 Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live Europe 2019, CUBE coverage. Three days, we're in day two of three days of coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host with Stu Miniman, as well as Dave Vellante has been on, interviewing our next guest, Seraf Prasad, Principal Engineer in Technical Marketing at Cisco as part of the Cisco DNA Center platform. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. So you guys having a DNA takeover in the DevNet zone. That's right. All week. This has been a real revitalization within Cisco DevNet, cloud native. Cisco coming together. The DNA Center has been a part of this from day one. Yes. What is the DNA Center these days? What's happening? Okay, so let me take you a bit back in time, right? So back in October, 2017, is when we first launched the Cisco DNA Center. Since then, we have added a lot more application workflows within the DNA Center. And last year in May or June of last year, 2018, is when we launched the DNA Center platform. And this product got FCS sometimes during October of 2018. So we now have the DNA Center platform, which essentially is an open platform which lets our developers, our partners, our ISVs, build applications on top of the DNA Center which will let them talk to the network. And the way to do it is using our APIs, our SDKs. And then we have a lot of other modules which help them interact with the network via the DNA Center. Now, the benefit of this is not really with respect to APIs or SDKs. It's more about we give them a very easy way to talk to the network. Instead of talking to 10,000 network devices, they talk to one DNA Center. So that's the idea behind the DNA Center platform. Well, yeah. We're wanting to expand a little bit. When we've been talking about platforms in general for many years now, and it's one thing to say you're a platform, but the proof is, who's actually building on it? What can they do on it? So you've got the platform, FCS, first customer ship, it's available, it's launching. What can you tell us about real customers, what they're doing, give us a little bit of the spectrum as to what we see out there? That's right. Before we FCS our platform in October, we actually were on early field trials for almost three to four months. And in that time, we were actually working with our 15 top partners. And this is across the world. So they were actually using the platform to build some integrations from their side, which was beneficial for them. So these are partners like Dimension Data, Accenture, WWT, and I'm just naming a few of them. These are all listed on our DNA Center portal on DevNet, but then we were working with them and we were actually looking for feedback on whether this is useful. And we found that it was really, really useful for them. They built some good applications, good workflows, good integrations, and that helps them drive their own business with their customers. So what's the mission of the DNA Center? What is the purpose? Why do you guys exist? So the DNA Center is built to provide you intent-based networking. So instead of you having to go to each and every network device and provision things on the network devices, you now go to the DNA Center and say, here is my intent. And an example for an intent would be, I want to prioritize Cisco-Jabber traffic. It should be high priority. Now that means there is a lot of network devices where I need to provision quality of service. I need to make sure I have the right queuing structures in place. And guess what? We have so many devices, each one of them might have some different CLIs, different architectures. We now give them one single place where you provide an intent and not worry about the device level details. And I'm just giving you one example. There could be a lot more where, for example, I'm getting the telemetry back from a network. Each and every device is saying, I'm having some issues, but they might all do the same issue here. What DNA Center takes all of this issue provides you an insight into what really is happening in the network. So that's the idea of DNA Center. Suraj, I mean, come on. Who doesn't want to use this? Everyone who's gone out and provisioned a device knows what the hassle of this. I mean, think about the manual labor involved. Just going out and doing all this stuff. So it's an action center, basically. You take action, one spot, window into the network, policy, whatever it takes. So it's driven by, and now applications can come in as well. Is that, am I getting that right? That's right. So the way this works is, again, and this is what we do with platform is different partners, different customers might have some different workflows. So within the DNA Center, we have decided here is how the workflow should look like. So if I want to do an upgrade of a network device, here are the steps I might follow. But when you use the APIs, you can almost define your own workflows, right? So this allows you the flexibility of building your own workflows. That's one example. Other is, say for example, I need some feedback from a different system. Not the network, maybe some other IT system. I need to get some information from them and based on that, I need to configure something on the network. You cannot do that automatically. There has to be an application in between which talks to both of these systems, one of them being the Cisco DNA Center. Now this allows you to do that. If I have the APIs, if I have the event framework, I can do all of that. So that's the benefit of using these. What's the alternative if someone doesn't use the DNA Center? Because this is a no-brainer. You got, I get the device piece, that's just a nice window. Now the platform allows applications to integrate and be programmable with the network. Yes. Why wouldn't someone be using this? This is a no-brainer. Yeah, I mean if you don't use this, what you do is you go to each of your 1,000 network devices, talk to each one of them and take care of all of the device-level details and do it. Again, it's doable. People have been doing it for years now, but now we are making it a slightly more easier, right, to make it faster. Well, you know, it comes to, we've been talking for years, the need for scale. And if you don't have good automation, if you don't have tools to be able to help you there, you're not going to be able to reach the scale that you need for your business. Hey, explain why this is important from the... Yeah, so like, I mean, if you're, like for example, what you've seen is, and we have been talking about the digital networks for some time now, and what really is a digital network? That's a key point to understand here. What you're seeing is, there was a time 10 years back when you had to roll out a new service, network admins, network architects had six months to provision that. Nowadays they don't have that. Six hours. Yeah, they probably have six hours. That's right. Six minutes. So in order for you to do all of that so fast, you really cannot go into each of the device and talk about it, you have to abstract some of that and that's what the DNS Center provides. And using our APIs, we are now adding a new level on top of it which really makes it much more easier for you to scale. Again, not just scale, also integrate with other ITSM systems, other IPAM system, other reporting systems. So this is all happening automatically instead of you having to manually touch each of these systems. Talk about the plug-and-play process. Okay. How does that fit in with DNA Center? Compatible, not compatible? So plug-and-play is an application or a workflow within DNA Center, right? So when I look at plug-and-play, now every network device in Cisco has a plug-and-play agent running. Now I'm going to get into a bit of a technical detail here but they have a plug-and-play agent running. And so when this device comes up, say for a day zero onboarding, you open up the box, you take out the device, power it up, the agent fires up. And what it looks for, it looks for the plug-and-play server. The Cisco DNA Center is the plug-and-play server. So now I'm allowing you to onboard new devices, right? I mean you could roll out a new site with 25 network devices, 100 network devices. So all the configuration gets pushed down from the DNA Center. So you build your own profile in DNA Center and you attach the templates or the configurations. You say here is a serial number and when this device comes in, I push in all the configuration. I provision a new software image on it. So your device or your site is up and running. Great for campus, great for remote sites. Exactly. So you really don't have to send a network admin on every remote site to do that. Will it take policy? So if I set policy up in the DNA Center, will it automatically take that down through? Yes, yes, yeah. So I mean, once the device is onboarded, it gets added to the Cisco DNA Center. And once I do that, now I can throw in policies, any kind of... I didn't mean to get in the weeds. Sorry, so go ahead. Yeah, so what's great about a platform, you've talked about some of the partners. My understanding, not just some of the integrator partners like WWT that you mentioned, but even some of the technology partners like IBM have services that plug in this environment. We've seen in platforms where you can, one of the other dimensions is the customers and what are they asking for and how are their feedback there? So is there anything in the DNA Center platform that if one customer is asking for something that more customers are going to get value of that? I think back to the day of Salesforce. When Salesforce gets something, we add a new feature and that's something that can roll out. We can learn from all the customers. You get that flywheel of development in a platform. So what we're doing here is we're actually working very closely with Cisco DevNet on that. So they have a partner ecosystem exchange. So what's happening is a lot of this, channel partners, technology partners, ISVs, when they build something, they go into the ecosystem exchange and they can post it there. So it's not just, which is useful for them. There are other partners, other customers, they can use it. They have a GitHub repository of all the core, sample core. Again, not everybody shares it to the extent what we would like, right? Because there's a lot of intellectual property which they have built and they might want to monetize on it. But that is the whole idea behind the ecosystem exchange where I am allowing partners to share what they have built and this could be used by others. So I'll talk about the success. What's the uptake? It must be well received. Obviously, we see a lot of action here in the DevNet zone. Give us some color commentary on what the momentum has been. Who's using it? How? So from our side, and I'm from the business unit which is actually building this product. The way we judge whether this product is getting traction is, what is the amount of future requests I'm getting? So we are getting a ton of future requests with respect to new APIs that we want to expose, with respect to new documentation that we have to build. I mean, what we don't want is we release a product and we got no feedback. So what's the feature request? Backlog big or what's going on? Oh yeah, so for example, when we launched we had a limited set of APIs available. Now since then with every release, now we have a release almost every month where we are adding newer APIs and new functionality release, we are actually adding more and more APIs. And again, there's much more to add, but that's the process and we will- Just keep jamming and taking it in, backlog it, get it out there, iterating quickly. Yeah, exactly. And again, I think the one point to add here is we are not really just exposing this API. We are exposing an intent API. So it's got slightly different. So instead of say for example, I want to provision a wireless network. That's probably a 10 step process even within the DNS center. What we want to give you is a single API which will do all of that, right? And all of the heavy lifting will be done by the Cisco DNS center platform. So we will internally call the 10 separate APIs. So for a developer who is building this, he or she may not be a network expert. They might not be an expert into how the network works. So all they have to do is call one single API and all of the details or all of the heavy lifting will be done by the platform. So they don't really have to worry about some of this. So this is where the automation will get done on behalf of the customer. Exactly. They'll come in, deploy DNA center, understand what's going on, and that's where they do all their work. Figure out what to do, get it done there. Yeah. What's the biggest use case so far? So a lot of use cases, right? Like we have a partner who is actually building a mobile app, right? So we have a DNS center which is sitting on-prem on in their own data center. They can go and look at the, you know, go to the browser, open up the Cisco DNS center console and look at the various workflows or see what's happening in the network. They might see there's a router which is just crashed, right? Or an application which is having some application performance issue. But what you want to see is also send this event send remotely and now their network admins could be walking in a grocery store for example and the mobile that alerts shows up. Guess what? That application is having an issue. So let's do the debugging. So we will provide you all of that details within our APIs which can then show up in the application. So DNA center platform has a takeover going on in the DevNet zone. We see classrooms, we send labs. Give us a little bit of the flavor of, you know, the solutions, you know, for the next hour as well as at the show in general. So in general here at the Cisco DevNet zone we have a Cisco DNA center takeover going on right now. We have workshops. We have sandbox labs. We have learning labs. You can go to any one of them and try it out. Again, that is not only for this hour. That is there for throughout the show. But for this hour, we have a tech talk going on from one of our distinguished sales engineers, Adam Radford. He's talking all about DNA center platform in deep dive. So showing live examples. We have some demo systems up and running here where you can actually see how we are able to generate events, how we are able to send events to external systems. So all of that is going on. And plus we have all of our experts. So a lot of our experts from the engineering team are here on the show right now in the show floor. So if there are any questions around DNA center platform there will be more. The range for us is here. Yes. In my understanding, I mean, when I've talked to people the DevNet group has labs running all the time. And that's what's great. I've talked to customers that say, you know, I need to get to be able to play with this and hear something that's online. It's in the cloud. You know, I just kind of do with it whenever. Yeah, and just to add to that like, so of course for our customers, our partners or developers who want to try this out, they are more than welcome to come and join us on the Cisco DevNet zone here. But even if you're not a Cisco live, these sandbox labs are live online. And we have, I think, around five or six of them and we are adding more to it. And you can go anytime, try out your own, our APIs on the sandbox. You don't really need to have your own environment. Now, of course, when you go production with it, you will, but just for trying out or building some applications, you can do it on the sandbox. So, Ralph, thanks so much taking the time, sharing some technical insight, went a little bit deep on the program play, but appreciate your time coming on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on, congratulations. DNA Center, the Cisco DNA Center platform, the official name, really an oasis, a place to go in and configure the networks. No brainer, as far as I'm concerned. Check it out. theCUBE's bringing you the DNA of the show here, which is all the action coverage. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Stay with us more here live in Barcelona. And we'll be back after this short break.