 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2020. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage. Four days here in Barcelona, Spain, for Cisco Live 2020, kicking off the year. Great event, I'm John Furrier, my co-host. Stu Miniman, our next guest, any win occur, general manager of App Dynamics, part of Cisco, and special key notar headlining the event. This is a networking show, headlining by the app development story. Danny, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. Thank you, it's good to be here. So one of the big signals, and I think it was a shot across the bow of the industry, but also internally within Cisco has been the multi-year movement around getting APIs built into the products. You're starting to see DevOps become network ops. Now with App Dynamics, digging down in infrastructure to provide great value, but in a DevOps way. This is the top story in my mind. You led the keynote, which was very unusual for Cisco. Was it planned that way? Tell us some of the background behind this. Well, it was planned that way, and I think part of what we're recognizing is that in the world that we're now living in, where applications have moved to become the center of the business, you have business initiatives encoded in applications, and that's what actually drives the use of technology in the organization. So it really starts with the application, and Cisco, of course, recognizes that, and that has implications for the way we think about the entire technology stack. And so we see it as an opportunity to actually make the infrastructure and the people that actually buy and work with the infrastructure, the infrastructure engineers and operations teams, network engineers and network operations teams, they become much more relevant by actually looking at how the technologies and the work that they do are actually placed within the context of the application, and how that application and the experiences within it are delivering a business result to the larger organization. Okay, and one of the big trends, obviously Stu and I were early days in the cloud, watching Amazon rise up, no one kind of saw that coming, most of the insiders did, but APIs were key, but the word DevOps was started around that time. Infrastructure as code makes a lot of sense, programmable infrastructure. You guys picked up on that, we've been covering that for now for four years around programmable networking, and Cisco's been shifting the products, but during the keynote, you mentioned biz DevOps, which I thought was a very fascinating stake in the ground. Could you explain what you meant by that, because if I think what you're saying is true, this is now another layer of opportunity that takes advantage of all the scale, the agility, the efficiency. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So I mean, what's going on is companies that now say, okay, my business is now in my app, the app has become the business, they have to now figure out how do they iterate very, very quickly on that application? And in order to iterate very quickly, the business team, the development team, and the operations teams need to work together in a closed loop operating model, because if they don't work together closely, they have two big problems, right? One is the business initiatives, which move very quickly, can't get encoded quickly enough in the application, and the application falls behind, and the business suffers. Number two, they can't produce winning experiences, because executives like us sitting in a conference room with an idea for an experience are almost always wrong about what's going to work for the end users. The way it works in the modern world and what we know from digital native organizations that have pioneered this is that you actually have to form user research and a hypothesis from it, encode it in your application and get it quickly in front of your users with real-time measurement and telemetry, and then you use that to inform yourself in real-time around what's working and what's not. You reform your hypothesis, make that adjustment, reimplement and code, get it back out, and iterate and iterate, and the more shots on goal that you're able to take with the velocity of iteration, the more likely you are to get to the winning experience. So BizDevOps is really around getting those three teams, the business team, the development team, and the operations team, working together with Velocity in a new operating model that allows you to actually gain the competitive advantage that's necessary in an experience-driven, application-centric world where the infrastructure and the development team and the business are now all working together in tandem and locked up. Danny, it's really interesting stuff. We all know that the organizational construct and the silos often slow down that innovation growth. We watch for years, developers, they find their tools, they do their thing, but as you said, it's got to be connected with the business. I want to make sure I understand. We've seen some places where some of the tooling actually is getting people together because they have common natural, you give the business people things in there, colors and languages, as opposed to the developers, they need different things out of it, but it's a backbone or backplane holding together. So are those business product owners or business leaders actually coming into APTI and seeing things? Is it at that level? Yeah, so this is a really important point, right? The problem that we've seen in the traditional operating model is not only are the team siloed, but the technologies and the data that they rely upon keep them siloed. And so as the changes in the market are pushing them to work together for the reasons I said, they need common tooling and common data sets. And so what we're actually doing at Cisco is connecting app dynamics to the tools that are beneath it in the stack, like what we announced yesterday with the intersite workload optimizer and what we've previously done with ACI for the software-defined data center networking fabric so that you can actually have each team, each persona use a tool that they're comfortable with that's specialized for their domain, but the data sets are now connected so it gives them a single source of truth that allows them, instead of finger pointing when something goes wrong or they need to optimize, they're now able to actually have a shared source of truth and they can say, okay, I understand my domain here, I understand my domain here, but they're telling me the same thing and that makes it easier for them then to collaborate in this closed looped operating model, whereas it was harder to do that when they were looking at their separate tools and separate data. One of the things I want to get your thoughts on, Danny, is as coming from the app dynamics side now at Cisco, you've seen a lot of modern, user-word modern applications. The modern architecture is evolving, people can see the picture, they know what to do. Most enterprises outside of the pioneers, they're like, okay, I love the idea of biz dev ops, but hey, I'm just trying to figure out which cloud I'm going to use. So take me through how you engage with that because you might be ahead of the curve on the thought process, but I'm just trying to grok the cloud and its impact to me as an enterprise. What do you say to that, what's your answer to that? Yeah, so what we see going on right now is that in almost every single organization that has their business now running in the apps, those apps are hybrid multi-cloud apps. They recognize that in order to iterate quickly on the front end of the application, they probably need to use some of the latest cloud-based technologies either in the public cloud or in a private cloud on-premises. But they also have other components of their architecture that are going to be using something more like web technologies or client server technologies or in some organizations still mainframe technologies for backend data access. And so you end up with this sort of diverse array of layered tech stacks across different deployment environments in a multi-cloud world. And they have to work together seamlessly. And so part of what we've done is innovate lenses within AppDynamics that actually give you a view through that complexity so that you can focus on what really matters most. And that was yesterday's announcement of the experience journey map that we have from AppDynamics, right? It complements what we've done before with business transactions and business IQ and adds a new lens that is focused on the screens that the end users are actually seeing in their browser or on their mobile device. And it automatically uses AI and ML technology to map a screen-by-screen journey flow through the application that the user's actually seeing and experiencing. And within that screen-based view, it gives you business data like abandonment rate and it correlates it down to the technical performance of what's actually being served to the user on that screen so that you can quickly determine where are the technology issues across this broad hybrid multi-cloud estate? Where are they actually surfacing issues or not on the screens that your users are seeing? So you can now prioritize the warnings on the backend based on what your users really need you to address right away. So if I hear you correctly, what you're saying is essentially, because instrumentation you mentioned earlier, data is critical. So what you're saying is you could have abandonment rates say it's an app or whatever. And say maybe there's a DDoS attack on a switch or a firewall. So I might want to scale that up with policy. So you're saying you're coordinating technical remedies or architectural changes based upon what you know the business logic. Is that what you're kind of getting at? That's exactly right. So we know from data that we have from our App Attention Index that 50% of users are willing to pay more for a competitor's product if it performs and gives them a better experience. And worse yet, 63% of users in the App Attention Index have told us that if they get a subpar digital experience they're going to go out and actually not only leave but bad mouth the experience that they had and spread ill will about your application. So what has to happen in that world is you have to actually relate your business performance data to the user experience within the screen through the experience journey map into the backend application components which is the business transaction and then down through intersite into the layers of the infrastructure where you can actually get into the chassis, the blades, the fans, the dims and the network. So essentially it's like auto-scaling concept that you know in cloud. Apply to the app level at a feature by feature basis. That's right and you can do it, exactly. You can do it within the context of the key experiences that have been prioritized as the ones that contribute the greatest impact to your business results and you can workload optimize and scale infrastructure dynamically and automatically. Final point on this because it's a good thread here. So final question is, okay, now prove it to me. How much money did I make? Can you guys tie that to actual dollars? Or is that on the client side? Do they have to program that? No, so you can within AppDynamics through our business IQ capabilities tell us through the interface of the product what are the pieces of business data that are the key measures of your business success? It could be dollars, it could be cents, it could be skews, it could be a product ID, it could be an abandonment rate or a funnel conversion through your funnel. You tell us what are those metrics that you need and we will actually introspect, pull them out and give you a real time dashboard. That's like real time ROI. It is, that's what it is. So Danny, the thing I've been trying to chomp at the bit here is I'm agreeing with a lot of what you're saying. There was a trend that was all over everywhere that we went in 2019 that I haven't heard you use a certain word, it's observability. You know, certain people are like one of the biggest trends of 2020. Help us understand your viewpoint on observability, what you're hearing from customers because much of the language you're talking about that systems view resonates as what we're talking about observability. So are you just not fond of the word or not trying to jump on that bandwagon? Yeah, I mean it's a buzzword. What I'm talking about is full stack observability. That's exactly what it is. You can go from the business to the end user experience, the application, the compute infrastructure, the network infrastructure and the security domain that wraps it all. And you can actually now see with telemetry that we're pulling in from each of those layers whether it's using app dynamics or using some of the instrumentation that Cisco has across those other infrastructure layers and security layers of the stack. We pull that all together with AI and ML, produce insights and then provide an API that allows integration with systems for automation and action. That is not only full stack observability but it's full stack observability paired with the ability to implement an AI ops operating model that then supports a biz dev ops way of working for the company. You might want to throw in horizontal observability too because you now with cloud you got horizontal scalability. Across deployment, exactly, across your deployment environment. And from an application standpoint, everything from kind of traditional monoliths through microservices, do things with serverless too? Absolutely. We have agent technologies that take care of the very latest serverless technologies. We have things for Kubernetes cluster monitoring. We have support for CloudWatch and then going all the way back to the other side of course traditional Java applications.net applications back to mainframes, IIB. We monitor and support all of that. It's the broadest array of visibility that you're going to get. The company working for you. All the cool stuff. Cloud native, Kubernetes. We try. We like to be the cool kids. We may ask you a question. So I got to ask you since you've got a good view up and down the stack and across multiple domains and workloads of clouds. What do you think going into 2020 with this show and beyond, what is the most important story you think that people are talking about and what's the most important story that you think people should be talking about? I think the most important thing that's going on right now is figuring out how to connect across the different technologies and the different layers. We're coming from a place where there's naturally been a specialization within each of the domains. The whole point now is about multi-domain and actually connecting the different layers of the technology stack to produce insights that allow for movement in this lockstep, higher velocity model. Because what we know from all of the data and all of the experience with customers is that the winners in an experience driven world are those that can actually implement with velocity, not break things and deliver well-designed beautiful experiences. And in order to do that, you need to be able to connect these different technologies and get the teams that traditionally run them working together in a much more collaborative model. And what are people missing? What should people be focused on outside of that? What are the other areas that either media or customers, what are some of the hidden gems out there that people should really pay attention to? Well, I think there's a lot of exciting innovation that is going on in some of the new cloud native technologies and the cloud native architectures. The other thing that I think is a little bit of a hidden thing that a lot of people haven't realized is that the cloud is great for some of the really high velocity fast moving things, but it's not always the most efficient or the least, I'm sorry, the most cost effective way, least costly way of running everything. And so we actually do see some recoil back to these hybrid environments where people are actually now running some cloud technologies on-premises. And so I think that's an area to watch as we see some of the public cloud players, obviously out of the traditional players, bringing cloud innovation, but running that on-premises in a way that connects seamlessly to elastic scalable public cloud resources that work together in tandem. Yeah, I guess last question I had for you, I think it was in your keynote, I heard you talk about customers using app day as being agents of transformation. Just what advice do you give them? Where are some of the stumbling blocks that if they don't have a conversation or understand a certain architecture that they're going to run into some issues? Yeah, so for us, an agent of transformation is the sort of notion of a change agent in the organization that recognizes the things we've been talking about, where the world is going and is seeking to be that disruptive force of change inside the company. And in order to do that, what we have found is they're most successful when they get their hands on hard, cold data, right? Like that's how you convince an organization, you show them the data and you connect the data and the technology to a business result. And so the most effective change agents have been able to go into the depths of the technology. They've been able to correlate data sets up and down the stack and then walk into the boardroom at the executive level and show in an undeniable, evidence-based way that these layers of technology are producing this business result and the organization needs to invest to accelerate that. And that's agile model too. You get the data and you iterate, double down on it. Absolutely. That brings it all the way up to the boardroom. Danny, thanks so much for taking the time to share the great insights. Of course. I'll give you a minute to get a plug-in for App Dynamics. What do you guys got going on? What shows you're going to be at in the coming year? Obviously Cisco Live in America. Any other events you're going to be there? Any investment areas? Give a quick plug for what's going on with App Dynamics. Yeah, no, I appreciate it. The next big one for us is on February the 20th, we're running a global virtual event called App Dynamics Transform 2020, which is our annual showcase where we bring together all of the latest and greatest innovations that App Dynamics has across what we're doing with AI and ML, everything that we're doing around new experiences, cloud-native technologies, the AI ops operating model, our vision for the central nervous system for IT. And we're going to showcase all of that demo and talk about our roadmap. So it's a global live virtual event. Come to our website, appdynamics.com and please tune in. Well, congratulations for your success and I'd love to have you come into our studio and talk about what you're doing with video because that's a hard, hard problem. We talked to Sri about that. Thanks for coming on, I really appreciate it. Congratulations. Yeah, I appreciate it. We're here in theCUBE, App Dynamics, headlining the keynote at Cisco Systems, a networking company turned into a data company, a video company, an instrumentation company, application company, all now and one. Just theCUBE bringing you all the data here in Barcelona. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break.