 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, day two of Cisco Live. We are live in San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host is Stu Miniman. Stu and I are very pleased to welcome back to theCUBE Mandy Whealy, Senior Director of the Developer Experience at DevNet. Mandy, welcome back. Thank you so much, happy to be here. Well, thanks for having us in the DevNet zone. The last two days, this has been jam-packed. It's been tons of activity from the morning until it shuts down. So you get a real sense of how strong this community is. And so something yesterday that Chuck Robbins kicked his keynote off with was 30th year of Cisco doing a partner and customer event. Incredible. So I thought, let's see what else is having a 30th year anniversary this year. And I discovered Bill and Ted's excellent adventure is 30 and I thought, I want to talk to Mandy because how the DevNet experience has been Susie and Mandy's excellent adventure. Look what you've built in five years. That is a really great analogy. I really like that. No, it is really exciting to see, you know, where we are in this five year journey. And I was reminiscing with some of the team who was here in the very early days. Our second ever DevNet Express was here in San Diego and we were in the same space. And I think, you know, we were maybe a third of the space was DevNet, so we had a classroom and a few like meeting spaces and some demos. But it was very vibrant and the community showed up then, but it's great to see five years later how we have workshops and demos and more interactive things and what we've been able to build to really help enable the community and then to see them just soaking it up is, you know, that's one of my favorite weeks of the year, so. Mandy, I'm really seeing the coming together of Cisco's traditional business. When I think about, you know, when I would write about Cisco, it's that army of CCIEs that are out there whose jobs we're relying on Cisco products and technology. And what you've built with the DevNet group is now you have about 600,000 in this community and everything like that. Now, the certifications went through some major updates and there's people who's like, oh my God, wait, it's not just the treadmill every year where I get my stamp and, you know, keep my number. Bring us inside a little bit of how that happened and what the new, you know, career is and how certifications fit into that. Absolutely. So this has been an exciting week for that reason as well because we've been working, my team of developer advocates and our DevNet experts have been working hand in hand with learning at Cisco on this project around certifications. And it's so exciting to be able to like finally tell people about it and share it with the community and get the feedback. And what's really interesting about that program is we started from the beginning, really designing it with this idea of the IT team of the future, the infrastructure skills, the software skills coming together. Whether that's one person that learns both sides of it or it's a team that's combinations of those skills, that's really how the certifications are designed. So there's abilities for someone to go, you know, very deep on the networking side. Our CCIEs are incredible and they have this incredible amount of knowledge and that path is still the same. But there is also an addition of automation and software into that path even in the very network focused certifications. Then we added the DevNet certifications and these allow someone who's coming more from, I have a software background but I am starting to automate infrastructure. I'm starting to span into the ops world. I'm building on Cisco platforms and allow those to connect together. And then there's this new concept of the specialist certification and that's where we really let people kind of choose and pick kind of choose your own adventure in terms of the certifications that you choose and the skills that you build so that you could start to take, you know, a security automation specialist with a DevNet professional developer and a data center certification and really focus in on something like DevSecOps or same kinds of things for IoT where you can put together wireless with IoT application development and go towards roles like an IoT architect or something like that. So it's been an incredible project. My team has been very, you know, energized by the work with learning at Cisco on really taking the certifications and adding the software skills to it and seeing how that's going to help enable this amazing community of people that's here at Cisco Live. Well, it seems like this is part of Cisco's transformation from purely a hardware network appliance vendor to a hardware plus software subscription service that DevNet is as part of that as an accelerant. Yeah, it definitely is and I think it really shows with the certifications, how Cisco is putting real effort into that and how that is the direction that we're heading and it gives a clear signal to people that we do need both sets of skills and it gives you a pathway to get those skills is the really important thing because we heard requests from our community. We want a DevNet certification. We want a certification path for these software skills and so it's really in response to, you know, things that we heard from our partners and our customers on like, they wanted these defined paths to get there and now we've got this way to help them, so. All right, so there were some other announcements this week. Why don't you walk us through the rest of the news? Yeah, the other DevNet announcement that we're really talking with people a lot about here is the DevNet Automation Exchange and this is really focused around network automation and how DevNet and the DevNet community can help lead the way in network automation and so the Automation Exchange is focused on tangible use cases that we've heard from partners and customers. Some of them very simple, we have a walk, run, fly methodology that we're applying. So a lot of people when they start with network automation they come to us and say, I don't know where to start. I don't know where me personally with skills and my organization does not know where to start and so the walk phase is a lot about, you know, using automation to do read-only kind of activities. Get insights, get information, use it to help maybe do zero-touch auditing or something like that. Things that are small projects, people can pick up and start building confidence around network automation. The run phase is start taking action. You can start to implement policy and start doing configuration through automation and then the fly is really connecting all of that together into a DevOps workflow where maybe you're adding in a chat bot to communicate back to an ops team or you're noting that something drifted out of configuration and taking action to fix it. And so the Automation Exchange is a place where we have 50 initial use cases that we go through, we explain and then we also give a code project. We actually give sample code. It's a repository on GitHub that matches to solving that use case. And so Automation Exchange is curated by Cisco and created by our community. So people will be submitting them in, bringing their use cases in, bringing their code. We'll also be bringing use cases and code into it and we really want it to be this vibrant place to move that conversation forward and find out, you know, what are those walk, run and fly use cases that people are really working on? With so much of networking changes today being done manually, I think I saw a stat on the Cisco website that upwards of 95% of all network changes are still done manually. And I think that's got to be a huge hit to, to CapEx, to Apex. What are some of, in this early history with network automation, what are some of the success stories that you guys are hearing with the impact that this walk, run, fly methodology or path is enabling businesses to achieve? Definitely. So, you know, yesterday in Chuck's keynote we heard him talk about that complexity is kind of moving beyond human scale. And that's one of the things that automation really helps with and that's where we hear some of the first real wins from our customers and partners around is we've been able to approach something we couldn't before because we put things in place using automation that help us work more efficiently and scale further. So that's, that's definitely a very common one. And then the other part of it is really not necessarily just about speed or scale, but it's about reliability and reducing risk. And, and so doing things in an automated way also can really help with that. It's just really the combination of both of those where you get the biggest impact. Yeah. Mandy, can you bring us inside a little bit the ecosystem? Cause, you know, we heard on the main stage lots of discussion of keynote, especially in this multi-cloud world that we live in, you know, Cisco spanning across lots of environments here from a DevNet standpoint, we've talked to startups that are involved as well as some of the big people. So give us the latest there and, you know, what lessons learned from your team have you started to share with, you know, some of the other, you know, big companies that are looking to go down similar journeys? Yeah. I think that is one of the things that's very unique about the DevNet community is within the community, we have technical stakeholders from small startups to really large partners or huge enterprises. And when we're all here in the DevNet zone, we're all engineers and we're all exchanging ideas kind of no matter what the scale. So it becomes this great mixing of, you know, shared experiences and ideas. And that is some of the most interesting conversations that I've actually heard this week is people talking about how maybe they're using one Cisco platform in these two very different environments and exchanging ideas about how they do that or maybe how they're using a Cisco platform with an open source tool and then people finding value and thinking, oh maybe I can do that in my environment. So that part of the ecosystem community is very interesting and then we're also helping partners find each other. So we do a lot of work around, you know, here's a partner in the Cisco ecosystem who goes and installs Meraki networks, right? Here's a software partner who builds mapping technology on top of indoor Wi-Fi networks and getting those two together because the software partner is not going to install the network and the network person may not write that application in that way and so bringing them together we've had a lot of really good information coming back from the community around kind of finding each other and being able to deliver those outcomes. There's so many impacts that DevNet has made. I'm suddenly thinking of, you know, expansion of partnerships and the ecosystem like wow that you probably in the beginning didn't even realize we're going to be some of the outcomes that you're seeing five years in. Yeah, it is exciting to be, you know, five years into it and certainly when I taught the first coding 101 for network engineers at Cisco Live five years ago in San Francisco I did not expect there to be DevNet certifications, you know, five years later that was a really interesting path to think about how that evolved and then certainly on the ecosystem side the same thing, you know, we always knew that the APIs were going to become prevalent across all the Cisco platforms and up and down the stack and we always knew developers are this creative force and if you get those two things together you can unlock a lot of interesting things but it's been great to see it come into reality. Yeah, so Mandy I had the opportunity to hear Fran who's the chief people person at Cisco talk to kick off the event here and they talked about the fact that, you know, 40% of the leadership team at Cisco has changed in the last 12 months and they did that because something was right. It wasn't that there was problems but you know, Chuck Robbins has been here for four years, you know, the stock's been going gangbusters but, you know, give us a little bit of insight what is this transformation of DevNet which talk about 600,000 people in the giant community but what does it mean inside? You know, Fran talked about, you know, the people that are engaged, you know, have, you know, are six times more, you know, engaged when they work if they, you know, really like what they're doing and we know kind of the quality of life benefits that happen if I, you know, it works not drudgery so. Yeah, so I think, you know, I think it's been very positive. I have super confidence in our leadership team right now and the Cisco culture is one of the biggest things that I love about working at Cisco and you know, I'm a mom of two boys and I have flexibility to have this amazing job and career and also be around with my boys and that's a life goal and that's really meaningful to me. Within the, within DevNet working within the company to kind of drive some change, I think within those five years we have seen awareness of what developers need and want and how to be developer friendly. Like that has certainly been something we've been working internally to help lots of groups understand and there's been a ton of progress around that and then also just the attention from the product teams and engineering teams into the work they're putting into their APIs is just incredible and I think that's the voices of the community coming back in and them seeing that, you know, the kind of innovation that it drives in our partner community and all of these people here learning about their platforms. I think that is, you know, the best kind of virtuous cycle that you can have. I can only imagine Cisco be as historyed as it is and as large as it is that having a reputation of being developer friendly is a massive competitive advantage especially for some probably larger enterprises that are still trying to make that pivot. You have such, you have so many demonstrable proof points of Cisco's developer friendliness that I can only imagine that's probably contributing to all these great revenue members we're saying. We do believe that it is really important for Cisco's future. If we're going to be a software company being a developer friendly is certainly a very important part of that and that was part of the original, you know, thought with DevNet starting five years ago and we always have more work to do but it's great to see, you know, how far we've come, so. Definitely, well Mandy, congratulations on your excellent adventure. We're excited to see where it goes from here. We also appreciate being in the DevNet zone and getting to feel the buzz and the excitement and I can just imagine how many partnerships are forming behind us, how many new products and services are going to be created, maybe new companies. It's very exciting. Thank you. It's great to be here. We appreciate your time. For Stu Miniman, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Cisco Live. Thanks for watching.