 Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2018. Brought to you by Cisco. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Cisco's DevNet Create here in Mountain View in the heart of Silicon Valley. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Lauren Cooney, Vanessa Susie Wees, Vice President and CTO of Cisco DevNet. This is her event. DevNet is a Cisco's developer team conference community DevNet Create is a cloud native, much more DevOps oriented. Our second year covering, it's only a year and a half old, the creator with her team, Susie, great to have you back. Great, it's great to be back. What a success, again, but you guys are learning, so we heard from the keynote that you made some changes, heard some feedback, you added more cooler elements, but this is about technology enablement, tools, education, and then fun and having people exchange information. So how's it going, what's the update? Going great. So we're really excited to have our second DevNet Create. And what happened was last year, what we've always tried to do with DevNet overall is to make sure that we had hands-on material because people want to code, people want to learn about the newest technologies. We also made sure that the content at the first DevNet Create was from Cisco, but also from the leading players in the community. And so we got feedback from last year on how to improve it for this year and basically they just wanted more hands-on. And so we've actually expanded from having three parallel workshops to eight parallel workshops where just folks can get hands-on and code. We continued to have both Cisco content as well as community content from leaders in the field. When we got feedback last year, what happened was, we were collecting the feedback, the people who responded, we asked a few questions and we said, did you feel that this was useful for you? Did you feel that you were learning about modern tools and technologies that would help you in your career? Would you come back again? The strangest thing that happened is like 100% of people said that they were learning about topics that are modern and they need for their careers. And 100% of them said they would come back again. And I'm like, is it still 100%? Because one person says no, it's not 100%. And so yeah, everyone who responded, they wanted to come back, so we just gave them more of what they wanted. I mean, it feels great, it got a good vibe, but I think there's some really interesting things. We talked last time about how the cloud native world, connecting with the commercial viability of Cisco. Cisco's not a small company, they invented routing as we know it, they connect the internet and you had that kind of ops networking culture with this new programmable internet kind of coming together. So there's some notable news you guys had here while I was impressed by. One is these business exchange or business ecosystem. Talk about some of the things that you guys are doing now as a result of these two worlds coming together it's not just like speeds and feeds, tech goodness, just like business value, money making. So just to go a little bit more into that, what happens is you kind of have your world of infrastructure and you have developers who are writing cloud apps, it's so easy to deploy and really get a lot of value out there. But then you have the world of real companies, real data, real kind of existing infrastructure, enterprise data, smart cities that you want to bring online and everything there. And there's a new type of app that's come to play and there's a new type of app that of course needs to work in the cloud but also needs to couple in with the real world and physical things and enterprise data. And so that brings rise to a whole new set of applications and new ways to do business. So in terms of what we're doing with that is that as someone writes this kind of an app, it's not easy as like just download it onto my phone. It's actually how do I couple that with a location-based infrastructure? How do I couple that with enterprise and hybrid cloud data? And so what we have now is a business exchange, an ecosystem exchange where we can bring those applications up where if someone's using Cisco infrastructure we have partners around the world who install and manage solutions that they put for their customers and we want to show them. These are the applications that work together with those products. These are the solutions that you can deliver. So we want to take the applications that our developers are writing and make it available to our partners, to let them use our go-to-market that we have around the world. Well you have the technical developer ecosystem and you have the business ecosystem. Exactly. So that's an indicator that there's some movement and growth. Where is it coming from? Where are you seeing the highlights here? Yeah, so in terms of the movement and growth, yeah what happens is we're concentrated on technical enablement for the first few years of DevNet but clearly the reason to do the technical enablement is to do that business pull through. Where do we see the growth? So what happens is really everyone in the world wants to digitize, right? So people want to take their manufacturing lines, they want to digitize them. People who have cities want to offer newer experiences that are still kind of leveraging the old but then providing a top notch experience for that. So we have people that are in cities who want to use our infrastructure but also have innovative applications to give to their friends. We have, again, partners around the world who want to not only provide infrastructure but to provide interesting solutions and experiences. So it's really interesting to see the hunger and the desire now for people to use applications in all different ways and we're trying to really package it up for them. So you're actually stitching these applications together and then packaging them up for consumption for the solution. Is that what you're looking at? Yeah, because everybody needs a network. Everybody has something that's exists but they want to go above it. Like, again, that boundary between applications and infrastructure is kind of blurring, right? And what an application can do when it's really coupled in to an infrastructure with APIs is completely new. And they want to play, they want to innovate and they don't want to just do the same old thing and they want to kind of unleash the power or get the value from all of the application development that's going on. I think that's great. I mean, one of the things that I saw from the keynote was the numbers in terms of your exponential growth over the past four years and also the number of folks that continuously visit the site. I think that's awesome. Can you kind of give folks that are looking to build communities any tips or tricks? Yeah, and actually Lauren, you were with us early on. You saw when I was begging for Cisco to have a developer community and so we didn't have any members at that time but yeah, we've grown to 485,000 registered developers. We have 60,000 active monthly users. That's great. So they are really doing stuff. But yeah, in terms of what it takes to grow that community, I think really the key is that my incentive, my goals, my mission which I shared is that we want to make developers successful. We want to make our partners in that broader ecosystem and our customers successful. It's not actually my job to sell products. Obviously, any solution that's written around APIs for our products will sell products but my job is to make the ecosystem successful. And so I think the key is just constantly keeping their best interest at heart and having a model where obviously they'll pull through the right business for Cisco. You've got great self-awareness and I think that's important is to understand what they're trying to do but also you bring a lot to the table. I mean, Cisco has massive presence in enterprises and businesses, whether it's service providers, down to the small, medium enterprise to large enterprises. So as you kind of look at across Cisco you bring the goods to the parties, so to speak. How do you balance that and what's your approach? Obviously, you're taking more of the programmable NetOps, which I love, by the way. We talked about that in Barcelona at Cisco Live. You can bring a lot to the table but you don't want to fire hose the developers with all this Cisco stuff. So how are you blending that together? What's your approach? This is a great, great point. So what we have to do is we have to understand who our audience is and we need to bring the right material and speak the language for that audience. And to give you an example is that we've had you at DevNet Create, we've had you at the DevNetZones at Cisco Live. When we go to Cisco Live and we have our developer conferences, that is the group and the audience that knows Cisco. They're getting certified. They know how to deploy infrastructure. It's a tremendous community. We have millions of people around the world who basically run, deploy, manage these solutions. And the way that we got to them. Over years of experience, too. And, oh, decades of experience, yes. And certification, mastery, expertise. They're the network nerds. They are the network nerds. They're moving packets around, but now it's changing. And the way that we talk to them is different because what we present to them is how can you automate your infrastructure? How can you scale and use the newest tools? How can you get observability and insights from that infrastructure itself? And then here's the software tools that you need to use and here's the APIs you need to know about. Let us understand your problems and let's work on this together. Now, the types of platforms that we expose and the APIs will be for networking. It'll be for security. It'll be for compute. It'll be in many of these areas. Then we come over to DevNet Create. And what we had to do was create a separate venue to hit app developers, cloud native developers. They're not going to Cisco Live. They're actually going to developer conferences. They're in the Bay Area. They're all around the world. They don't think of Cisco or even of infrastructure and what they do. That's a different culture. It's a different culture. And we actually had to rejigger our vocabulary. We had to rejigger what we present to them. Because when they think of iOS, they don't think of a network operating system. Cisco's iOS network operating system. They think of a mobile operating system. So we've actually had to even retrain ourselves to show this is the value that we provide to application developers. Here's the platforms and the APIs that matter to you. Here's the right level of abstraction of what would be relevant to an app developer and really speak to them. And DevNet Create is a separate venue created for that reason. And timing's everything, as we know. You're going to, the wind's at your back because you've got Kubernetes, the container madness, the standardization of containers, which is not new. The Google guy was on earlier, talking about containers. You've got microservices. You've got Istio, which is where you're partnering with Google. So this is a new real emerging tech area. That's a nice glue layer between the cultures. How are you handling that? Do you agree? And what do you, what's your focus on? Yes, it's so amazing. So the whole world, the containers and microservices is shifting how applications are developed. We actually used it within our own system where we had to, you know, well, we wanted to use the newest technologies. We saw the benefits of working in container microservices-based architecture to not write monolithic apps, but to really be able to compose and reuse services. So we had to go through that change. But what we saw is that when you're dealing with enterprise data, Cisco, you know, confidential data, customer data, and then public cloud data and everything there, there's a lot of thinking about how to write a cloud app that is a hybrid cloud app, right? That uses on-prem and public cloud and the best of both worlds. And the world of containers is interesting because suddenly the performance of your application, it depends even more on the network. Getting security of how, you know, how your containers are built up, how they're connected when they're spinning up in different places, you need that consistency. So, you know, having the whole tool of how do you now deploy containers on-prem resources as well as cloud-based, you know, public cloud-based resources is tricky and you need to build in that security into the infrastructure itself and then provide the right abstraction for developers with tools like Istio. So we're partnered up with Google. It's been a fantastic collaboration where we start with the really Google's leadership in just cloud-native development and what they had to do to scale and then take together the problems and the opportunities of real enterprises, of real cities and things there. And, you know, as Alan said this morning, is it's complicated, it's not that easy. There's a whole new set of problems that we need to deal with and this partnership is amazing at bringing that together. Makes the network more important. Makes the network more important, yes. Awesome, so now talk about what you're doing for incentives. Obviously you got a great posture to the marketplace, love how you're doing it. You're bringing two worlds together, bringing a lot to the table, but now you got to keep people motivated and keep them incentives. Couple things you announced on stage. DevNet Solutions Plus, which is a much more, you know, curated set of approved Rockstar developers or apps that can get on the price list. Which is like, that's like a lottery ticket. It's like the golden ticket for a developer. There's real value there, right? So I mean, you can't invite everybody but you got to do some QA, but talk about some of these incentive programs you have. So what happens is, once again, a company like Cisco has an entire community and ecosystem of people, places of infrastructure around the world. And they're looking to differentiate. They're looking to have interesting offerings as well. And they're very relevant because an app developer today needs to figure out how can they make money? How can they take all of, everything they've invested in software and then bring it to a business value? And so what we're doing is actually coupling that app developer with the entire Cisco channel and the Cisco partners that are out there and then letting their applications come forward. So when you get something onto, the way that it works is that Cisco has its price list. Partners around the world can create solutions that they deliver with those products. But in addition to Cisco's products, what we can do is put on a software and ISV's products onto there. And we're adding it onto the Cisco price list. It's a whole new type of quote, app store, but it's another way to go to market to get into these places. You're seeing some early returns in terms of the types of ISVs that are coming into the tables or pattern to the match. Obviously more network centric. I mean, who are some of the kinds of developers? What's the makeup look like? Yeah, so it's really a combination. So what happens is there's the set of applications that are built on infrastructure. Surprisingly, so built on a collaboration or unified communication infrastructure. Things that are built on a UCS, like a compute infrastructure, things that need the network in a mission critical way. So like trading applications, right? You need that network to work. The performance of the application needs to be coupled. So then people tend to buy a kit of here's the software, here's the hardware that makes it all work. I'm buying infrastructure, I want to buy these together. And so it's really kind of putting that bundle of value together and then letting that sell. And I talked to our partners around the world. We have just an entire, it's an amazing ecosystem. And when they can actually connect to the world of software developers and this ecosystem in a way that it helps them differentiate their business. It helps bring the app developer money and a business opportunity. It's a whole new level of scale. It's incredible. You can put some video apps on there too. The Cube videos. Cube videos, there we go. Absolutely. Interesting times, awesome. Anything you want to add? Yeah, definitely. One of the things I was wondering about is that with this whole app ecosystem and the partners and things along those lines, what are the apps that you're seeing that you actually never expected to see? True. Well in some are ones that, you know, maybe we actually did expect, we hoped for them. Yes. But the fact that they're coming through is another case. So, there's a set of applications that are built, for example, around contact centers. So contact customers are customer care. It's the way that people are interacting, right? And there's a whole kind of communications infrastructure around that. It's how people are answering phones, offering services, knowing what to do. So how you build those solutions together. There's a set of healthcare applications. So when you're going into healthcare, your patient monitoring devices versus your guest Wi-Fi services are different. So the kinds of solutions that you can provide there are key. There's actually a great thing in terms of indoor location-based services. So we have Meraki and CMX where your Wi-Fi infrastructure not only provides wireless connectivity but gives you indoor location proximity. There's actually a company here called Mapwise, which has built kind of a way-finding application on top. When I was at Web Summit, then they had Cisco infrastructure for putting up the conference. Then they had their application to help people navigate throughout the conference. And they came in and actually spoke to Matthew who's here and he was like, yeah, I had to learn because I had to go in early. They had to set up the network and then I'm a software guy. I had to get my app to work on that network. I hadn't really thought about how to do that before. So you're starting to couple these apps into that. These new use cases. These are new use cases and so much value. Yeah, and it's good that you got the terminology. It's a language issue, right? So you got to get the languages nailed down. All right, final question for you. What's the bumper sticker here? What's the phrase? I heard you on stage, create, connect, secure. I mean, what's the current DevNet create tagline? So it is connect to create. Connect to create. And so in one part, it was all about connecting the world, providing that connection. And that's what we've done over the last 25 years. And over the next 25, even more things will be connected. But it's really about the solutions that we can build together as a team and as an ecosystem now that you have APIs that are exposed. You can build machine learning and artificial intelligence together with world leading connectivity, together with world leading cloud companies. And when you bring all those together, you can have entirely new types of experiences that we can do. So it's connect to create. And along with that actually comes the need for security and protection. And so that fabric needs to not only connect to create, but also connect and protect to create. And we think that by building that into the infrastructure as well, we can help app developers to secure their customers data, to secure their users themselves, access and all sorts of things. I love the concept of co-creation. Really great, great collaboration model. Absolutely. And I think you guys are doing a great job. Congratulations on driving this developer program and programs now from a handful of renegades now to a big organization or growing organization. We're still lean, but our impact is growing. You're not going to be a rocket scientist thing. They're going to be doubling down on this. Cisco cracking the code on the developer forum about learning the languages, knowing how to lean into the right cultures and bring them together and have the right technology, enablements, Susie Weed, the creator, a part of the team member of Cisco team for DevNet. Thanks for coming on and sharing. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. We'll be right back with more live coverage after this short break.