 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partnerships. Hello everyone, welcome back live here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live. We're going to go out to the events, extract the signals. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Stu Miniman. Three days of live coverage, our next guest is Sachin Gupta, Senior Vice President and Product Management at Cisco. 20 plus year career, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. Thank you, thanks for having me. So we love the product execs because you've got visibility into the customers, but also into the engineering roadmap, which now as Chuck, your CEO, laid out is in a new modern era. Exactly. So you guys are busy, right? Yeah. What does that mean? What do you guys think about? What do you talk about in the product teams to go modern with cloud? Obviously a lot going on. You've got cyber ops going really heavily on with the routers right now and all the core products. So you've got to maintain that, but yet build out a future path. Yeah. What are you guys working on? What's the core? I mean, this has been pretty significant. I mean, we had to reinvent the entire network. And the motivation behind this is for many, many years, our customers could go in, manually operate these networks, go box by box, they're putting command line in, they're deciding the configuration of each element, setting it up this way, and they provide connectivity, some basic security, some experience this way. And what's happening now is, it's just a sheer volume and scale of things that they're having to deal with. I mean, everybody comes in with four mobile devices. There's all these things that are connecting. We talk about 26 billion things connected to the network in 2020. It's mind-boggling. And then at the same time, the applications are moving to the cloud, which means your threat surface has expanded. We needed to do things fundamentally differently. And so we reinvented the entire stack and we're serious about that. The ASICs, the platforms that they're built on, the operating system, modular, programmable, API-driven, the controller system on top. Everything had to be redone from scratch. One of the exciting things in following Cisco over the years, Stu and I have been following you guys from the beginning, you go back, say, 15 years ago, the big debate in Cisco, should we move up the stack and how should we move the stack? But now the time is almost a perfect path because you got software defined data center completely going full throttle, really relevant, a lot of stuff going on at the root level of the networks. So, networking's not going away anytime soon. And as the things I mentioned, security's obviously a big concern. And then now you've got Kubernetes and Diane Greene from Google Cloud saying, hey, this Kubernetes and containers and service meshes feels a lot like some of the kind of coolness of networking. So the network engineers now have a kind of a path, if you will, to take their core competence and drive more value around that. Talk about what that actually means. Yeah, and there's a couple of things, interesting things that you mentioned. First of all, the data center moving to a software defined path. So we've applied a lot of learning from that. And so we've taken the fabric approach, the automation approach, and brought that to the campus with DNA center. It's basically software defined access in DNA center. And DNA center actually is built on a Kubernetes model, so in a cloud type of platform to allow it to scale out with service offers. So we've actually taken both the examples applied it. What does it mean from a network engineer point of view? Instead of repeating mundane tasks again and again, now they can automate network-wide. The entire network operates as a single system. I can define a policy and say, I need this user group. I need these doctors to have access to these medical records. I want this telepresence application to get high priority. Specify intent, let that system automatically apply that everywhere. And then take data and analytics out of that infrastructure to ensure that the intent was delivered as expected. So very powerful. They can sort of instead of be box-by-box network engineers, now they're system-wide looking at the entire network as a whole system. Yeah, Sachin, I wonder if you can give us a little bit of insight here. You talked about customers not being box-by-box. Well, from the product side, you spent a lot of your career helping define the catalyst boxes. And we watched the generations of catalyst switches over the years. Cisco transforming from being measured in boxes and ports to being a software company. How do you, on the inside, measure that transformation? You talked about things like the DNA center and the like, but what's that been like on the inside? And how do you measure internally that balance between software and kind of the hardware world? We measure it through customer success through that software. So how many customers were actually able to get a DNA center? It's an appliance that has software embedded in it and get value through the network. And I think one thing I'll tell you is we found that while reinvention of the network sounds scary. Hey, how do I even start reinventing my entire network as a customer? How do I start? That you can take DNA center, take the network that you have, and start sending data from DNA center, as from your network, sorry, from your access points, from your switches, your routers, your identity product, send it to DNA center, and start getting immediate value. Immediate value. So what was the experience for this user at this time? How do I pinpoint where the issue is and go fix it? And so we find that for these customers, the, yes, the switches, all the new products we brought out are important because they're programmable, they have rich capabilities, rich data streaming, but at the same time, a lot of the products they have through a software model, they can now get network-wide assurance. They can troubleshoot, get automated remediation steps that Cisco recommends. And now the new announcement if we go there is, how do we expose all of this through an API layer? Yeah, it's interesting, because if you think back 10, 15 years ago, doing a network upgrade, oh my God, that was a scary thing for customers. You're thinking forklift, am I doing some major build out? I start at my core, I build out to the edge, it's generation is shifting. What we hear from the DevNet team here is you've got to meet them where they are, add value, and then you can make change along the way, almost like we do with applications, slowly pulling things apart. Absolutely right. And one of the immediate values is assurance, analytics for assurance, helping you troubleshoot better. But another piece of value that customers love and that we get great feedback is, you know, racking and stacking a switch sometimes, like in a branch site, they would pay more to get it stacked than the switch itself. Because imagine, you know, you've got a remote site, you don't have a highly trained person, flying somebody out, getting them, installing it, spending a few days there, costs a lot of money. And now we're saying we can automate onboarding a product, we can automate software upgrades for those products using DNA center with intent-based networking. So you start there, then you start transforming it for policy-based automation, some of the more advanced security capabilities that the system provides. Yeah, we hear GZero a lot when some of those use cases, and then you see the shift happening with software as a holistic view. I want to explore that with you for a second, because if you think about the system, which I totally agree with, by the way, it's awesome, then you've got the DNA center. A lot of people understand it, and people are now moving to that, and now trying to understand it. Share the mental model on how people should think architecturally around DNA center. Is it an abstraction layer? Is it just a set of APIs? What are you enabling with the APIs? What's actually going to be the result from that architecture? So how should I think about it architecturally? And then what are some of the enabling things that could come as a result? Let me explain this a little bit, maybe with two examples, right? On an example of how it works, and an example of where we think we can take this. So how it works is, before the APIs on the switch would mean that you can say, hey, how much memory do you have left? Let me copy an image to you, let me reboot the switch to upgrade it, let me check if it works, and that's the level you were operating at. When we say DNA center is a platform and has APIs, now you have an intent that you can express which says, take all the switches of this type on the site and upgrade all of them, right? And now you have to go through all those steps behind the scenes and that's the abstraction that it provides. So those are intent-based APIs. So what's exciting, first of all, is look with that, I can extend, integrate with IT services, I can integrate with service now, for example, IP address management schemes, cross network domains, I can support third party, I can do all those things. What's exciting for me is I'm going to pull out my device, right? You think about it, this thing has a phone, it has a camera, accelerometer, all sorts of things. But the way it's exposed through the app developer is through very simple APIs and through an app store. So you're essentially enabling. We're unleashing innovation on that network by taking away the need to understanding the depths of networking for the developer that sits on top. So it's really an on top of a holistic view, so you're taking away steps that takes to get something done. Right. And integrating other things, is that on the app side? Yeah, from the app side now, I mean, you look at DevNet and the capabilities that DevNet brings to the table, and now the app developer, our systems integrator, can invoke powerful network technology without understanding the depths of networking. Because what they're looking for is, you know what, I'll give you an example, I'll talk about doctors and medical records. If you need to onboard a group of contractors to help out for six months and have secure access, you can now define that at an application layer, at an identity layer, and automate that completely through DNA center, without understanding exactly what the network will need to do in a highly sophisticated way, across all those boxes to make it happen. So is DNA center a net new capability for your customers? It is, DNA center's been around since last August. So less than a year, it is a new controller built for the enterprise. And so yes, many, many customers are using it, but for a lot of customers, it's a net new powerful piece of technology. I got to ask you a personal question. You've been in Cisco for a long time, you've seen waves come and new waves emerging. Why has DevNet been so successful? And you got DevNet create with the cloud native side kind of coming together, bringing those two worlds together. I mean, timing's everything, right? I mean, life, right? So is it timing? Is it just, what is the, I mean, the success is pretty significant. 500,000 developers, you know, you guys have it. That's a great developer program. That's robust. That's on its way to continue to write. Why is it so successful? I'll give you my honest example. I think networking, people have thought is sort of big, big boxes is sort of what networking is. And we always tell people that even when you think about switches, the majority of our engineering investment is in software. So my network engineers, you know, yes, they're plugging in a switch, but the majority of their life is operating the software on that infrastructure. And so by their very nature of networking and network engineers, they're actually very comfortable with software. They're very comfortable with scripting and those kinds of capabilities. Now you enter DevNet. DevNet says, I'm now going to give you a easy way, sandbox way, learning and enablement for you to learn the APIs not just on the network, on the collab systems, on the security systems, in the data center, and be much more powerful at how quickly you can move. You're much more agile. So I think it was a pretty natural evolution for the network engineer. Now the last piece of the puzzle was the network. And now with DNA Center, we provide the same sort of API abstraction for the network itself. And I mean, look, so far, the network engineers are loving it. I was talking to Paul who's at Presidio, who's a network engineer. He's actually one of the DevNet creator award winners and loves it. He's a network practitioner and now can solve problems for his business as a partner and his customers could never do before. Great point. I mean, we don't need Paul, great guy, but you just said something I think is really interesting. The people in the community, the network engineers, they've been solving problems. That's what they do. That's what they do. And with software. So now you add scripting to your point. This is not new things. It's not foreign, but the networks are core. Yes. They're not learning Python to get a career change. They're extending their capability. That's exactly right. They're not doing Python just to do Python. They're using Python. They're using the APIs. They're using the DNA Center platform to become more powerful as a network engineer for networking to solve business problems. Yeah, I think the timing combined with just where cloud is, where you guys are with the program ability, it really is, I mean, again, timing is everything. It's exciting. It's exciting, I think. So one of the things we've been looking at with Cisco is Cisco's moving up the stack. And I think we want you to help connect the dots for us. Intent-based networking really is one of the ways that networking people are building applications. I think in the keynote, they walked through some specific examples. What kind of things are people building with intent-based networks that they couldn't do before? I think, you know, so some of the app examples that sit on top, right? So I'll give you simple examples and some other interesting things. Accenture, for example, is doing automated software updates, much more intelligent software updates based on, you know, business information, like who, how many people will get impacted with the update, tying it to the service process with ServiceNow. That's an Accenture use case. Worldwide Tech has taken DNA Center and made it mobile. So instead of consuming it on your laptop like this, you can now kind of consume network status, client status, health on your mobile device. You've got dimension data that's actually doing SSID leasing. So in your sites as a customer, if you need to create temporary network connectivity for certain types of users, you can deliver that automatically, right? So you've got examples of all kinds that are leveraging the power of the network without actually having to understand all the nitty-gritty details behind it and as a developer or a systems integrator providing tremendous more value to our customers. It's interesting too, one of the things that Worldwide Technology said here when we interviewed him on the first day yesterday was, in the old model, there was dislocated capabilities. They'd go talk about business outcomes, essentially what the intent was on the business side. And then, great, we're done. Now let's check Tim with Cisco. Cisco would come in and the networking guys would come in. Okay, here's what you can do. So now those are coming together. Which shrinks the time frame on the execution. So to actually put it together, that is really kind of DevOps-like. I mean, this is integration. This is kind of like, this is a big trend. It's a big trend because now the network has an ability through DNA Center to take that business outcome you described as an intent, translate that into what the network understands, activate it and then provide the data analytics and assurance back to the application. And so you're absolutely right. Before you'd have to go manually take that business outcome and figure out now, how do I make this happen through a network that did not operate as a single system? And now the worlds are coming together and our partners and our customers can move much, much more quickly. Well, you guys doing a great job. We really think that the clear path to the stack or the stack as integrating with networking is colliding in a good way. You still got the hardcore software defined networking and data center and the networks. So it's awesome. I want to get your thoughts on as industry participant also as Cisco executive. For the folks that couldn't make Cisco Live this year. What's the biggest story? I mean, we heard a lot of things. You have to boil it down. What's the most important development happening this year at Cisco Live? I think the big announcement is DNA Center platform where it is an open API system that supports third-party infrastructure and has that API layer accelerating innovation through our partners. But what I will tell you is that the important message I'd like to deliver is they can start on this network reinvention today. It is not about a rip and replace of the gear that they have. They can add the software capabilities of DNA Center on the infrastructure they have and get immediate out-the-gate benefit with things like network assurance, DNA assurance. And so I really encourage everybody to look at this and say, yes, you know what? Maybe I'll get to the last step later. Start now. You're going to see immediate value. And there's not a lot of, there's really no disruption. And there's no disruption to that. They can put their toe in the water or jump off full throttle. And once you like the controller approach, you can see how it integrates with APIs with everything else in your IT processes. You can then take more steps like software-defined access, policy-based automation, which are more intrusive and but provide tremendous value. But there's a way to start that's not intrusive. Well, we're super excited to see how DNA Center continues to accelerate. We love what's going on in DevNet. DevNet create, you're seeing the cloud growth happen. You're seeing all kinds of new modern era things that we've never seen before. So congratulations. DNA Center platform, multiplied by DevNet, right? It's exponential growth. So it's a great way. People's jobs will become easier. Again, automation for the right reasons, accelerating new value creation opportunities. TheCube here in Orlando, bringing you all the action at Cisco Live, extracting the signal noise. I'm John Furrier, Stu Minis. Stay with us. We've got more here on day two of three days of coverage. Stay with us.