning, at the end of February, about 2% of the knowledge worker population was virtual, you know, working from home or in a remote work environment. And over the course of about 11 days, that number went from 2% to 70%. And interestingly, that it worked. You know, there was a lot of hiccups along the way and there was a lot of organizations making really quick decisions on, how do I enable VPN scale at mass? How do I leverage things like WebEx for virtual meetings and virtual connectivity much faster? Now that as you said that we've kind of gotten out of the fog of war or fog of battle, organizations are looking at what they accomplished and it was nothing short of Herculean. And looking at this now from a transition to, oh my gosh, we need to change to we have an opportunity to change. And we're looking, we see a lot of organizations, specifically around financial services, healthcare, the K through 20 educational environment, all looking at how can they do more virtually for a couple of reasons. Obviously, there is a significant safety factor. And again, we're still in the height of this pandemic. They want to make sure their employees, their customers, students, patients remain safe. But second, we've found in discussions with a lot of senior IT executives and our customers that people are happier working from home. People are more productive working from home and that again, the network that's been built over the course of the last few decades has been resilient enough to allow that to happen. And then third, there is a potential cost savings here. Outside of people, the next most expensive resource that organizations are paying for is real estate. If they can shrink that real estate footprint while providing a better user experience at the locations that they're maintaining, again, leveraging things like location services, leveraging things like a unified collaboration that's very personalized to the end user's experience, they're going to do that. And again, they're going to save money, they're going to have happier employees and ultimately they're going to make their employees and their customers a lot safer. So we see, we believe that there is, in some parts of the economy, a shift that is going to be more permanent. And some estimates put it as high as 15% of the current workforce is going to stay in a virtual or a semi-virtual working environment for the foreseeable future. Interesting. And I would say, I'd say 15% is low, especially if you qualify it with part-time, right? There was a great interview we were doing and talking about working from home, we used to work from home as the exception, right? Because the cable person was coming or you're getting a new washing machine or something. Where now that's probably getting, in many cases will shift to the other, where I'm generally going to work from home unless somebody's in town or having an important meeting or there's some special collaboration that drives me to be in. But I want to go back to you Kuhn and really double down on, I think most people spent too much time focusing especially we'll just say within the virtual event space where we play on the things you can't do virtually, we can't meet in the hall, we can't grab a quick coffee and a drink. Instead of focusing on the positive things, like we're accomplishing right here. You're in Belgium, right? Eric is in Ohio, we're in California. And we didn't take three days to travel and check into a hotel and all that stuff to get together for this period of time. So there's a lot of stuff that digital enables. And I think people need to focus more on that versus continuing to focus on the two or three things that it doesn't replace and it doesn't replace those. So let's just get that off the table and move on with our lives because those aren't coming back anytime soon. No, totally, I think it's the balance of those things. It's guarding the fact that you're not necessarily working for home. I think the trick there is you could be sleeping at the office, but I think the positives are way, way more outspoken. I look at myself, I got much more exercise time in these last couple of months than I usually do because you don't travel, you don't have the jet lag and the connection. And then you talked about those face-to-face moments. I think a lot of people are in a way wanting to go back to the office, hard time as Eric also explained, but a lot of it you can do virtually. We have virtual coffees with the team or you can hear in Belgium, our local general manager has a virtual aperitif every Friday, I obviously skipped the one this week, but there's ways to be very creative with the technology and the quality of the technology that the network enables to get the best of both worlds. Right, so we're going to wrap the segment. I want to give you guys both the last word because we've both been at Cisco for a while and Susie Wee and the team on DevNet has really grown this thing. I think we were there at the very beginning a couple, four, five, six years ago, I can't keep track of time anymore. But it's really, really grown and the timing is terrific to get into this more software-defined world which is where we are. I wonder if you could just kind of share a couple of thoughts with a little bit of perspective and what you're excited about today and kind of what you see coming down the road since you guys have been there for a while, you've been in the space. Let's start with you, Koen. I think the possibility it creates, I think really programmability software-defined is really about the art of the possible. It's what you can dream up and then go code. Eric talked about the relevance of it and how it maximizes that relevance on a customer basis. And then it is the evolution of the teams in terms of the creativity that they can bring to it. We're seeing really people dive into that and customers co-creating with us. And I think that's where we're going in terms of the evolution of the value proposition there in terms of what technology can provide but also how it impacts people as we discussed and redefines process. I love that, the art of the possible which is a lot harder to execute in hardware than in software, certainly takes a lot longer. Eric, I'd love to get your thoughts. Absolutely, so I started my career at Cisco putting IP phones onto the network. And back then it was 2001, 2002 when the idea of putting telephones onto the network was just such an objectionable idea. And so many purists were telling us all the reasons it wouldn't work. Now if we go forward, again, 19 years, the idea of not having them plugging into the network is a ridiculous idea. So we're looking at an inflection point in this industry. And it's really, it's not about programming. It's not necessarily about programming. It's about doing it smarter. It's about being more efficient. It's about driving automation. But again, it's about unlocking the value of what the network is. We've moved so far past just connectivity. The network touches everything and as more workload moves to the cloud, as more workload moves to things like containers. The network is really the only common element that ties all of these things together. The network needs to take its rightful place in the IT lexicon as being that critical insight provider for how users are interacting with the network, how users are interacting with applications, how applications are interacting with one another. Programmability is a way to do that more efficiently with a greater degree of certainty with much greater relevance into the overall delivery of IT services and digitization. So to me, I think we're going to look back 20 years from now, probably even 10, and say, man, we used to configure things manually. What was that like? I think really this is the future. And I think we want to be aligned with where we're going versus where we've been. Right. Well, Coon, Eric, thank you for sharing your perspective. It's really nice to have some historical reference. And it's also nice to be living in a new age where you can stay at the same company and still refresh new challenges, new opportunities and grow this thing. Because as you said, I remember those first IP phone days and I thought, well, my bell must be happy because the old Mother's Day problem is finally solved when we don't have to have a dedicated connection between every mother and every child in the middle of May. So good news. So thank you very much for sharing your insights and really enjoy the conversation. Thank you. You. All right. He's Coon. He was Eric. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE for continuing coverage of Cisco DevNet Connect. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.