 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco NetApp and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone, this is theCUBE's live coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Stu Miniman, my co-host for the next two more days. We're in three days of coverage. Our next two guests here from Cisco, Ronnie Ray, Vice President of Cisco and Prakash Rajamani, Director of Product Management at Cisco. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, John. So all the buzz is about the DevNet developer aspect, the rise of the network engineer moving up to the stack while taking care of business in the Software-Defined Data Center, Software-Defined Service Provider, everything is software-defined. You guys are involved in the DNA Center platform, which we've talked about, the DNA Center, the product. This is a real innovation environment for you guys. So take a minute to explain what is the DNA Center platform and how does that compare from the DNA Center? How should customers think about this? What is it? What's the offering? Absolutely. So if you just take, you know, walk back about a year. A year ago, we launched the DNA Center. DNA Center is the product and that supported things like SD Access, which is absolutely a new innovation about software-defined campuses. Through the year, we launched the showrooms. Through the year, we've launched Enterprise Network Function Virtualization. We have capabilities and automation and these are all product capabilities that DNA Center has. What we are doing today and this week in Cisco Live and in the DevNet area right now is that we've launched DNA Center platform, which is the ability to open up and expose all of the APIs and the SDKs that now makes DNA Center a product that our customers, our partners, and developers out there can now work on and create new value. It could be apps, it could be integrations, it could be new devices, third-party devices, Cisco's never supported before, but they can now make that supportable in DNA Center because we're giving them the tools to do that. So this is not so much a customer thing, it's more of kind of a partner or app. I mean, is that kind of how it's going? So if I'm a partner, it makes sense. Is this kind of where it's different? I mean, where's the line here? Or is it open for everybody? It is for everybody. So it is about if you are a networking expert and you've done CLI in the past, what we are doing is making APIs simpler, we're making them intent-based, which means that they can achieve a lot more. And this is open to you as a networking expert, you as an application developer, you as a partner that is providing, creating new services for your end customer or client, all of you can now use DNA Center platform to create new value. So this is great for everyone. So this is where, if I get this right, we love this notion of DevOps on cloud. Suzy and you guys have been talking about network programmability. Is this kind of where it is? I mean, we're talking about network programmability, is this where the APIs shine and what's our vision? This is truly network programmability. In fact, in the past, what we've talked about is device programmability. But now what you're doing in the center platform is really expressing intent and using APIs that apply across the whole network. But Prakash can probably give you some examples of what these intent APIs look like. Yeah, and I think as Ronnie said, we like to call it network DevOps. I think Suzy calls that too. And this is the way in which network DevOps is going to evolve. There are two kinds of target market that we look at. One is the network engineer who understands everything network centric, who knows all the nuances and are very comfortable with those. But then being able to achieve those through a programmable API, right? That's one market. The way we want to go with the intent API is for the software engineers who want to be able to say, hey, I want to prioritize YouTube traffic less in my network and I want to prioritize my custom built app which is the most critical for my enterprise as the most critical network. And I want to express that as an intent through an API and then let the DNS center platform take care of making that real on the network without having to worry about all the technologies and all the bells and whistles that come in. Yeah, how to provision it, what's going on under the hood. Essentially, to them it's a call. To them it's a call and it's taken care of. That is actually seamless to the software developer. By the way, who doesn't want to get in the weeds of networking. The networking guys who are under the hood, what does it mean for them? They get to provide services to the developers. So, I mean, it sounds like everyone's winning here. What's the benefit to the network engineers? They get scalability. I mean, so how do you, I see the benefits for the software developer, right? That's awesome. But where's the network engineer? What are they getting at? They can achieve more things faster. They can get deeper. And this is absolutely making it simple for them operationally to run their network. So they can basically free up time to do other tasks like design and architecture. You know, that typically is very... Cooler tasks. Cooler tasks. Not boring, mundane, cut and paste the scripts. See ally scripts to another device. Absolutely. And that's one part. The other part is about the cool new apps that they can create because there are use cases and even if you look at all the show floor, the companies that are here and Cisco Live and that they come every year, there are use cases out there that even collectively as an industry, we cannot solve. That needs to be solved in the context of the company and the environment that you're in. And so the network expert that's sitting in a customer environment can say, okay, I have this problem. Let me solve it. Let me go. They're getable problems to solve now. Absolutely. Because now you're taking off more time but also cloud and some of the software defined things are now at the disposal to create that creativity. Is that kind of where you're getting at? This is the new opportunity. Is that what Chuck was kind of referring to in his keynote around getting at these new use cases? I mean, because... Certainly. And this opens up new use cases because this is a new way to program across the entire network in a much more simpler fashion than that's ever been done before. Yeah, so when I hear a new way to program, I want to understand what's the learning curve for this? If somebody understands the Meraki APIs, is this a short learning curve? If they don't, is it a longer learning curve? So what we have done from a learning curve perspective, we have worked with the DevNet team. We have learning labs where somebody who's not familiar with programming completely can start with the basics of, okay, how do I get started with DNA center platform APIs and get started and go through a sequence of learning labs to get them completely familiarized with everything. Somebody like what you said, like a Meraki person who's already using the Meraki API. For them, anybody who understands REST XML APIs can just turn around and there's a bunch of new APIs available that they can understand, program, try within the product and then create sample codes and then build on top of that. So it's that easy as that. Yeah, it was interesting. I was walking through the show floor talking to some of the customers here and for some of them, what's off the shelf is good but I hear them griping about, not about Cisco, some of the partners like, ah, you know, I can't customize what I need. You know, one of the challenges we've always had in IT is, you know, it's great if you can take the off the shelf but everybody needs to tweak and adjust what they have. How's that addressed with this solution? So from a customization perspective because we provide, in our product, we provide a specific set of capabilities but when it comes to API, we make it much, much, much richer and granular so that people can create any workflow that they want. The workflows that we create in the API context is in three formats. We have what we call as tasks which are individual operations that you perform and then we group the tasks and offer them as workflows and we group the workflows and offer them as an intent. So as a user, based on what level of granularity you need, you can go to the lowest level task or you can go all the way up to the intent based on your skill set and then use them and customize them as it fits your needs. So they can get up and running pretty quickly. It sounds like, and if you know APIs, it's just JSON, it's all the same XMLs, all the great stuff, great stuff. But I got to ask you where this kind of goes from here because one of the things we were talking before that we came on camera is, we've been covering all the Linux foundation, the cloud native computing foundation, CNCF, you got Docker containers and containers now have been a great thing. Pretty much check standard, everyone's using containers. And it's great for, put a container around it, a lot of great things could happen. Kubernetes and then microservices around, service meshes Diane Greene mentioned in her keynote with Chuck Robbins Istio, who's one of the hottest projects in the Linux foundation. So that's kind of microservices. This sounds like it's got a lot of levels of granularity. I love that word because now when you get to that point, you can really make the software targeted and strong and bulletproof. How is that on the roadmap? Where does someone who's actually looking at microservices as a North Star, what does your offering mean for them? Is it right in line? What's the progression? What's the roadmap? So from a microservice perspective, DNA Center as a product itself is completely microservice based architecture. There's about 110 microservices today that make up what is DNA Center. This gives us a flexibility to really update every single service, every single capability and make it almost like giving customers ability to do this every two weeks or every four weeks, new changes, new enhancements in a very simple fashion. That's kind of how the product is being built. What we eventually want to do is extend the platform as an ability for partners and others to build microservices that can be built and deployed within DNA Center over time. That's further down the road, but given the solution and given the strategy where we are as a product architecture that lends us to extend that to the... It's natural extension, so basically you're cloudified. You've got all the APIs, so if a customer wants to sling APIs, customers want to integrate in, like you mentioned service now, they can do that easily today, and then you got some extensibility in the roadmap to be kind of cloud native when things are growing. That's, I mean, timing's everything, right? I mean, you don't have to... It's kind of evolving right now heavily with cloud native. Yep, and yeah, I mean, that's the benefit of this architecture that you can really pick and choose where you want to run over time. We are right now on-prem, on a box, on appliance that helps us solve the solution, but there's nothing that stops us from going anywhere. Ronnie, I want you to talk about this significance. This is an open platform, you know? I've watched Cisco my entire career, and you know, always it's, Cisco's been heavily involved in standards, but takes arrows from people as to how they do this. This is open, what does that mean, and what's that mean to your customers? Absolutely, now this is basically opening up Cisco to industry-wide innovation. So till now, if you look at everything that we have done on the inner center and when some of the other Cisco platforms, that Cisco developed. But what we are now getting to a point where with DevNet, now at 500,000 developers registered, we have the critical mass to basically say the industry can come and develop on top of Cisco platforms. And so this is completely new, kinds of innovation that we will see, use cases that we've never thought of, and this will happen. And of course, we will continue to contribute to all, whether it's IETF or whether it's certainly, you know, open config, when all of these and the Yang models that we're doing across the industry, those will continue, the open source contributions that we do, but this is really saying, okay, let's provide our best customers and our partners, and of course, the individual developer that's out there, a way to today build new creations and maybe tomorrow there's a path to monetize that. And you know, it's interesting you bring that up. I love the open, we love open, we're open content. You guys are now open networking for lack of a better description. You know, Chuck Robbins talked about his keynote, one of the things that's really impressed on, he highlighted something that we've been talking about is that the geo-political, the geo-technical world is a huge factor. You look at just cloud computing, you look at regions, you got GDPR, I mean, all these things going on, you mentioned assurances off camera, this is like a huge deal, right? So you got a global tech landscape, you got global tech compliance issues. So you got this now open source and it's whatever fourth generation where it's part of the entrepreneurial fabric. So Ron, I got to ask you, you've been an entrepreneur before, you were bringing entrepreneurship into networking. What's the guiding principles? What's your inspirational view on this? Because this is really not only a safe time for engineers, it makes them part of an open collaborative culture like open source, which they're used to, bringing an entrepreneurial vibe to it. Absolutely, this is a big dynamic. What's your view on this? It's a huge dynamic and I can talk from personal experience, you know, when I've done startups and I've raised money or put my own money into it, 70% of your calories go in building a platform. So you're just looking at how do I store data? How do I process data? How do I look at the variability of systems? And 30% of it really goes into building a use case. What we are doing with DINOS Center platform is basically saying, forget about that 70%. We will give you normalized data, whether it's for Cisco equipment or whether it's for third party equipment. So the SDK will allow you to bring in Juniper or Huawei or Aruba or whoever that's out there and you can bring that into DINOS Center so now you have a view of the entire network, Cisco or non-Sysco. You have normalized data for all of those and you can configure all of those, you can image update all of those. It's very, very powerful. So just from an ISV standpoint, an individual developer standpoint, now you're kind of unlocking, making this almost democratic. You've done the heavy lifting. Yep, absolutely. Absolutely what Cloud is all about. But that's, talk about the creativities for, because you mentioned that entrepreneurial, a lot of the energy goes into, you know, trying to find the fatal flaw. Is the product going to be product market fit? You do all that heavy lifting and bootstrap it. Right now it's simply, okay, I can sling some APIs together, get a prototype, then the creativity starts. Talk about the creativity impact. How do you see that impacting some of these new use cases? These hard problems. This is going to come from, Absolutely. Not some guy coming out of business school saying, hey, I'm going to go hire some engineers and solve that big, hard problem. It's going to come organically. This is a huge deal. What's your problem? This is a huge deal because we're making it simpler. It can come from any quarters. It doesn't have to be an established company. It can be an individual person that's kind of solving a use case. And then we, as Cisco, not only do we have, you know, of course the majority share in the market, but also we have the platforms like DevNet, and DevNet now has an ecosystem exchange. So if something that's cool can float up in the exchange, can be voted on, can become something that becomes an absolutely, an easy path to monetization for somebody, that basically is saying, okay, how do I marry business and how do I take network and bring them together? This is awesome. It's also external to Cisco, but talk about the global impact. Just outside of North America, massive growth, you're seeing things going on in Europe, but really in the Asia and China, huge growth markets going on. New onboard, and you go to China, talk about mobility, mobility nailed down. India is absolutely on fire, growing like crazy. The talent, this is a melting pot of tech talent. How do you make all that work from a Cisco standpoint? Because what you want to do is, you know, bring the goods to everybody. That's open source. Absolutely. So think about, I mean the logical place that we will go to with, you know, given that the way the platform is already built, which is, it is cloud native. We've not in the cloud yet, but at some point the platform will go to cloud. And we are looking at harnessing the creative talent worldwide, whether it be in Asia, or whether it be in Europe, or whether it be in the Americas, really doing that new value creation and taking that to the masses. And Cisco has the right to play in this market. We are absolutely in support of, you know, folks that want to do that. That's why, you know, DevNet has all of the learning labs and the sandboxes and everything else that's there in support. These are free to use. We want people to come and learn and co-create on the Internet platform. And making it open and collaborative, the community aspect. Absolutely. All right, final question while you guys are here. Obviously you're at the Cisco perspective, but put your industry landscape hat on. People who couldn't make Cisco live this year here in Orlando that might be watching this video either live or on demand when it goes up to YouTube. What's the big story? I mean, obviously either you guys, what you guys are doing across the whole show, what's the most important stories that are developing here this week that people should pay attention to deeply? Yep. So in terms of looking at the openness of the platform, Cisco is an open platform. API is really the new CLI because that's the way that you'll talk to the network. And think about what Chuck said at the opening keynote. You know, this starts from the user, the things that you want to do to the applications wherever they live, whether it be in a cloud or a multi-cloud environment, Cisco's bringing all of that together. Prakash, what's your thoughts? So, I mean, adding on to Ronnie's point, the openness and something that new that we are going, not just from campus perspective, but campus branch data center and making it open across everything, which is what Dave covered today in his keynote. I think that's something that Cisco is not just looking at one infrastructure, but across all of his portfolio and making it unique. It is very, very something that people should take away from this one. That's awesome, great. So, well, thanks guys, thanks for sharing. Thanks for co-sharing, co-developing content with us. I got to say, just from the hallway conversations, people are impressed that you guys are taking a very practical approach, not trying to boil over the ocean here with all these capabilities and announcements, focusing on the network value, where it fits in and being cloud native from day one with microservices is a good start. So, congratulations. Thank you. Thanks for sharing. Live coverage here in the Cuber, day two at Cisco Live. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. More live coverage, stay with us here at day two as we start winding down day two here at Cisco Live in Orlando, Florida. Be right back.