 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back, everyone. We're here live in the Cisco DevNet Zone at Cisco Live 2018, it's theCUBE's exclusive coverage. I'm Cisco Live, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. I'm here with Susie Wee, who's the CTO and vice president at Cisco. This is her baby DevNet, the fastest growing developer program in Cisco history, only four years old. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again. Good to see you, I too. I made that stat, I was only four years old. So DevNet, obviously just for color commentary, really successful developer program, only in its fourth year or so for Cisco. But it's really changing the face of Cisco. It's showing that a new collaboration, a new co-development, a new developer framework is being built on top of networks, and it's on a collision course with cloud native. Okay, this is a great path for network engineers. It really changed the show of lives, so congratulations. Thank you, thank you. Yeah, and why do you say collision course? There's like a whole new paradigm, right? And it's pretty amazing, it's pretty amazing. Well, some of the things that we've been seeing here, obviously CCIEs are 25 years of excellence and stats was out here. The keynote from the CEO, Chuck Robbins, talks about an old way and new way. Developers are clearly in the driver's seat here, and network engineers, Cisco partners, customers, technical folks, and engineers, they're at the keys to the kingdom, and you introduced a concept called network DevOps. Yes. Okay, a few years ago when we were the first out of theCUBE, where is that now? Where is network DevOps now? What's the vibe internally? Is there full acceptance to it? Is there embracing it? It's amazing, I mean, and you know, it's like when we were pushing it, we're just saying, hey, the network is changing. The network is going to be programmable. The network is going to have APIs. And you go back four years, and then you're just like, what was the buzz? The buzz was SDN. You know, the buzz was SDN, SDN was open flow. It was separation of control plane from data plane, but it was still kind of research. And what we knew is like, it wouldn't become real until the people who are building and operating the world's networks were ready to adopt it. And so at first, of course, it was like there were the people who were like, okay, this network thing, this programmability is going to come to the network, but what can we do there? And since then, like people have jumped in. They've like really gotten in and like here at this Cisco Live, what we're seeing is that people are ready to code. And so the concept of I'm a networker, now their software built into my entire network programming portfolio. How do I build the skills? I'm a developer. And the networkers are getting comfortable with understanding that they need to code, they need to understand these skills. But one thing that we did is we actually separated out like the definition of developer. You know? You guys done a good job of really defining a path for the network engineer who can extend their skillset and solve network problems, be creative, and also do great business outcome-oriented things. So I want you to take a minute to explain the DevNet story because you guys just didn't throw a PowerPoint at this. You dug in, you built it up and you threw a lot of resources for Cisco, I mean small for Cisco scale, but you guys dug in, you did the homework and you're doing new things. So take us through the DevNet story and what's happening this year in the momentum. Take us through that little journey. Yeah, so the story was like back in actually 2013, Cisco was saying, hey, we're going to get into software. We're doing software. We have a software strategy. And all of that is fantastic. And there, but the thing that was missing was like, hey, we need an ecosystem. Like the reason you do software is to have an ecosystem. And in order to have an ecosystem, you want people to build upon your stuff. You need to expose your APIs. It doesn't happen by itself. You need to have a developer program so that you can actually really let people use all of that and partake in the ecosystem. So we kind of, I evangelized, evangelized, evangelized, gave a couple hundred pitches, got the okay to start DevNet. And that was in 2014. And then in 2014, then we said, okay, so now we got the okay to start a developer program for Cisco. But it's still not a sure shot that it would work. And then we said, our dream is to have a developer conference at Cisco Live. And so we wanted to have that developer conference at Cisco Live. And then three months later, we had it. And we're like, okay, 24 hour hackathon, deep dive API sessions, but would the people come, would they be ready? And then they came. Like they came, it was packed. It was just like wall to wall of people who are excited to learn about software. So now you go and then you fast forward, four years, and now we just hit 500,000 developers. 500,000 people have registered for DevNet. And you can be like, well, what does that mean? Like it's, we have half a million developers. Is that a real number? Well, my team kept scrubbing the database. Like so like we had hit 400,000 and then our numbers got lower. And I was like, come on guys, stop it. And they're like, no, no, no, we have to scrub it. You know, we got to get out the dupes, duplicates. And then finally we got it up and we've grown it. It basically is just 500,000 registered developers. And what that means is like now we have a community. We have a community of people who are getting up on network APIs. We have a community of people who can develop. And once you do that, you hit this completely different inflection point where at first our mission was just to help networkers be developers, to help the app developers understand that the network has APIs and to do stuff there. That's still our goal to enable developers. But now we have a community. What we can do is really catalyze that community and the business and impact. Yes, Susie, first of all, congratulations. It's been so much fun to be here in the DevNet zone. It'd been a few years since I'd been to Cisco Live. And you know, people in these sessions every time and you go, people are coding, they're whiteboarding, they're, you know, building, they're playing with Legos. They're doing all sorts of stuff. Over the last five years, you know, we all knew that, you know, developers are the new king makers. It's been talked about a lot. But we've seen many infrastructure companies try. They create little developer conferences. They bring in speakers. They'll get some momentum. And then after a year or two, it kind of fizzles out. Yes. Give us a little bit behind the scenes as to, you know, is it because, you know, networking people are worried about their jobs and they're getting on board? Is it, you know, I know part of it's, you know, your team and the ecosystem you've built here. But give us some of the reasons why this has succeeded when so many others have kind of come and gone. Yeah. Well, I mean, we're very fortunate, you know, that we've kind of executed in a way that it has continued to be here. We know that's really hard to do. It takes executive support. It takes the troops. It takes fighting antibodies and kind of all of that kind of stuff. But I think like the key has been that we've been working with the community. When we had that first DevNet zone, that first developer conference at Cisco Live four years ago, people came. And that told Cisco something, right? And then as we've continued to build it out, we've actually been not doing it as a silo within Cisco. We've been doing it with our sales organization, with our partner organization. We've been doing it with our ecosystem and our partners out there. And we've just continuously been doing it based on what their needs are. And Susie, I love that because there's some of the events I saw. They were like, well, the developers this special unicorn and we're going to have this special area. It's velvet rope. We're going to treat them really well. But this is the first thing you see when you come in. You're very approachable. The line I've heard from your team is we are going to meet them where they are. There are no, you know, gosh, you know, I haven't touched programming in 20 years. No, no, no, you're fine. You're good, come on in. I'm not sure if I really can, I don't want to program. Well, do you not program? You're coding. So, I think that's part of the success is these people, you know, this is their careers and you're giving them that path forward. It is. And like when we look at like developer programs, like you think it would be easy to start a developer program, but there's no formula for it, you know? And when we did it for Cisco, like as we've grown this, it depends on the products that we have. It depends on the community that we have, the types of solutions, what our customers want. And basically what happens is we did have a core set of networkers who are scared. And we, instead of making DevNet like the elite place for the elite developers, we said it is the place to bring in the community. We're going to be welcoming. We're bringing them in on the journey because they're the ones who need to be there. And so we've really tried this more, you know, open approach. And if you look at Cisco's community of networkers, they're amazing. Like they are developing and installing and operating networks around the world in every country. They've been dedicated, but they are scared of that transition to software and programmability. And they've been dedicated to us. We're dedicated to them getting to that next level. Did a good job of bringing a tribe kind of mentality and co-development, co-creation. People are learning, so you have first-time learners kicking the tires on coding and growing. And experts, so Cisco champions coming in, powerhouse developers. Not Cisco employees, they're Cisco champions. And so the nice balance, so that's a good sign of success. And you're right, that's key because it's not just develop, just beginners. I mean, first of all, there is a very large stage of new people who are just coming in and then wanting to get started. And that's awesome. And in addition, very advanced folks who are just the most advanced developer you'd find who also has networking expertise. And then, of course, the app developers. We're talking to app developers and cloud developers and DevOps pros, and they're coming in as well. Yeah, and Susie, you bring up a great point because one of the challenges when you have the cool new innovation stuff is the business is like, well, how does that connect back? So help connect the dots. We heard Chuck Robbins on stage. Not only was it just DevNet and 500,000, but the new products that are coming out just tie right into it. It's crazy, like, yeah, it's awesome because what happens is programmability. Cisco is building programmability into our entire portfolio. It's not that we have one product that has APIs. I mean, that's where we were a few years ago, but now we look our enterprise networking products for the data center, for service provider, for wireless. All of those products are programmable. Our security products are programmable. IoT collaboration, our entire portfolio is now programmable, so it gives you this whole portfolio of programmability to play with, and that cross-domain, who covers that many domains? And that's really powerful. When we take a look at the programmability, it was for the network devices themselves. Those have ASICs that are programmable, so if there's a new protocol that comes up to handle IoT things, we can actually reprogram the ASICs to get that going at line rates. You can do on-board application hosting on those network devices. We have controller levels, you can hit the network, and then now you have analytics and insights that you can do to pull out information from the network and then be able to operate at that level as well. So strategic advantage, architecturally, for Cisco, with certainly in the network side and scaling up into the stack with Kubernetes and Isti, we saw Google on stage giving an indicator of where it's going. I want to ask you about the culture question for DevNet. Obviously, people are fascinated with the success of DevNet. We've been great to follow the success through your journey and being part of it, but for the folks that are now seeing the success and want to join, what can they expect if I join the DevNet mission? What's the expectation? What's going to be the vibe? What would you share to someone watching that's going to jump in and join the journey? What can they expect? Well, I think that, first of all, it's going to be very welcoming. Like, they're going to feel welcome and I'm just proud of my team because people come in and they actually say, wow, sometimes you go to developer conferences and it's a little bit intimidating. And yeah, you might be intimidated, but here you're going to feel welcome because we really want things to happen. And then there's going to be this kind of intrigue, like in terms of what you can build because what we're building is different. It's not a well-known area. Like, everyone knows how to build apps for a mobile device. People don't know how to build applications for programmable infrastructure. Like the fact that, hey, your wireless access points now give you location and proximity information, I can write an indoor location app. So it's simple, but it's awesome. Connect a camera to it. It's amazing, right? And then what happens is, like, as you're doing that, you have like, yeah, connect a camera. You're like, put a PlayStation into a hospital. You know, the children's hospital of LA came and spoke and they were talking about, like, the business problem. They had a patient who was very sick, a young boy, and his wish was to have PlayStation so he could play it. And then they had to go to their networkers because you don't put playstations in hospitals. And you had to make that happen. And intent-based networking lets you make that wish and then activate that in the network. That's now a programmable infrastructure. So the types of problems that you can solve are different, it's amazing. You're creating a new first-generation green field of networked apps. Yes. Like what iPhone did for mobile apps, you guys are doing for networks. That's right, that's right. That's awesome, it's super cool. Programmable infrastructure, all DevOps, kind of geeky stuff. For the next steps, as you guys are now at the beginning of the next inflection point, what are you guys focused on? What's happening with the team? What's happening with some of the initiatives you're doing? Demos get better and better. The training classes are still going on. What's your focus? So what some of the things that are happening now, so we've hit this milestone of half a million developers, but what does that mean? What that means is that we have half a million people who can use network APIs. What that means also is that they're contributing code. So it's no longer just, here, I'm going to help you use your API, but now it's also like they're contributors back. And what we're doing is we're actually embracing that and making that part of the innovation model for networking. So you're not just taking Cisco's platforms and the innovation there, which is, of course, growing tremendously, but now you can also add in innovation by the community. And I know it's a straightforward concept for software. It's not a straightforward concept for networking and infrastructure. Open source ethos. Exactly. To code sharing, code contributing. Exactly. And what we're something that we've released is code exchange, DevNet code exchange. And what it is is just a list of curated software, software that's out on GitHub, that works for our platforms. But the thing that developers are always like, okay, there's a lot of software out there, which one should I use? And then basically giving them the curated list of here's the stuff that you can use. So Susie, it's been fun to watch the transformation of Cisco overall. As we look at, before we used to measure, in boxes and ports, what's the measurement internally? When you talk about saying, okay, how are we doing on our journey to become a software company? Give us a little insight as to internally how Cisco measures that. The way that we measure that now is we're talking to our customers and our partners and their adoption of APIs, of programmability, their ability to execute on that and to be successful in this business. And so it's really an external looking view. So it's all just like, okay, how much do they get it? How much can they use it? How much are they building the skills? So it's really looking at the success of the community and being able to build the skills and use these products and build solutions with them. Susie, congratulations on a continuing growing, hitting a major milestone, 500,000 developers, half a million developers. That's a real community. It's just the beginning now, it's a start line. It's a start line, it is. What's the finish line? It's another start line. It is a start line, it's absolutely the start line. And you guys had a great event last night at the Mango Party, Mango Cafe. Talk about that, you had a celebration. Turns out a lot of people showed up, it was supposed to be a little private party. It was a little private party, yeah. So we just wanted to thank the team and thank our community because quite honestly, to get to this half a million, it wasn't just the people who worked for me who got it there. It's the fact that there's, of course, our team who's very dedicated to that, but then it's our partners. It's even you guys, right? It's our partners who have like, I understand this mission, I'm going to jump in, I'm going to help it happen. It's our systems engineers, it's our partners, it's our innovation folks. It's people from the community who understand the mission and have joined in to push it forward. So we had this party last night at, you know, Mango Cafe. You guys are there. The people are calling it kind of the best one. It's really just appreciation for our community at what they've done to get it there. Because it's not us, it's our system. This is the open ethos, this is the open ethos. Cisco becoming open. What's it like to be in the inside and seeing Cisco open up like this? It's, I mean, it's amazing. And what's amazing is like when I started DevNet, you think like, okay, I'm going to run a developer program. The thing that surprises me is just how hurtful it is to so many people. Like people, they find a path. They see a new opportunity. They figure out a new way they want to advance their businesses and their careers. And it's like all heart. And that's how it grew. Like with the resources, it's just because people who had felt this heart and this connection and this mission and drive, they're taking it to the next level. So it's amazing. Like open-source software, people love to be part of a great project. It is. And DevNet certainly is. And DevNet Create, don't forget, DevNet Create is your other event that brings the cloud native world with the networking world together. Great project. And you were with us at DevNet Create and that's where it's this mixing of communities of like the app developers with the networkers who are getting out there. And what's funny is, we didn't know how those communities would interact and they're mixing. Like they're getting it. They're just like, okay, I have this location software. I need to work together with the guys who are going to install the network and then we can make this amazing experience. And they're mixing. And when they do it, the right thing's happening. Very complimentary. There's love going about. App developers love the network guys to take care of the network. And the network guys love the app guys to take care of the apps. Exactly. It's a win-win. Great stuff. Congratulations. Again, a new way to program. Just like we saw the iPhone creating the apps, our networking now is programmable. We expect to see a lot of great creativity, new problems, new things being created. And that's an opportunity for all. We're here at theCUBE bringing you all the action from the DevNet Zone of Cisco Live, more live coverage day three. Stay with us. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back.