 Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante and I want to welcome you to theCUBE's presentation of accelerating automation with DevNet. In this special program, we're going to explore how to accelerate digital transformation and how the global pandemic is changing the way we work and the kinds of work that we do. theCUBE has pulled together experts from Cisco DevNet. Now DevNet is essentially Cisco as code. I've said many times in theCUBE that in my opinion, it's the most impressive initiative coming out of any established enterprise infrastructure company. What Cisco has done brilliantly with DevNet is to create an API economy by leveraging its large infrastructure portfolio and its ecosystem. But the linchpin of DevNet is the army of trained Cisco engineers, including those with the elite CCIE designation. Now DevNet was conceived to train people on how to code infrastructure and develop applications in integrations. It's a platform to create new value and automation is a key to that creativity. Now let's kick things off with the architect of DevNet, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco's DevNet and CX ecosystem success, Susie Wee. From around the globe, it's theCUBE presenting Accelerating Automation with DevNet, brought to you by Cisco. Hello and welcome to theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got a great conversation, a virtual event, Accelerating Automation with DevNet, Cisco DevNet. And of course we've got the Cisco Brain Trust here, CUBE alumni, Susie Wee, Senior Vice President, GEM, and also CTO at Cisco DevNet, an ecosystem success, CX, all that great stuff. Many Wade Lee, who's the Senior Director of DevNet Certifications, Eric Thiel, Director of Developer Advocacy. Susie, Mandy, Eric, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you, John. So we're not in person. We can't be at the DevNet zone. We can't be on site doing DevNet, creating all the great stuff we've been doing over the past three years. We're virtual, the CUBE virtual. Thanks for coming on. Susie, I got to ask you because we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you had has been awesome. But DevNet Create has brought on a whole another connective tissue to the DevNet community. This ties into the theme of accelerating automation with DevNet because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service, or X AAS as it's called. And automation plays a critical role. Could you please share your vision because this is really important. And still only 5% to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and programmability. What's your vision? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are coming online, I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud, as they're growing in new areas, as we're dealing with security, as everyone's dealing with the pandemic, there's so many things going on. But what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on. And that infrastructure has networking, it has security, it has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be able to really satisfy everything that businesses need? And in order to do that, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable. The infrastructure is programmable. And you don't need just apps writing on top, but now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually, you can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation, you can rise to higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the stack by leveraging automation. You know, I remember a few years ago when DevNet Create first started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we were talking about Meraki. You know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about then, this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was Cisco Europe in Barcelona before all the COVID hit. And you had the massive cloud surge and scale happening going on right when the pandemic hit. And even now more than ever, the cloud scale, the modern apps, the momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing more innovation at scale because of the pressure to do that. Because the business is going to stay alive. We want to get your thoughts on what's going on in your world because you were there in person, now we're six months in, scale is huge. We are, yeah, absolutely. And what happened is, as all of our customers, as businesses around the world, as we ourselves all dealt with, how do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home? And how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because you have to go home and then figure out, how from home can I make sure that my IT infrastructure is automated? How from home can I make sure that every employee is out there and working safely and securely? You know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and be in kind of, you know, just, you know, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. So we had to extend business applications to people's homes in countries like, you know, well, around the world, but also in India, where it was actually not, you know, not, they wouldn't let, they didn't have rules to let people work from home in these areas. So then what we had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer, you know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home. So that put extra stress on automation. It put extra stress on our customers' digital transformation and it just forced them to, you know, automate, digitally transform quicker. And they had to because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers. You had to figure out how to automate all of that. You know, one of the hardest... And we're still all in that environment today. You know, one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, Kubernetes, micro services. So those things, again, all DevOps. And, you know, you guys got some acquisitions. You thought about thousand eyes. You got a new one. You just bought recently PortShift to raise the game in security, Kubernetes, all these micro services. So observability is super hot, but then people go work at home, as you mentioned. How do you make observable? What are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's zooms and WebXs and education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this in the app side? How are you guys looking at the, what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this programmability challenge and observability challenges? It's a huge deal. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right? You know, back when we talked to Todd before, he had Meraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use, this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place. And now he has Cisco's entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that bigger scale for Cisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation and the APIs into all of it. But when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. They had to build in. And what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people to work from home and how well you could reach customers. All of that used to be an IT conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually, you know, calling on the heads of IT and the CIO and saying, you know, how's our VPN connectivity? Is everybody working from home? How many people are connected and able to work and what's their productivity? So all of a sudden all these things that were really infrastructure IT stuff became a board level conversation. And you know, once again, at first everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people working. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they are now building in automation and digital transformation and these architectures. And that gives them a chance to build in that observability, you know, looking for those events, the dashboards, you know, so it really has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. Suzy, I know you got to go, but real quick, describe what accelerating automation with DevNet means. Well, you've been fault, you know, we've been working together on DevNet in the vision of the infrastructure programmability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that. And you need the right skill sets and the programmability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people and it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people run things. Our DevNet community has risen to this challenge. People have jumped in, they've gotten their certifications, we have thousands of people getting certified. You know, we have Cisco getting certified, we have individuals, we have partners, you know, they're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerating automation, while it is about going digital, it's also about people rising to the level of being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications of cloud-directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people just as much as it is about automation and technology. And we got DevNet Create right around the corner virtual. Unfortunately, we won't be in person, but we'll be virtual. Susie, thank you for your time. We're going to dig into those people challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you got to go, but stay with us, we're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric, thanks. Thank you so much, have fun. Thanks, John. Okay, Mandy, you heard Susie, it's about people. And one of the things that's close to your heart, you've been driving is a senior director of DevNet certifications, is getting people leveled up. I mean, the demand for skills, cybersecurity, network programmability, automation, network design, solution architect, cloud, multi-cloud design, these are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? Oh, yes, absolutely. What we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning, those are what's accelerating a lot of the technology changes and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at things like DevSecOps engineer, network automation engineer, network automation developer, which Susie mentioned and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization and then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current scope and broaden out and take on new challenges. Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this piece of getting the certifications. First, before you get started, describe what your role is as director of developer advocacy because that's always changing and evolving. What's the state of it now? Because with COVID, people are working at home, they have more time to contact switch and get some certifications and yet they can code more. What's your role? Absolutely. So it's interesting, it definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our historically, a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the DevNet creates the Cisco lives and helping the community connect and to help share technical information with them, doing hands-on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? So that's had to pivot quite a bit. Obviously Cisco Live US, we pivoted very quickly to a virtual event when conditions changed and we're able to actually connect as we found out with a much larger audience. So as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of how big the convention center is, we were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with our DevNet Dave that was kind of attached on to Cisco Live and we got great feedback from the audience that now we were actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it. But to your broader question of what my team does, so that's one piece of it is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out, building new sandboxes, new learning labs, things like that that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the DevNet site. And then my team also looks after communities such as the Cisco Learning Network where there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. We've seen a huge shift now in that group that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the DevNet certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with programmability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up the community with helping answer questions, helping provide content. They move now into the DevNet space as well and are helping people with that sort of certifications. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that. I got to ask you on the trends around automation. What skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Are there anything in particular? Obviously network automation has been around for a long time. Cisco's been a leader in that. But as you move up the stack as modern applications are building, do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What are people learning? Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned observability was big before COVID and we actually really saw that amplify during COVID. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observability? Now that we need it, well, we're virtual. So that's actually been a huge uptick and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that are now figuring out how can I do this at scale? And I think one good example that Susie was talking about the VPN example and we actually had a number of SEs in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up. And one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all the different parameters that IT departments might care about about their firewalls. Things that you didn't normally look at in the old days. You would size your firewalls based on assuming a certain number of people working from home. And when that number went to 100%, things like licenses started coming into play where they needed to make sure they had the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the SEs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use some open source tooling to monitor and alert on these things and then published it. So the whole community could go out and get a copy of it, try it out in their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that in trying to figure out, okay, now I can take that and I can adapt it to what I need to see for my observability. That's great. Mandy, I want to get your thoughts on this too because as automation continues to scale, it's going to be a focus. People are at home and you guys had a lot of content online. You recorded every session in the DevNet zone. Learning's going on sometimes linearly and nonlinearly. You got the certifications, which is great. That's key, great success there. People are interested. But what are the learnings are you seeing? What are people doing? What's the top trends? Yeah. So what we are seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time, they want to advance their skillset. And just like any kind of learning, people want choice. They want to be able to choose what matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors leading them through a study plan. And we have two new expert led study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do an immersive learning experience together with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kind of team experiences called automation boot camp. And then we're also seeing individuals who want to be able to dive into a topic, do a hands-on lab, get some skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. And so we have really modular self-driven hands-on learning through the DevNet fundamentals course which is available through DevNet. And then there's also people who are saying, I just want to use the technology. I like to experiment and then go read the instructions, read the manual, do the deeper learning. And so they're spending a lot of time in our DevNet sandbox trying out different technologies, Cisco technologies with open source technologies, getting hands-on and building things. And three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD-WAN. There's a huge interest in people scaling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about. Security is a focus area where people are dealing with new scale, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways and then automating their data center using infrastructure as code type principles. So those are three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing some more about that at DevNet Create. Awesome, Eric and Mandy, if you guys can wrap up in this accelerated automation with DevNet package and virtual event here and also tee up DevNet Create because DevNet Create has been a very kind of grassroots organically building momentum over the years. Again, it's super important because it's now the app world coming together with networking, end-to-end programmability and with everything as a service that you guys are doing, everything with APIs, only can imagine the enablement that's going to create. Can you share the summary real quick on accelerating automation with DevNet and tee up DevNet Create? Mandy, we'll start with you. Yes, I'll go first and then Eric can close this out. So just like we've been talking about with you at every DevNet event over the past years, DevNet's bringing APIs across our whole portfolio and up and down the stack and accelerating automation with DevNet. Susie mentioned the people aspect of that, people skilling up and how that transforms teams. And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so what I think about accelerating automation with DevNet, it's about the DevNet community, it's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community with those new skills. Eric, take us home here, accelerating automation DevNet and DevNet Create. A lot of developer action going on on cloud native right now, your thoughts. Absolutely, I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for DevNet Day this year for Cisco Live and we're able to leverage it even further with Create this year. So whereas it used to be confined by the walls that we were within for the event, now we're actually able to do things like we're adding the start now track for people that want to be there. They want to be a developer, a network automation developer for instance. We've now got a track just for them where they can get started and start learning some of the skills they'll need. Even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. So I love that we're able to bring that together with the experience community that we usually do from across the industry, bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. So I'm really excited to bring that whole mix together as well as getting some of our business units together too and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new APIs into their platforms? What problems are they hoping that customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So like I said, Cisco Learning Network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. Awesome, thanks so much. Go ahead, Mandy. Can I add one more thing? Yeah, I was just going to say the other really exciting thing about Create this year with the virtual nature of it is that it's happening in three regions. And we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions. And content and speakers and the region stepping up to have things personalized to their area, to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for DevNet Create that's going to be fantastic this year. Yeah, that's a good one. I'm just going to close out and just put the final bow on that by saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now during with this virtual DevNet Virtual, DevNet Create Virtual, theCUBE Virtual, I think we're learning new things. People working in teams and groups and sharing content. We're going to learn new things. We're going to try new things. And ultimately people will rise up and will be resilient. And I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun and we'll ride the wave with you guys. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on theCUBE and talk about your awesome accelerating automation in DevNet Create. Looking forward to it, thank you. Thank you so much. Happy to be here. Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE Virtual here in Palo Alto Studios. Doing the remote content amendments, stay virtual until we're face-to-face. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at DevNet Create. Thanks for watching. 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. 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, 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, especially like back in March and April with this light switch moment, which was no time to prep and suddenly everybody has to work from home. Teachers got to teach from home. 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 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 Webex 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. Right. 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 end of 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 saw it 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 and 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 focused 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 actually, 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 AT side really do an IT operations transformation, right? How IT operates. And I think that's really exciting to see. And this was 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 that 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. You know, software 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, you know, get a machine to run with some level of automation. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. And I said the tech line I have, you know, 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 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 the 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 a 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 CDB tools. Some go even further than saying, this is like the cloud native piece and saying, 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 infrastructures that can do this, it is 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 to just roast the 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 you just couldn't really do before. No, you're absolutely right. And this is like, I just 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 whole automation plus tool integration, cloud native tool integration is, you actually open this up and out this 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 execute the request using these tools and then hands it back over. Or you say, hey, maybe some of these security things are going 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'm going 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, it's just very, very exciting, right? Because it's literally unleashes a lot of flexibility how they want to structure and how they want to rebuild the IT operations processes. That's interesting, you know, 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 share how kind of that DevOps attitude, point of view workflow, whatever the right verb is has impacted 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 def-ups person or a sec-ups person, it doesn't really matter. There's 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 thing that like sandbox environments where you can, try things out, snips it's a quota 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 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. We've had Suzy, we on a number of times and I know he 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? Democrization to 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 that, 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 the one network person to help them out and set 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 a one agility, a one flexibility, and a one resiliency, right? This is where you 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 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 and the resilient way in an Android way to 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 tight 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 it application centric. Clearly a lot of these concepts evolve, but in a sense it is that reversal of the role from the network provides something in you used 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. 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 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? So it's good, 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, 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, you know, like 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. TK Kianini is here. He's a distinguished engineer at Cisco. TK, my friend, good to see you again. How are you? Good, I mean, you and I were in Barcelona in January. And you know, we saw this thing coming but we didn't see it coming this way, did we? No, I have no one did. But yeah, that was right before everything happened. Well, it was weird, right? I mean, we were, you know, it was in the back of our minds in January. We said, Barcelona hasn't really been hit yet. Looked like it was really isolated in China, but wow, what a change. And I guess I'd start with the, we're seeing really a secular change in your space and security. Identity access management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden these things have exploded as the work from home pivot has occurred. And it feels like these changes are permanent or semi-permanent. What are you seeing out there? Yeah, I don't think anybody thinks the world's gonna go back the way it was. To some degree, it's changed forever. You know, I do a lot of my work remotely. And so, you know, being a remote worker isn't such a big deal for me, but for some it was a huge impact. And like I said, you know, remote work, remote education, you know, everybody's on the opposite side of a computer. And so, the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect and the integrity of it, essentially is almost our own integrity these days. Yeah, and when you see that, you know, that work from home pivot, I mean, you know, our estimates are along with our partner, DTR, about 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to COVID. And now it's, you know, north of 70% plus. And that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next six months. We'll see what happens with the fall surge, but people essentially expect that to, you know, at least double that 16%, you know, going forward indefinitely. So, what is that, what kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and how organizations are approaching security? Yeah, I just think from a mindset standpoint, you know, what was optional maybe last year is no longer optional. And I don't think it's going to go back. I think a lot of people have changed the way, you know, they live and the way they work and they're doing it in ways, hopefully that in some cases yield more productivity. Again, you know, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is, it frankly works just as well for the bad guys. And so that's the balance we need to keep, which is we need to, you know, be extra diligent on how we go about securing infrastructure, how we go about securing even our social channels, because remember all our social channels now are digital. So that's become the new norm. You know, you've helped me understand over the years. I remember a line you shared with me on the Cube one time is that the adversary is highly capable as sort of the phrase that you used it. And essentially the way you describe it is, you know, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease the bad guys' return on investment, you know, increase their cost, increase the numerator. But as works just from home, I'm in my house, you know, my Wi-Fi and my, you know, router with my, you know, dog's name is the password. You know, it's much, much harder for me to increase that denominator at home. So how can you help? Yeah, I mean, it is truly when you think, when you get into the mind of the adversary and, you know, the cyber crime out there, they're honestly just like any other business, they're trying to, you know, operate with high margin. And so if you can get there, if you can get in there and erode their margin, they'll finally go find something else to do. And again, you know, you know, the shift we experience day to day is, you know, it's not just our kids are online in school and our work is online, but all the groceries we order, you know, this Thanksgiving and holiday season, a lot more online shopping is gonna take place. So, you know, everything's gone digital. And so the question is, you know, how do we up our game there so that we can go about our business effectively and make it very expensive for the adversary to operate and take care of their business because it's nasty stuff. I want to ask you about automation, you know, generally and then specifically how it applies to security. So we, I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyperscalers and of course, they really attacked the IT labor problem. We learned a lot from that and IT organizations have applied much of that thinking. And it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace that technology scales today. How does that apply to security and specifically how is automation affecting security? Yeah, it's the topic these days. You know, businesses I think realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like AI and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand and operate at machine scale. Now, I mean that for businesses, I mean that for, you know, education and everything else. Now, so are the adversaries, right? So it's expensive for them to operate at human scale and they are going to machine scale. Going to machine scale, a necessity is that you're going to have to harness some level of automation. Have the machines work on your behalf. Have the machines carry your intent. And when you do that, you can do it safely or you could do it dangerously. And that's really kind of your choice. You know, just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should. You want to make sure that frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's a tricky thing because, you know, when you take the phrase, you know, how do we automate security? Well, you actually have to take care of securing the automation first. Yeah, we talked about this in Barcelona, where you were explaining that, you know, the bad guys, the adversaries are essentially, you know, weaponizing using your own tooling, which makes them appear safe because they're hiding in plain sight. That's scary. Well, they're clever given that, you know, there's this phrase that they always talk about called living off the land. There's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools and being detected. You know, if they can use the tools that's already there, then they have a higher degree of evading your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob, who's already been credentialed and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not, you know, marked as the adversary. So again, you know, having the detection methods available to find their behavioral anomalies and things like that become paramount, but in also, you know, having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to minimize their effectiveness, without, I mean, ideally without human interaction, because you just can, you move faster, you move quicker. And I see that with an asterisk, because if done wrong, frankly, you're just making their job more effective. I wonder if we could talk about the market a little bit. It's, I mean, the security space, cybersecurity is 80 plus billion, which by the way, it's just a little infinitesimal component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that massive GDP. But guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart, because when you talk to CISOs and you ask them, what's your biggest challenge? They'll say, lack of talent. And so what this chart shows, this is from ETR, our survey partner, and on the vertical axis is net score. And that's an indication of spending momentum on the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence, pervasiveness, if you will, inside the data sets. And so there's a couple of key points here. I wanted to put forth to our audience and then get your reaction. So you can see Cisco highlighted in red. Cisco's business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter. It's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the conference call. And so you can see on the horizontal axis, you've got big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere, but you're right there in that data set. And then you've got for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace. So that's very impressive. But the other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here. And that just adds to the complexity. This is, of course, only a subset of what's in the security space, the people who answered for this survey. So my question is, how can Cisco help simplify this picture? Is it automation? Is it, you guys have done some really interesting tuck in acquisitions and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left there, it's, I had a customer tell me once that, I came to this trade show looking for transportation and these people are trying to sell me car parts. That's the frustration customers have. And I think what Cisco has done really well is to really focus on outcomes. What is the customer outcome? Because ultimately that is what the customer wants. There might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closer you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think security in general has just year over year been just ridden with you need to be an expert. You need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself. And I think those days are behind us, but particularly as security becomes more pervasive and we're selling to the business, we're not selling to the T-shirt wearing hacker anymore. Yeah, so how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about cloud people. They go, I put my date in the cloud, I'm safe, but of course we know it's a shared responsibility model. So I'm interested in your thoughts on that. Is it really, is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way, say, no, the state of security is great in the cloud. Whereas many of us out there are saying, wow, it's not so great. So what are your thoughts on that whole narrative? And what's Cisco's play in cloud? I think cloud, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern, which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible. You know, no data center required, no disk drive required, you just get storage. It's all of those things that are, again, closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud too is it's really punctuated the way we go about building systems. Again, at machine scale. So before when I write code and I think about, oh, what computer is it going to run on? Or what servers are you gonna, is it gonna run on? Those thoughts never crossed my mind anymore. I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do and the machines then figure it out. So, for instance, on Tuesday, if the entire internet shows up, the system works without fail. And on Wednesday, if only North America shows up, so what? But there's no way you could staff that, right? There's just no human scale approach that gets you there. And that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff is it really is the next level of how we do computer science. So you're talking about infrastructure as code and that applies to security as code. That's what DevNet is really all about. I've said many times, I think Cisco of the large established enterprise companies is one of the few, if not the only, that really has figured out that developer angle because it's practical and you're not trying to force your way into developers. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that trend and where you see it going. Yeah, no, that is truly the trend. Every time I walk into DevNet, the big halls at Cisco Live, it is Cisco as code. Everything about Cisco is being presented through an API. It is automation ready. And frankly, that is the love language of the cloud. It's machines, it's the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So it is the, I think necessary, maybe not sufficient, but necessary for doing all the machine scale stuff. What's also necessary is to secure, if infrastructure is code, therefore what security methodologies do we have today that we use to secure code? Well, we have automated testing. We have threat modeling, right? Those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So when I talk about how do you do automation securely, you do it the same way you secure your code. You test it, you threat model, you say, can my adversary exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intend it to go? So all of those practices apply. It's just everything has code these days. TK, I've often said that security and privacy are sort of two sides of the same coin. And I want to ask you a question. It's really, to me, it's not necessarily Cisco and companies like Cisco's responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you can help. And of course, this Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma, I don't know if you have a chance to see it, but basically dramatizes the way in which companies are appropriating our data to sell us ads and creating our own little set of facts, et cetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy, I mean, it's good from the standpoint of awareness, you may or may not care if you're a social media user. I love TikTok, I don't care. But they sort of laid out this pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that? And can Cisco play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy? I mean, beyond GDPR and California Consumer Privacy Act, what do you think? Yeah, I'll give you my humble opinion is you fix social problems with social tools. You fix technology problems with technology tools. I think there is a social problem that needs to be rectified. We weren't built as human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. It's just pretty wrong. So yeah, that series did really kind of wake up a lot of people. It's probably every day I hear somebody ask me if I saw it. But I do think it also, with that level of awareness, I think we overcome it or we compensate by number one, just being aware that it's happening. Number two, how you go about solving it, I think maybe come down to an individual or even a community's solution. And what might be right for one community might be not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. Yeah, so it's almost, I think if I could play back what I heard is, technology maybe got us into this problem, but technology alone is not gonna get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic AI bot is gonna solve this. It's gotta be, society has to really take this on as your premise. It's a good one. When I first started playing online games, I'm going back to the text-based adventure stuff like Muds and Moos. I did a talk at MIT one time and this old curmudgeon in the back of the room, we were talking about democracy and we were talking about the social processes that we had modeled in our game and this and that. And this guy just gave us the smackdown. He basically walked up to the front of the room and said, you know all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes. He says democracy is completely the opposite, which is you need to sleep on it. In fact, you should be scared if somebody can decide in a minute what is good for the community. Two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community. So it almost has the opposite dynamic and that was super interesting to me. That's really interesting. You read the Lincoln historians and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long to make certain decisions but ultimately when he acted with confidence. So to that point. But so what else are you working on these days that is interesting, that maybe you want to share with our audience? Anything that's really super exciting for you, are you? Yeah, you know, generally speaking, trying to make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate, I guess that's a general theme. Making it simpler for the common person to use tools. Again, you know, all of these security tools, no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity, it's that we're moving the complexity away from the user so that they can thrive at human scale and we can do things at machine scale. And kind of working those two together is sort of the magic recipe. It's not easy, but it is fun. So that's what keeps me engaged. I'm definitely seeing, I wonder if you see it, this sort of obviously heightened organizational awareness, but I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. You know, it used to be a sec ops team in an island, okay, it's your problem. You know, the CISO cannot report into the CIO because that's like the Fox in the hen house. A lot of those structures are changing, it seems, and becoming this responsibility is coming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there? And what are you... And it's so familiar to me because I started out as a musician, so bands are a great analogy. You play bass, I bet guitar, somebody else plays drums, everybody knows their role, and you create something that's larger than the sum of all parts. And so that analogy I think is coming to, we saw it sort of with dev ops where the developer doesn't just throw their code over the wall, and it's somebody else's problem, they move together as a band. And that's what I think organizations are seeing is that, you know, why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business, not just here's the product, and here's the rest of the business? And so that's pretty awesome. I think we see a lot of those patterns, particularly for the high performance businesses. You know, in fact, it's interesting, a great analogy by the way, and you actually see in that within Cisco, you're seeing sort of a, and I know sometimes you guys don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you got a leadership structure now, I've talked to many of them, they seem to really be more focused on how they're connecting across organizations, and it's increasingly critical in this world of silo busters, isn't it? Yeah, no, and you almost, as you move further and further away, you can see how ridiculous it was before. It would be like acquiring a band and say, okay, all you guitar players go over here, all you bass players go over there, like, what happened to the band? It's like, that's what I'm talking about, is moving all of those disciplines, moving together and servicing the same backlog and achieving the same successes together is just so awesome. Well, I always feel better after talking to you. I remember Art Coviello used to put out his letter every year and I was reading and I'd get depressed. We spend all this money now, we're less secure, but when I talk to you, TK, I feel like much more optimistic, so I really appreciate the time you spend on theCUBE. It's awesome to have you as a guest. Right on, I love these sessions, so thanks for inviting me. And I miss you, hopefully next year, we can get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird, like the sign says. Doing my part. All right, TK Kinini, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE, we really appreciate it, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with our next guest right after this short break. Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, this is theCUBE virtual's coverage of DevNet Create, virtual, we're not face-to-face. theCUBE's been there with DevNet and DevNet Create since the beginning. DevNet Create was really a part of the DevNet community looking out at the external market outside of Cisco, which essentially is the cloud native world, which is going mainstream. We've got a great guest here the company's been on theCUBE many times, we've been talking to them, recently acquired by Cisco, ThousandEyes, we have Joe Vaccaro, he's vice president of product. Joe, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Great, and thanks for having me. You have the keys to the kingdom, you're the vice president of product, which means you get to look inside, you get to look outside, figure it all out, make everything run on, ThousandEyes, you guys have been providing common language across multiple layers of network intelligence, external services. This is the heart of what we're seeing in innovation with multi-cloud, microservices, cloud native. This is really a hot area, it's converging multiple theaters and technology, super important, so I want to get into that with you. But first, ThousandEyes is recently acquired by Cisco, big acquisition, super important, the new CEO of Cisco is very clear, API everything, we're seeing that come out, that's a big theme at DevNet Create, the ecosystem of Cisco is going outside their own, their walls outside of the Cisco network operators, network engineers, we're talking developers, talking programmability, this is the big theme. What's it like at Cisco? Tell us, obviously the COVID hits, you get acquired by Cisco, tell us what's happening. Yeah, it's really been an exciting six months for ThousandEyes and the entire team and our customers, as we all kind of shifted to the new normal, working from home, and I think, that change alone really kind of amplified even some of the fundamental beliefs that we have as a company, that cloud is becoming the new data center for customers, that internet has become the new network and the new enterprise network backbone, and that SaaS has really become the new application stack, and as you think about these last six months, those fundamental truths have never been more evident as we rely upon the cloud to be able to work as we rely upon our own home networks and the internet in order to be productive, and as we access more SaaS applications on a daily basis, and as you think about those fundamental truths, what's common across all of them is that you rely upon them now more than ever, not only to run your business, but to enable your employees to be productive, but you don't own them, and if you don't own them, then you lack the ability in a traditional way to be able to understand that digital experience, and I think that's ultimately what ThousandEyes is trying to solve for, and I think it's really being amplified in really these last six months. Talk about the COVID dynamic, because I think it highlighted and certainly accelerated digital transformation, but specifically exposes opportunities, challenges, weaknesses. I've talked to many CXOs, CISOs, security is huge, the whole of the conference talk check we'll get to in a second, but it exposes what's worth doubling down on, what to abandon from a project standpoint. As people start to look at their priorities, they're going, hey, we got to have a connected experience, we got to have security, people are working at home, no one has VPNs at home, VPNs are passing, maybe it's SD-WAN, maybe it's something else, they're on a backbone, they're connecting to the internet, a lot of different diversity in connections. At the same time, you got a ton of modern apps running low for these networks. This is a huge issue. COVID has exposed us at scale. What's your view on this, and what is ThousandEyes thinking about this? You know, if you think about the kind of legacy application delivery, it went from largely users in an office, connected over, say, a dedicated corporate network, largely to traditional, say, internal hosted applications, and that was a fairly simple connectivity path. And as you mentioned, we've seen amplifications in terms of the diversity from the users. The users are not in the office, now they're connected in distributed, disparate locations that are dynamically changing. And you think then how they're getting to that application, they're going across a really complex service chain of different network services that are working together across this public internet backbone, ultimately to land them on an application. And then those applications themselves are becoming now, as you mentioned, distributed largely based upon a microservices architecture and increasing their own dependence upon third-party SaaS applications to fulfill, say, key functions of that application. Those three things together ultimately are creating that level of complex service chain that really makes it difficult to understand the digital experience. And ultimately, the IT organization is really chartered with not just delivering the infrastructure, but delivering the right experience. And yet then have a way to be able to see, to gain that visibility, that experience, to measure it and understand it, to provide that intelligence, and then ultimately to act on it, be able to ensure that your employees, as well as your customers, are getting the right overall approach to be able to leverage those assets. It's funny, you know, as you're getting to some of these high-scale environments, a lot of these concepts are converging. You know, we hear terms like automation, self-healing networks. You mentioned microservices, early you mentioned the cloud's a new data center, or WAN's a new land, however we're going to look at it, it's a whole different architecture. So I want to get your thoughts on the automation piece of networking and internet outages, for instance. Because when you, you know, there's so many outages going up and down, it is like catching, looking for a needle in a haystack, right? So we've had this conversation with you guys on theCUBE before. How does automation occur? When you guys look at those kinds of things, what's important to look at? Can you comment on and react to, you know, the internet outages and how you find and resolve those? Yeah, it's, it was really great. And as you mentioned, automation really plays out a key when you think about the just a broad problem that IT is trying to drive. And, you know, from our lens, we look at it in, you know, really three ways. You know, first off, is you have to be able to gain the level of visibility from where it matters and be able to test, and be able to provide the level of active measurements across the type of ways you want to be able to inspect the network, but then also from the right vantage points you want to inspect it. But what we talk about right is that, you know, data alone doesn't solve that problem. As you mentioned that needle in a haystack, you know, data just provides the raw metrics that are streaming across the screen. You have to then enable that data to provide meeting. You need to enable that data to become intelligent. And that intelligence comes through the automation of being able to process that data very quickly. It'll allow you to be able to see the unseen. It'll allow you to be able to quickly understand the issues that are happening across this digital supply chain to identify issues that are even happening outside of your own control across the public internet. And then the last step of automation, really comes in the form of the action, right? How do you enable that intelligence to be put to use? How do you enable that intelligence to then drive across the rest of your IT workflow, as well as to be able to be used as a signaling engine to be able to then make the fundamental changes back at the network fabric, whether that is addressing or modifying your BGV peering that we see happen within our customers using thousandized data, be able to route around major internet outages that we've seen over the past six months, or to be able to then use that data to be able to optimize the ultimate experience that they're delivering to both our customers as well as their employees. Classic policy-based activities taking to a whole other level. I got to get your thoughts on the employees working at home. Okay, because most IT people like, oh yeah, we're going to forecast in cases of disruption or a hurricane or a flood or hurricane Sandy, but now with COVID, everyone's working at home. So who would have forecasted 100% work from home, which puts a lot of pressure on everything? So I got to ask you, now that employees are working at home, how do you tie network visibility to the actual user experience? Yeah, that's a great question. As you, we saw within our own customer base, when COVID hit and we saw this rise of work from home, IT teams were really scrambling, said, okay, I have to light up this, say VPN infrastructure, or I need to now be able to support my users in a work from home situation where I don't control the corporate network. In essence now, you have potentially thousands, every employee is acting across their own corporate network. And people were then using thousand eyes in different ways, be able to monitor their, say VPN infrastructure across, back into the corporate network, as well as then using our thousand eyes endpoint agents that runs on a local user's laptop or machine in their home to help you to be able to gain that visibility down to that last mile of connectivity. Because when a user calls up support and says I'm having trouble, say accessing my application, whether that Salesforce or something else, what ultimately might be causing that issue might not necessarily be a Salesforce issue, right? It could be the device in the device performance in terms of CPU memory utilization. It could be the Wi-Fi and the signal quality within your Wi-Fi network. It could be your access point. It could be your local home router. It could be your local ISP. It could be the path that you're taking ultimately to your corporate network or that application. There's so many places that could go wrong that are now difficult to be able to see unless you have the ability to see comprehensively from the user to the application and to be able to understand that full end to end path. You know, IT teams have also been disrupted. They've been off site, off property as well, but you got the cloud. How has your technology helped the IT teams? Can you give some examples there? Yeah, great way is how people use thousand eyes as part of that data sharing ecosystem. Again, that notion of how do you go from visibility to intelligence action? And where in the past it might be able as an IT administrator to walk over to their network team to say, hey, can you take a look at what I'm seeing? Now that's no longer available. So how do you be able to work efficiently as an IT organization? You know, we think at thousand eyes in how our customers are using us, thousand eyes becomes a common operating language. It allows them to be able to analyze across from the application down into the underlying infrastructure through those different layers of the network. What's happening and where do you need to focus your attention? And then furthermore with thousand eyes in terms of enabling that data sharing ecosystem leveraging our share link capability really gives them the ability to say, you know what? Here's what I'm seeing and be able to send that to anybody within the IT organization. But it goes even further and many times in recent times as well as over the course of people using thousand eyes. They take those share links and actually send them to their external providers because they're not just looking to resolve issues within their own IT organization. They're having worked collaboratively with the different ISPs that they're pairing with with their cloud providers that they're pairing they're leveraging or the SaaS applications that are part of that core dependency of how they deliver their experience. So I got to ask you the question, when you think about levels of visibility and making the lives easier for IT teams, you see a lot of benefits with thousand eyes. You pointed out a few of them. So I've got to ask you the question. So if I'm an IT person in the trenches, are you guys an aspirin or a vitamin or both? Can you give an example? Because there's a lot of pain point out there. So give me a couple of Advils and aspirins but also you're an enabler too. The new things are evolving. You pointed out some use case. Talk about the difference between where you're helping people pain points and also enable them to be successful for IT teams. Yeah, that's a great analogy. I think it, like you said, it definitely sits on both sides of that spectrum. You know, thousand eyes is the trusted tool, the source of truth for IT organizations when issues are happening, as our alarm bells are ringing, as they are generating the different on call to be able to jump into a war room situation. Thousand eyes is that trusted source of truth allow them to focus, to be able to resolve that issue in the heat of the moment. But thousand eyes also, when we think about baselining your experience, what's important is not understanding that experience at that moment in time, but also how that's deviated over time. And so by leveraging thousand eyes on a continuous basis, it gives you that ability to see the history of that experience, to understand how your network is changing. Because as you mentioned, networks are constantly evolving, right? The internet itself is constantly changing. It's an organic system and you need to be able to understand not only what are the metrics that are moving out of your bounds, but then what is potentially the cause of that as that network has evolved. And then furthermore, you can begin to use that as you mentioned in terms of your vitamin type of an analogy, to be able to understand the health of your system over time on a baselining basis so that you can begin to be able to ensure a success. And a great way to really kind of bring that to light is people using say thousand eyes as part of say an SC land-based rollout where you're looking to say benchmark making confidence as you look to scale out in either benchmarking different ISPs within that ugly connectivity, or as you look to ensure a level of success with a single branch to give you that confidence to then scale out to the rest of your organization. That's great insights. The classic financial model, ROL, you got baseline and upside, right? You got handle the baseline as you pointed out and the upside, use experience, connectivity, application performance, which drives revenue, et cetera. So great point, great insight. Joe, thank you so much for that insight. It's got a final question for you. I want to just riff a little bit with you on the industry. A lot of us have been having debates about automation. Who doesn't love automation? Automation's awesome, right? Automate things. But as the trend starts going on as everything is a service or XAAS as it's called, certainly Cisco's going down that road, talk about your view about the difference between automation and everything as a service. Because at the end of the day, everything will be a service, but without automation, you really can't have services, right? So, you know, automation, automation, automation, great drum to bang all day long. But then also you've got the same business side, saying as a service, as a service, pushing that into the products means not trivial. Talk about how you look at automation and everything as a service and the relationship and interplay between those two concepts. Yeah, ultimately, I think about interns what is the problem that the business is trying to solve? And ultimately, what is the, that they're trying to face? And in many ways, right? They're being exploded with increase of data that they need to be able to not only process and gather, but then be able to then make use of. And then from that, as we mentioned, once you've processed that data and you've said gather the insights from it, you need to be able to then act on that data. And automation plays a key role of allowing you to be able to then put that through your workflow because again, as that IT experience becomes even more complex, as more and more services get put into that digital supply chain, as you adopt, say, increased complexity within your infrastructure by moving to a multi-cloud architecture where you look to increase the number of, say, network services that you're leveraging across that digital experience, ultimately, you need with the level of automation to be able to see outside of your own vantage point. You need to be able to look at the problem from as broad of a broad of a way as possible. And data and automation allows you to be able to do what is fundamentally difficult to do from a very narrow point of view in terms of the visibility you gather, the intelligence you generate, and then ultimately, how do you act on that data as quick as possible to be able to provide the value of what you're looking to solve. It's like a feature, it's under the hood. The feature of everything as a service is automation, data, machine learning, all the goodness and software. And that's really kind of what we're talking about here, isn't it? Final question for you as we wrap up DevNet Create, really again, it's going beyond Cisco's DevNet community, going into the industry ecosystem where developers are there. These are folks that want infrastructure as code. They want network as code. So network programmability, huge topic. We've been having that conversation with Cisco and others throughout the industry for the past three years. What's your message to developers out there that are watching this who say, hey, I just want to develop code. You know, like I want, you know, you guys got that. ThousandEyes, thanks so much. You know, you take care of that. I just want to write code. What's your message to those folks out there who want to tap some of these new services, these new automation, these new capabilities? What's your message? You know, ultimately, I think, you know, when you look at ThousandEyes, you know, from a product perspective, you know, we try to build our product in an API-first model to allow you to be able to then shift left of how you think about that overall experience. And from the developer standpoint, you know, what I'd say is that while you're developing in your silo, you're going to be part of a larger, ultimate system and your experience you deliver within your application is now going to be dependent upon not only the infrastructure it's running upon, but the network it's connected to, and then ultimately the user and the standard that user. If I leveraging ThousandEyes and VML2, then, you know, integrate ThousandEyes into how you think policy on that experience, that's going to help ensure that ultimately the application experience that the developer is looking to deliver meets that objective. And I think what I would say is, you know, while you need to focus on your role as a developer, having the understanding of how you fit into the larger ecosystem and what the reality of being of how your users will access that application is critical. Awesome, Joe, thank you so much. Again, trust is everything, letting people understand that what's going on underneath is going to be, you know, viable and capable. You guys got a great product and congratulations on the acquisition that Cisco made of your company. We've been following you guys for a long time and great technology chops, great market traction. Congratulations to everyone at ThousandEyes. Thanks for coming on and sharing. I appreciate it, thanks for having me. Joe Vicar, vice president of product here for ThousandEyes, now part of Cisco. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, CUBE Virtual for DevNet Create Virtual. Thanks for watching. Even prior to the pandemic, there was a mandate to automate. The hyperscale cloud companies, they've shown us that to scale, you really have to automate. You human labor, it just can't keep up with the pace of technology. Now post COVID, that automation mandate is even more pressing. Now, what about the marketplace? What are SES seeing on the horizon? theCUBE's Jeff Frick speaks with Cisco engineers to gather their insights and explore the DevNet specialized partner program. 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, Sunplay's 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 CI-CD 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 craftsmen 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, 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 workload 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, Kukudos 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 Kuhn hit on it briefly, you talked about it as well. We're seeing a massive explosion of devices. 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 alive. 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. 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 guys 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 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, 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 it, Google Cloud a couple 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 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 when 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 wanna 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 gonna see the same thing, kind of human generated data relative to machine generated data is also gonna fall off dramatically as the machine generated data just sky rock us 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 gonna catalyze cloud adoption even further and it's gonna 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 it 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 wanna 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 didn't know 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 Boss 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 don't 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. I love 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 beat Eric. So hey, work on your own. Right, absolutely. No, 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 multicloud and people are trying to move stuff all the way around. Now suddenly had this COVID moment in March, which is 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, this is going to extend for some period of time. And even when it's the acute crisis is over, this is going to drive a real change in the way that people communicate in the way that people where they sit and do their jobs and kind of how customers are responding accordingly as the 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%. Wow. 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, you know, leverage, you know, 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 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 it 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, and really double down on, I think most people spend 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 for any time 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 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 part-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. You'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 of 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 this space. Let's start with you, Coon. 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 discuss and redefine 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 turning, 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 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 or 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 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. We've been covering DevNet Create for a number of years, I think since the very first show and Susie, we and the team really built a practice, built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and getting devs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software-defined networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and developing solutions and using brain power that's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have our next guest, a partner. First one is Brad Haas. He is the engineering director for DevOps at Presidio. Brad, great to see you. Hey, Jeff, great to be here. Absolutely. And joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect for Cisco DevNet partners. And he has been driving a whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, great to see you. Thanks, Jeff. Great to be here. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Absolutely. So let's start with you, Chuck, because I think you're leading this kind of partner effort and software-defined networking has been talked about for a long time. It really seems to be maturing and software-defined everything has been taking over, especially with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the programability, customability in software and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is to have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. Yeah, Jeff, absolutely. So along this whole journey of DevNet where we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of our Cisco platforms, most of Cisco's business is transacted through partners. And what we hear from our customers and our partners is our customers want a way to be able to identify, does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey? I'm trying to do a new implementation. I want to automate that. How can I find a partner to get there? And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices, going along this DevNet journey with us for the last six years. They really want to say, hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and giving edge to my customers to show them that, yes, I have these capabilities. I've built a business practice. I have technologists that really understand this capability and they have the DevNet certifications to prove it, help me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what our DevNet partner specialization is all about. Right, that's great. And Brad, you're certainly one of those partners and I want to get your perspective because partners are oftentimes a little bit closer to the customer because you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions. And just reflect on, we know what happened back in March 15th when basically everybody was told to go home and you can't go to work. So, there's all the memes and social media about who pushed forward your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO or COVID and we all know what the answer is. What if you can share some information as to what happened then and really for your business and your customers and then reflect now we're six months into it, six months plus and this new normal is going to continue for a while. How does the customer attitudes kind of change now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment and really we need to put in place some foundation to carry forward for a very long time potentially. Yeah, it's really quite interesting actually, when COVID first hit, we got a lot of requests to help with automation and provisioning our customers and the whole digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there. And I'd say it became more of the workplace transformation. So, we were quickly migrating customers to new topologies where instead of the users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly and we did have a lot of success there in those beginning months with using automation and programmability, provisioning portals for our customers to get up and running really fast. And that's what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit. Now they're asking, how can I take advantage of the technology to look at my offices in a different way? For example, how many people are coming in and out of those locations? What's the usage of my conference rooms? Are there situations where I can use that information like how many people are in the building and at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that? Like, do I even need this office anymore? So the conversations have really changed in ways that you couldn't have imagined before March. Right. Now I wonder with you Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view, I mean, the network is amazing. It had COVID struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly. Entertainment, restaurant business, transportation, hospitality. But for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. And the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if, kind of from your perspective as suddenly the importance of the network, the importance of security and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that having DevNet with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space, as good a space as you could be given this new challenge thrown at you. Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. Cisco has always pushed the idea that the network is transformational. The network is the foundation. And as our customers have really adopted that message, it has enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. For myself, I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore, but my day-to-day functions are still the same and it's built because of the capabilities we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry as far as kind of moving to that application type of economy, as we go to microservices, as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud, those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this COVID situation. And I think it's helped to justify the investments that our customers have made, as well as what our partners have been being able to do to deliver on that multi-cloud capability to take those applications, get them closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable to users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional four walls. Right, right. That's interesting. And Brad, you made a comment on another interview I was watching, getting ready for this one in terms of applications now being first-class citizens was what you said. And it's kind of interesting, coming from an infrastructure point of view where before it was, what do I have and what can I build on it? Now really it's the infrastructure that responds back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that apps first is the way to go because that gives people the competitive advantage that it gives them the ability to react in the marketplace and to innovate and move faster. So it's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. Yeah, no doubt. And I think the whole push to cloud was really interesting in the early days. It was like, hey, we're going to change our applications to be cloud first. And then I think the terminology changed to over time to more cloud native. So when we look at what cloud has done over the past five years with customers moving their assets into the cloud in the early days that we were all looking at it just like another data center. But what it's really become is a place to host your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're no longer talking about the assets per se. We're talking about the applications and what did those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now especially with the whole move to cloud native and microservices and the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure as code. You're now able to bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application as infrastructure as code, the application in the definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are all are wrapped together. And you've got change control, version control and it's all automated. It's a beautiful thing. And I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. And when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking, I think everybody was trying to figure it out and they didn't really fully understand what that meant. Now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's Terraform or Ansible, whatever that might be, whatever method or tool that you're using to bring it all together. It's really interesting now. I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than when those early days of SDN were out. Was it a controller or is it a new version of SNMP? Now it makes sense. It's actually something tangible. Right, right. But still Chuck, as you said, there's still a lot of APIs and there's still a lot of component pieces of these applications that are all run off the network that all have to fit together. We cover PagerDuty Summit and their whole thing is trying to find out where the problems are within the very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandons their shopping cart or whatever the particular application. So again, the network infrastructure and the programmability are super important but I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of and they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. Yeah, absolutely Jeff. So the bandwidth that's necessary in order support everybody working from home to support this video conference. I mean, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the internet. The amount of people necessary to be able to facilitate that type of traffic if we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not scale. It's automation that makes that possible that allows us to look higher up the ability to do that automatic provisioning. Now that we're in microservices, now that everything is cloud native, we have the ability to better adjust to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we can very quickly spend something up to take that load off where traditionally it was open up a ticket, let me get someone in there, let me fix it. Now it's instantaneously identify the solution, go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team, they just simply need to get notified that this happened and as long as there's traceability. And a point that Brad made as far as you being able to go through here, doing the automation of the documentation side of it. I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the APIs from the infrastructure and then the ability to tie that into other systems like an IP address management or a change control or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made an infrastructure change and now I can automatically do that documentation, update and record. I know who did it, I know when they did it and I know what they did and I know what the test results were even five years ago, that was fantasy land. Now today, that's just the new normal. That's just how we all operate. Right, right. So I want to get your take on the other trend which is cloud, multi-cloud, public cloud, as I think you said, Brad, when public cloud first came out there was kind of this rush into we're going to throw everything in there then for different reasons people decided maybe that's not the best solution but really it's horses for courses, right? And I think it's pretty interesting that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're going to put their workloads and oh by the way, that might not be a static place. It might be moving around based on maybe I do my initial dev in Amazon and then when I go into production maybe I want to move it into my data center and then maybe I'm having to do promotion or something I want to flex capability. So from your perspective in helping customers work through this because still there's a lot of opinions about what is multi-cloud, what is hybrid cloud and it's horses for courses. How are you helping people navigate that and what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through, everybody talks about their journey. I think they're still kind of bumbling down, bumbling down paths, trying to find new things, what works, what doesn't work and I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. Yeah, yeah, no doubt it is still early days and I go back to it being application centric because being able to understand that application when you move to the cloud it may not look like what it used to look like when you move it over there. You may be breaking parts off of it. Some of it might be running on a platform as a service while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as a service and some of it might still be in your data center. Those applications are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier, those resources wherever they are can be defined in that infrastructure as code and automation. But aside from provisioning, I think we focus a lot about provisioning when we talk about automation. We also have these amazing capabilities on the side of operations too. Like we've got streaming telemetry and the ability to gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before or at least in the early days of monitoring software, right? You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. It probably had a friendly name. Like maybe it was something from the Hobbit, right? Now you've got things coming up and spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place. In that thing, you used to know what that was. Now you have to quickly figure out where it went. So the observability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody should be paying attention to moving forward with regards to when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers or in your premise, breaking that into microservices, you really need to understand what's going on and the programmability and APIs and Yang models are tied into streaming telemetry now. There's just so many great things coming out of this and it's all like a data structure that people who are going down this path and the DevNet path, they're learning these data structures and being able to rationalize and make sense of them. And once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or a switch, Amazon, it doesn't matter. You're all speaking in common language which is that data structure. That's great. Chuck, I want to shift gears a little bit because there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about, you know, DevNet really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco as really more of a software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you can put a little more color on that because clearly as you said, partners are super important. It's your primary go to market and Presidios, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world, that's a, you know, you said there's some, there's some, you know, non-traditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner that suddenly you guys are playing with because of really the software lead. Yeah, Jeff, that's exactly right. So as we've been talking to folks with DevNet, so whether it be at one of the Cisco live events in the DevNet zone or at the prior DevNet create events, we'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resale market. This, what we're doing with the DevNet specialization gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem, share them with our extremely large DevNet community so they can get access to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner or partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they've built a fantastic networking, they always have the fantastic networking business but they've built this fantastic automation business that's there. They may come into a scenario where it's working with a vertical or working with a technology piece that they may not have an automation practice for. We can leverage some of these software specific partners to come in there and do a joint go to markets so they can go where the traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value on top of that traditional stack. That brings us to this business outcomes that the customers are looking for in a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion. That's terrific. Well, again, it's unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the Cisco DevNet shows, they're still small, they're still intimate, there's still a lot of information sharing and great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the computer's museum I think the last couple of years and in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together. I hope maybe for next year's event, but thank you very much for stopping by and sharing the information, really appreciate it. Yeah, pleasure. Happy to be here. From around the globe, it's theCUBE presenting accelerating automation with DevNet brought to you by Cisco. Well, I'm John Furrier theCUBE, your host for accelerating automation with DevNet with Cisco. And we're here to close out the virtual event with Mindy Whaley, the senior director. Mindy, take it away. Thank you, John. It's been great to be here at this virtual event and hearing all these different automation stories from our different technology groups, from customers and partners. And what I'd like to take a minute now is to let people know how they can continue this experience at DevNet Create, which is our free virtual event happening globally on October 13th. There's gonna be some really fun stuff. We're gonna have our annual demo jam, which is kind of like an open mic for demos where the community gets to show what they've been building. We're also gonna be giving out and recognizing our DevNet Creator award winners for this year, which is a really great time where we recognize our community contributors who have been giving back to the community throughout the year. And then we've got really interesting channels. We have our creator's channels, which is full of technical talks, lightning talks. This is where our community external Cisco people come in, share what they've been working on, what they've been learning during the year. We also have a channel called APIs in Action, which is where you can go deep into IoT or collaboration or data center automation and get demos, talks from engineers on how to do certain use cases and also a new segment called Straight From Engineering where you get to hear from the engineers building those products as well. And we have a start now for those people just getting started who may need to dive into some basics around coding APIs and Git. That's a whole channel dedicated to getting them started so that they can start to participate in some of the fun challenges that we're gonna have during the event. And we're gonna have a few fun things. Like we have some DevNet advocate team members who are also musically talented. They're gonna share some performances with us. So we encourage you, everyone to join us there. Pick your favorite channel. Join us in whichever time zone you live in because we'll be in three different time zones. And we would love for you to be there and to hear from you during the event. Thanks so much. That's awesome. Very innovative, multiple time zones, accelerating automation with DevNet. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at DevNet Create. Thanks for watching.