 From around the globe, it's theCUBE, presenting Accelerating Automation with DevNet, brought to you by Cisco. Hello and welcome to theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got a great conversation, a virtual event, Accelerating Automation with DevNet, Cisco DevNet. And of course we've got the Cisco Brain Trust here, CUBE alumni, Susie Wee, Senior Vice President, GM, and also CTO with Cisco DevNet, and Ecosystem Success, CX, all that great stuff, Manny Wadley, who's the Senior Director of DevNet Certifications, Eric Thiel, Director of Developer Advocacy. Susie, Mandy, Eric, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you, John. So we're not in person, we can't be at the DevNet zone. We can't be on site doing DevNet, creating all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years. We're virtual, the CUBE virtual. Thanks for coming on. Susie, I got to ask you, because we've been talking years ago, when you started this mission, and just the success it has been awesome, but DevNet Create has brought on a whole another connective tissue to the DevNet community. This ties into the theme of accelerating automation with DevNet, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service, or X AAS as it's called, and automation plays a critical role. Could you please share your vision, because this is really important, and still only five to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and programmability. What's your vision? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are coming online is, I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud, as they're growing in new areas, as we're dealing with security, as everyone's dealing with the pandemic, there's so many things going on. But what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on, and that infrastructure has networking, it has security, it has all of your compute, and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely, and then be able to really satisfy everything that businesses need? And in order to do that, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable. The infrastructure is programmable, and you don't need just apps writing on top, but now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually, you can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation, you can rise to higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the staff by leveraging automation. You know, I remember a few years ago when DevNet Create first started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale, and we were talking about Meraki. You know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about then, this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was Cisco Europe in Barcelona before all the COVID hit. And you had the massive cloud surge and scale happening going on right when the pandemic hit. And even now more than ever, the cloud scale, the modern apps, the momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing more innovation at scale because of the pressure to do that. Because the better things stay alive. You want to get your thoughts on what's going on in your world because you were there in person, now we're six months in, scale is huge. We are, yeah, absolutely. And what happened is, as all of our customers, as businesses around the world, as we ourselves all dealt with how do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home? And how do we work? And then it turns out, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because you have to go home and then figure out, how from home can I make sure that my IT infrastructure is automated? How from home can I make sure that every employee is out there and working safely and securely? Things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and be in kind of, just blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. So we had to extend business applications to people's homes in countries like, well, around the world, but also in India, where it was actually not, they wouldn't let, they didn't have rules to let people work from home in these areas. So then what we had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer, all of our customers could administer these systems from home. So that put extra stress on automation. It put extra stress on our customers' digital transformation and it just forced them to automate, digitally transform quicker. And they had to, because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers. You had to figure out how to automate all of that. And we're still all in that environment today. You know, one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, Kubernetes, micro services. So those things, again, all DevOps, and you guys got some acquisitions. You thought about 1000Is. You got a new one. You just bought recently PortShift to raise the game in security, Kubernetes, all these micro services. So observability, super hop. But then people go work at home, as you mentioned. How do you make observer? What are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's Zooms and WebExes and education. Huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this in the app side? How are you guys looking at the, what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this programmability challenge and observability challenges? It's a huge deal. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right? You know, back when we talked to Todd before, he had Marocchi and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use, this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place. And now he has Cisco's entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that bigger scale for Cisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation and the APIs into all of it. But when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. They had to build in. And what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people to work from home and how well you could reach customers. All of that used to be an IT conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually, you know, calling on the heads of IT and the CIO and saying, you know, how's our VPN connectivity? Is everybody working from home? How many people are, you know, connected and able to work and watch their productivity? So all of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure IT stuff became a board level conversation. And, you know, once again, at first everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people working. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they are now building in automation and digital transformation and these architectures. And that gives them a chance to build in that observability, you know, looking for those events, the dashboards, you know, so it really has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. Suzy, I know you got to go, but real quick, describe what accelerating automation with DevNet means. Well, you've been, you know, we've been working together on DevNet in the vision of the infrastructure programmability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that. And you need the right skill sets and the programmability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people and it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people run things. Our DevNet community has risen to this challenge. People have jumped in, they've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. You know, we have Cisco getting certified. We have individuals, we have partners. You know, they're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerating automation, while it is about going digital, it's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications of, you know, cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people just as much as it is about automation and technology. And we got DevNet create right around the corner virtual. Unfortunately, we won't be in person, but we'll be virtual. Susie, thank you for your time. We're going to dig into those people challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you got to go, but stay with us. We're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric. Thanks. Thank you so much. Have fun. Thanks, John. Okay, Mandy, you heard Susie is about people. And one of the things that's close to your heart that you've been driving is a senior director of DevNet certifications is getting people leveled up. I mean, the demand for skills, cybersecurity, network programmability, automation, network design, solution architect, cloud, multi-cloud design, these are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? Oh yes, absolutely. The, you know, what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning. Those are what's accelerating a lot of the technology changes and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like DevSecOps engineer, network automation engineer, network automation developer, which Susie mentioned. And looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current scope and broaden out and take on new challenges? Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this piece of getting the certifications. First, before you get started, describe what your role is as director of developer advocacy because that's always changing and evolving. What's the state of it now? Because with COVID, people are working at home, they have more time to contact switch and get some certifications and they can code more. What's your role? Absolutely. So it's interesting, it definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our historically, a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the DevNet creates the Cisco lives and helping the community connect and help share technical information with them, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? So that's had to pivot quite a bit. Obviously Cisco Live US, we pivoted very quickly to a virtual event when conditions changed and we're able to actually connect as we found out with a much larger audience. So, as opposed to in person, where you're bound by the parameters of how big the convention center is, we were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with our DevNet Dave that was kind of attached on to Cisco Live and we got great feedback from the audience that now we were actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it. But to your broader question of what my team does, so that's one piece of it is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out, building new sandboxes, new learning labs, things like that, that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the DevNet site. And then my team also looks after communities such as the Cisco Learning Network where there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. We've seen a huge shift now in that group that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the DevNet certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with programmability, they're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up community with helping answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the DevNet space as well and are helping people with that sort of certifications. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that. I got to ask you on the trends around automation. What skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Or is there anything in particular, obviously network automation has been around for a long time, Cisco's been a leader in that. But as you move up the stack as modern applications are building, do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What are people learning? Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned observability was big before COVID and we actually really saw that amplified during COVID. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights, how can I get that better observability? Now that we need it, well, we're virtual. So that's actually been a huge uptick and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that are now figuring out how can I do this at scale? And I think one good example that Suzy was talking about at the VPN example and we actually had a number of SEs in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up. And one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all the different parameters that IT departments might care about about their firewalls, things that you didn't normally look at in the old days. You would size your firewalls based on assuming a certain number of people working from home and when that number went to 100%, things like licenses started coming into play where they needed to make sure they had the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the SEs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use some open source tooling to monitor and alert on these things and then published it. So the whole community could go out and get a copy of it, try it out in their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that in trying to figure out, okay, now I can take that and I can adapt it to what I need to see for my observability. That's great. Mandy, I want to get your thoughts on this too because as automation continues to scale, it's going to be a focus. People are at home and you guys had a lot of content online for you recorded every session in the DevNet zone. Learning's going on sometimes linearly and nonlinearly. You got the certifications, which is great. That's key, great success there. People are interested. But what are the learnings are you seeing? What are people doing? What's the top, top trends? Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time. They want to advance their skill set. And just like any kind of learning, people want choice. They want to be able to choose what matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors leading them through a study plan. And we have two new expert led study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do an immersive learning experience together with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kind of team experiences called automation boot camp. And then we're also seeing individuals who want to be able to dive into a topic, do a hands-on lab, get some skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. And so we have really modular, self-driven, hands-on learning through the DevNet fundamentals course, which is available through DevNet. And then there's also people who are saying, I just want to use the technology. I like to experiment and then go read the instructions, read the manual, do the deeper learning. And so they're spending a lot of time in our DevNet sandbox, trying out different technologies, Cisco technologies with open source technologies, getting hands-on and building things. And three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD-WAN. There's a huge interest in people skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about. Security is a focus area where people are dealing with new scale, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways. And then automating their data center using infrastructure as code type principles. So those are three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing some more about that at DevNet Create. Awesome, Eric and Mandy, if you guys can wrap up in this accelerated automation with DevNet package and virtual event here and also tee up DevNet Create because DevNet Create has been a very kind of grassroots organically building momentum over the years. Again, it's super important because it's now the app world coming together with networking, end-to-end programmability and with everything as a service that you guys are doing, everything with APIs, only can imagine the enablement that's going to create. Can you share the summary real quick on accelerating automation with DevNet and tee up DevNet Create? Mandy, we'll start with you. Yes, I'll go first and then Eric can close this out. So just like we've been talking about with you at every DevNet event over the past years, DevNet's bringing APIs across our whole portfolio and up and down the stack and accelerating automation with DevNet. Susie mentioned the people aspect of that, the people skilling up and how that transforms teams. And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so what I think about accelerating automation with DevNet, it's about the DevNet community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community with those new skills. Eric, take us home here, accelerating automation with DevNet and DevNet Create. A lot of developer action going on on cloud native right now, your thoughts. Absolutely, I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for DevNet Day this year for Cisco Live and we're able to leverage it even further with Create this year. So whereas it used to be confined by the walls that we were within for the event, now we're actually able to do things like we're adding a start now track for people that want to be there. They want to be a developer, a network automation developer for instance. We've now got a track just for them where they can get started and start learning some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. So I love that we're able to bring that together with the experience community that we usually do from across the industry, bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. So I'm really excited to bring that whole mix together as well as getting some of our business units together too and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new APIs into their platforms? What problems are they hoping that customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So like I said, Cisco Learning Network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. Awesome, thanks so much. Go ahead, Manny. Can I add one more thing? Yeah, I was just going to say the other really exciting thing about Create this year with the virtual nature of it is that it's happening in three regions. And we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions and content and speakers and the region stepping up to have things personalized to their area to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for DevNet Create that's going to be fantastic this year. You know, I was going to close out and just put the final bow on that by saying that you guys have always been successful with great content, focused on the people in the community. I think now during with this virtual DevNet virtual DevNet Create virtual, the CUBE virtual, I think we're learning new things. People are working in teams and groups and sharing content. We're going to learn new things. We're going to try new things and ultimately people will rise up and will be resilient. And I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun and we'll ride the wave with you guys. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on theCUBE and talk about your awesome acceleration automation in DevNet Create. Looking forward to it, thank you. Thank you so much, happy to be here. Okay, I'm John Furrier with the CUBE virtual here in Palo Alto Studios, doing the remote content and managed state virtual until we're face to face. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at DevNet Create. Thanks for watching.