 from San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live in San Francisco for theCUBE's exclusive coverage, two-day coverage of Cisco's inaugural event, DevNet Create, an extension of the core DevNet community founded three years ago by our next guest. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, our next guest. Rick Taiwaniak, senior director of Cisco DevNet, also the co-founder with Suzy Wee, who's on yesterday. Congratulations on creating DevNet three years ago. Thanks John. Very successful. I said it's blowing up, I'm in a good way, going and doing great, robust community, and also creator of DevNet Create. Congratulations. Thanks. Thanks John, appreciate it. So why DevNet Create? I mean, just give us the quick, why DevNet Create versus DevNet? What's the difference? How should people look up those two events? So yeah, so DevNet Create is our event to reach out to a new community of developers. Typically, an audience that may not have thought about Cisco in the past, may have thought of us as a hardware company doing routers and switching, and we want to try to reach out to that new community to help them understand that Cisco has got a great platform for them to develop on, and there's great opportunity to work with Cisco. And so we want to get to that new audience, and that's what the inaugural vision of DevNet Create is all about. Before we came on camera, Peter asked you a question, you were getting rolling, but we decided to wait. Go ahead, ask the question. Why Cisco? Why Cisco? You know, and we were talking about, so there's a subset of developers, let's call them ISV, independent software vendors, and when you think about the plethora of platforms out there, there's a lot of people that they can develop on. And so you got to think about why Cisco. So when I talk to developers, there's a couple of things. First of all, you start with the platforms, right? So is the technology cool, and are the APIs cool, and can you do something innovative with them, right? So you have, you know, Meraki location APIs, you have Spark collaboration APIs, you have the networking APIs, right? And so the first thing we do is we start off with the technology. And you know, to be fair, a lot of the developers, when you start talking about the technology that Cisco brings to market, they weren't even aware. They just thought it was routing and switches, hardware, they weren't even aware that the network had APIs that they can use, right? Especially in the area of IoT. So educating the developers on what the technology is, is extremely important, but it doesn't stop there. Because, okay, it's cool technology, but if I'm an ISV, eventually I need to make money. So what can Cisco offer me that's unique and different? And there's a couple of things that we do with Insight DevNet, which takes you sort of the partnership area. So if you're out there developing a software product, and you integrate with our platforms, and you develop some APIs, the second thing that we also bring to our developers, who have companies, you see, is introduction to the field and the channel, okay? So how do you, you know, we have one of these, yeah monetize this, we have one of this, so we help them monetize their app. Now obviously it has to be a good app, it's got to be tested and certified. And it has to have some customer traction, but once you get your customer traction, my group is also responsible for introducing them to the field and our channel organization to help them get out to market. And then we also have 13 innovation centers throughout the world where you can do co-creation and get, even if you're early stage, get introduced to customers, Cisco's got a lot of customers in the enterprise, right? We help, depending on where you are in the world, if you're in Latin America, you can go to Brazil, if you're in Europe, you can go to France, and in England, you can get involved in these innovation centers and get out to the customer base and get opportunities. If you go from there, say you get a lot of traction, many times we will put applications on the general price list, so our field and channel can actually sell those applications and get compensated. So now you're opening up, say you're a small startup, right? And you want to take advantage of, you have to have a good application, right? It has to have the customers want it, but then you can start to leverage some of the field and the channel out there to get your application out to get bigger. Great, great explanation. Thanks for taking the time to lay that out there. My question for you is, and we talked about this on our opening today and our wrap-up yesterday, is Cisco's a huge opportunity. I mean, you have network guys who are really great. They know the operation's cold, and it's known that not everyone has the operation skills. And DevOps has an ops piece, so this is a great direction for you, so we're both very complimentary of that. Question is, what value does Cisco bring to the table because certainly, yeah. You've got monetization, that's going to be great for the startups. What value providing up the stack? Because you have the networks, that's the crown jewel of the operations. Making it programmable, how is that valuable to the developer? Well, so applications that are developed inside the enterprise have to run on the network, right? So everything you have or all the devices that you have in an area of IoT all have to run on the network. So you start with that core sort of functionality that we provide, and then you start adding the APIs, right? Because all the intelligence that was in the stuff that runs the network is now as exposed in an API layer. So now if you're a software developer inside an enterprise, taking advantage of those APIs to have your application run more efficiently is the key sort of sauce that DevNet, Cisco provides, right, through DevNet. And if you go back to the original vision of what we had, so why did you start this thing and what was the vision? So this idea of taking two groups that may have never talked to each other in the past, the networking professionals who really understood the network, software professionals inside an enterprise who really understand how to build software. How do you bring them together and sort of create a community where those two are starting to understand what each other does, understand the skill levels that they have worked together, break down the silos, right? Get out of their tribes, come together in a DevOps environment. How do you run software more efficiently? The innovation's there. You got open source, you got dominated in the app developer market big time. So you bring network guys who know ops to the application guys who don't want to know ops. They don't. And they want to make a share. But increasingly, we talked about this yesterday the network, the evolution of a lot of IT componentry, especially if you look at for example hardware, those server storage, there is a regular cadence of how it's improved. The network has always been a step function. You know, we go from IP forward, IP five, whatever else it might be. There's always a step function and developers have always looked at the network since it's too big and we don't know when the next big change is going to happen as a stable unchanging thing and it never impacted their vision of architecture or how they did things. And we're not too far off from another big step function. It's just goes going to be right in the middle of and having those two groups talk about how to do things today, but also how to do things in a planful way to anticipate some of the big changes that are going to happen in network technology is going to be really crucial for developers to build stuff that's got more than a three month life to it. Right. Do you agree with that? Absolutely. All that came when we took that intelligence and moved it into a software layer because you have the opportunity to make it unstable, not what you want to do. So you have to plan it out, you have to figure it out, but you have to, once it's in software, you have to be able to leverage it and that's what it's all about. You know, the other component of DevNet is an educational component. So what we want to do is teach software developers the value of the network and a little bit about networking and more importantly, what those APIs are. But we're not trying to turn the software people into networking guys. And then for the networking guys, we're teaching basic coding skills, right? So we're not necessarily going to make them a coder unless they want to do that. They could. There's no change to DevNet. But no, it gives an appreciation for what the other group does. And so we have a big educational component. And how each impacts the other. How each impacts the other because they can start talking to each other and working together. And when you start looking in a DevOps environment, it is crossing the hallway to go talk to this other guy in another department. And if we can educate these guys on how to work with each other, I think it's kind of that high level. The ops sharing is happening. We're seeing people sharing the operational roles and you need the people who know the network to do that. Okay, the question for you is how are you going to get the folks who are watching or in the DevOps world, cloud native world on board? Is there a strategy? Or is it going to be a loose affiliation? Is it going to be a formal program? Obviously developer.sysco.com is the site. But this is a great tagline. Infrastructure meets applications and interesting applications meets infrastructure is a really good vision. How do I get involved if I'm not a part of that? Well, obviously come to developer.sysco.com and get involved. Not everybody can hear- Do I raise my hand and say I'm an app developer or is there like a- Yeah. Profiling kind of thing? Yeah, yeah, no there is. Yeah, you come in and your app. If you come into our learning area, right? There's a learning track. I'm an app developer. I want to learn about networking there. If I'm a networking guy, I want to learn about app development. We have learning tracks that we'll take you through either, yeah. So it's declarative because I can say it and get it. We have events. DevNet create is big, but we actually have events all throughout the year and around the world. So we call them DevNet Express events. We're at Cisco Live. We're also going to be at various DevOps conferences. So sometimes we just have to go to where the developer is. So you'll see us there with our developer, Evangelis. So yeah, no, there's definitely a plan to get the word out there and you're going to see a lot more of Cisco. You know, we've only been three years old, right? If you think about what we've accomplished in three years, pretty significant. But we still have a long way to go. What's the big learnings that you could share with the folks? It could be anecdotal, personal, business from the process of three years. I mean, DevNet, again, you guys were entrepreneurial. You weren't sure, the reaction was overwhelming and congratulations for that. Now you got DevNet create. As I said, middle of the fairway for you guys. Did a good job here. Yep. What'd you learn? What's the learnings? It's risk-taking, you know. You got to take risks. You got to fail and you got a mistake and you got to learn from them. So, you know, a lot of us that are in DevNet, including myself, came from the startup world. Okay. And so, you know, you just know about that. You know, fail fast, fail often. Yeah. Don't be able to take a risk. Don't be able to take a risk. When we had our first, when we started DevNet, we had our first event at Cisco Live. We invested a lot of money to put a developer conference together in five months as a brand new organization. And literally, I remember walking into that event that the Moscone thinking, this could be empty. It could fall on the floor and I'm out of a job. Luckily, when I came up that escalator at 10 o'clock, the place was packed and we knew we had something. And in a classic startup way, you double down. We double down. Yeah, now, and here we are yet. Now we're getting out of Cisco Live doing DevNet create, which is kind of separate from Cisco by design. How do you feel about this event when you walked in here? Did you feel like it's working? I mean, what's the vibe? What's your take on that? Yeah, and I think that the cool thing is we are getting people that would not necessarily come to Cisco Live. Some of them do. And we still have some of our loyal audience here. But yeah, we're talking about new topics. And so, yeah, we see this definitely as the future. We're going to do more of these events and we're going to do them in Europe in places like that, so. We certainly want you to come into our studio and talk more about it. It's something that we're passionate about. As you know, we're glad to support you guys here. It's a great direction for Cisco. And we love DevOps. We love cloud data. We love big data. You guys are on the right track. Congratulations. Thank you very much. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Congratulations. The inaugural event for Cisco DevNet create exclusive coverage from theCUBE. And of course, DevNet, check it out. Go to developer.cisco.com. We'll be right back with more exclusive coverage after this short break. Hi, I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior Director of Strategy.