 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live Europe 2019. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante as well. Stu Miniman has been co-hosting all week. Three days of coverage, we're in day two. We're here with very special guests. We're in the DevNet Zone, and we're here with the leader of the DevNet team of Cisco. Excuse me, we senior vice president and CTO of Cisco DevNet, welcome. Good to see you. Thank you, good to see you, and I'm glad that we have you here again in the DevNet Zone. You've been running around, it's been super exciting to watch the evolution. We chatted a couple of years ago, okay, we're going to get some developer-centric APIs. You had a small community growing, now it's exploding. Be sure to show the size gets bigger every year. It was interesting. Yeah, we took a chance on it, right? So we didn't know, and you took this bet with me is just that the network is becoming programmable. The infrastructure is programmable, and not only is the technology becoming programmable, but we can take the community of networkers, IT infrastructure folks, app developers, and get them to understand the programmability of the infrastructure. And it's really interesting that these classes are packed, they're very deep, they're very technical, the community is getting along, and networkers are developers. Yeah, and you nailed it, because I think as a CTO, you understood the DevOps movement, saw that in cloud. And I remember my first conversation, you're like, you know, the network has a DevOps angle too, if you can make it programmable, and that's what it's done, and you're seeing Cisco's wide, having this software abstraction, ACI anywhere, HyperFlex anywhere, connecting to the cloud, now Edge, APIs are at the center, the DNA center platform. Yes. API first, very successful project. Yes, yes. This is the new DNA of Cisco, is APIs. This is what it's all about. It is, it is. And, you know, like, at first, you know, when we started this journey five years ago, a few of our products had APIs, like a few of them were programmable. But, you know, you don't take your network and overnight it's programmable, you know, when you have this type of thing. But we've been building it in, and now practically every product is programmable, every product has APIs. So now you have a really rich fabric of, yeah, security, data center, enterprises and campus and branch networks, like, and it can, you know, now put together really interesting things. Well, congratulations, it happened and it's happening. So I got to ask the question, now that it's happening, happened and happening, continuing to happen, what's the impact to the customer base? Because now you're now seeing Cisco clearly defining the network and the security aspect of what the network can do, foundationally, and then enabling it to be programmable. Yeah. What's happening now for you guys? Obviously apps can take advantage of it, but what else is the side effect of this investment? Yeah, so the interesting thing is, if we take a look at the industry at large, what happens is you kind of have the traditional view of IT, you know? So if you take a look at IT, you know, what do you need it for? I need it to get my compute, just give me my servers, give me my network, and let's just hope it works. And then it was also viewed as being old, like I can get all this stuff on the cloud and I can just do my development there, why do I need all of that stuff, right? But once you take it and the industry has come along, what happens is you need to bring those systems together, you need to modernize your IT, you need to be able to just, you know, take in the cloud services to take the applications come across, but the real reason you need it is because you want to impact the business. You know, so kind of what happens is, like every business in the world, every is being disrupted, right? And if you take a look, it has a digital disruptor going on, if you're in retail, then you're a brick and mortar, traditionally a brick and mortar store kind of company, and then you have an online retailer that's kind of starting to eat your lunch, right? If you're in banking, you have the digital disruption, like every manufacturing is starting to get interesting and what you're doing in energy. So all of this has kind of disruption angles, but really the key is that IT holds the keys. So IT can sit there and keep its old infrastructure and say, I have all this responsibility, I'm running this machinery, I have this customer database, or you can modernize, right? And so you can either hold your business back or you can modernize, make it programmable, and then suddenly allow cloud native, public, private cloud, deploying new applications and services, and suddenly become an innovative platform for the company, then you can solve business problems and make that real. And we're actually seeing that's becoming real. Well, and you're seeing it right in front of us. So a big challenge there, what you just mentioned, having the skills to be able to do that, but the appetite of this audience to absorb that knowledge is very, very high. So for example, we've been here all week watching, essentially Cisco users, engineers, absorb this new content to learn how to basically program infrastructure. That's right. And it's not Cisco employees, it's the community. It's the world of Cisco certified engineers, like people who are doing networking and IT for companies and partners around the world. And so, what do they have to go through to get from where they were not modernized to modernized? Yeah, and actually, and that's a good way because when we look back to five years ago, it was a question. Like we knew the technology was going to become programmable and the question is, are these network guys, are these IT guys everywhere, are they going to stay in the old world? Are they really going to be the ones that can work in the new world? Are we going to hire a bunch of new software guys who just know it or cloud native, they get it all, to do it all? Well, it doesn't work that way because to work in oil and gas, you need some expertise in that and those guys know about it. To work in, again, retail and banking and all these, there's some industry knowledge that you need to have, but then you need to pick up that software skill. And five years ago, we didn't know if they would make that transition, but we created DevNet to give them the tools within their language and kind of within what they do. And what we found is that they're making the jump and you see it here with everyone behind us and in front of us, like they are learning. Your community said we're all in. Well, I'm interested in, we've seen other large organizations, infrastructure companies, try to attract developers like this. I'm wondering is it because of the network? Is it because of Cisco? Are there some other ingredients that you combine? Is it the certified engineers who have this appetite? Why is it that Cisco has been so successful and I could name a number of other companies that have tried and failed. Some of them even own clouds and have really not been able to get traction with developers, why Cisco? Well, I mean, I think we've been fortunate in many ways as we've been building it out, but I think part of it, like the way any company would have to go about, kind of taking on programmability, DevOps, these types of models is tough. And there's not one formula for how you do it. But in our case, it was that Cisco had a very loyal community, and we appreciate that very loyal community because they are out there working the gear, building the networks, like running train stations, transportation systems, running around the world. And so they've had to invest a lot into that knowledge. Now, we then gave them the tools to learn. We said, here's coding 101. Here's your APIs, here's how to learn about it. And your first API call will be get network devices. Here's how you automate your infrastructure. Here's how you do your things. And because we put it into there, they're grabbing on and they're doing it. And so it was kind of having that base community and being respectful of it, and yet bringing them along, pushing them. Like we didn't say keep doing things the old way. Yes, learn software, and we're not going to water down how you have to learn software. Like you're going to get in there, you're going to use REST APIs, you're going to use Postman, you're going to use Git. And we have that kind of like first track to just get them using those tools. And we also don't take an elitist culture, like we're very welcoming of it, and respectful of what they've done, and like just teach them and let them go. And the thing is like once you do it, like once you spend your time and you've go, oh, okay, so you get the code from GitHub, I got it. Now I see all this other stuff. Okay, now I made my REST API call and I've used Postman. Oh, I get it, it's a tool. Just once you've done just that, you are a different person. And then it's business impact. Then it's business, yeah. And like then you're also able to experiment. Like you suddenly see a bigger world because you've been responsible for this one thing, but now you see the bigger world and you think differently. And then it's business impact because then you're like, okay, how do I modernize my infrastructure? How can I just automate this task that I do every day? I'm like, I don't want to do that anymore. I want to automate it, let me do this. And once you get that mindset, then you're doing more and then you're saying, wait, now can I install applications on this? Boy, my network and my infrastructure can give lots of business insights. So I can start to get information about what applications are being called, what are being used. You know, when you have retail operations, you can say, oh, what's happening in this store versus that store? When you have a transportation system, where are we most busy? When you're doing banking, where is like mobile, are you having mobile transactions or in store transactions? There's all this stuff you learn and then suddenly you can really create the applications that impact business. So they get the bug, they get inspired, they stand up some quick sandbox with some value and go, wow. Or they use our DevNet sandbox so that they can start stuff and get experiment, yeah, they can use their stuff right away. It's a cloud kind of mindset of standing something up and saying, look at, wow, I could do this. I couldn't be more contributing to the organization. So talk about the modernization. I want to get kind of the next step for you because the next level for you is what? Because if this continues, you're going to start to see enterprises saying, oh, I can play in the cloud. I can use microservices. I can tap into that agility and scale of the cloud and leverage my resources and my investment I have now to compete, you just mentioned that. How is that going to work? Take us through that. And there's more in addition to that is also I can actually leverage the ecosystem, right? Because you're used to doing everything yourself but you're not going to win by doing everything yourself even if you made everything modern, right? You still need to use the ecosystem as well. But then at that stage what you can do and we're actually, we're seeing this as like our developers are not only the infrastructure folks but now all of a sudden our ISVs, app developers who are out there writing apps are able to actually put stuff into the infrastructure. So we actually had some IoT announcements this week where we have these industrial routers that are coming out and you can take an industrial router and put it into a police car. And because a police car has a dashboard camera, it has a wifi system, it has onboard computer tablets like all of this stuff, the officer has stuff, that's a mobile office and it has a gateway in it. Well now the gateway that we put in there does app hosting. It can host containerized applications. So then if you take a look at it, all the police cars that are moving around are basically hosting containerized apps. You have this kind of system and Cisco makes that. And then we have the gateway manager that does it and if you take a look at what does the gateway manager do, it has to manage all of those devices, you know? And then it can also deploy applications. So we have an ability to now manage, we also have an ability to deploy containers, pull back containers and then this also works in manufacturing, it works in utilities. So you have a substation, you have these industrial routers out there that can host apps, you know, then all of a sudden edge computing becomes real. But what this brings together is that now you can actually get ISVs who can actually now say, hey, I'm an app developer, I wanted to write an app. I have one that could be used in manufacturing. I could never do it before, but oh, there's this platform, now I can do it. And I don't have to start installing routers. Like, a Cisco partner will do it for a customer and I can just drop my app in. And it's, we're actually seeing that now. So basically what's happening in the Nirvana is, first of all, intelligent edge is actually possible. Yes. With having the power at the edge with APIs. But for the ISVs, they might have the domain expertise in saying, hey, I'm an expert on police, fire, public safety, vertical. Yes. But I could build the best app, but I don't need to do all this other stuff. Yes. So I can focus all my attention on this. Yes. The bottleneck was having that kind of compute and or edge device. Yes. Is that what you're kind of getting at? Yeah, and there's exactly, it was because, you know, I mean, an app developer is awesome at writing apps. They don't want to get into the business of deploying networks and like even managing and operating how that is. But there's a whole like kind of Cisco ecosystem that does that. Like we have a lot of people who will love to operationalize that system, deploy that, you know, kind of maintain it. And then there's IT and OT operators who are running that stuff, but the app developer can write their app, drop it into there, and then all of that can be taken care of. And we actually have two ISVs here with us, one in manufacturing, one in utilities who are, you know, DevNet ISV partners, they've written applications and they actually have real stories about this. And kind of what they had to say is, like in the manufacturing example, is okay, so they write, they have this innovation. I wrote this cool app for manufacturing, right? So there's something that it does. Building it, you know, they've gotten expertise in that. And then as they've been, they're doing something innovative. They actually need the end customer who does the manufacturer to use it and adopt a new technology. Well, hey, you know, I'm running my stuff. Why should I use that? How would I? So they actually work with a systems integrator like a channel partner that actually will customize the solution. But even that person may not have thought about edge computing. What can you do? What's this crazy idea you have? But now they've actually gotten trained up. They're getting trained up on our IoT technologies. They're getting trained up on how to operationalize it. And this guy just writes his app. He actually points them to the DevNet sandbox to learn about it. So he's like, no, let me show you how this edge processing thing works. Go use the DevNet sandbox. You can spin up your instance. You can see it working. Oh, look, there's these APIs. Let me show you. And it turns out they're using the sandbox to actually train the partners in the end customer about what this model is like. And then these guys are adopting it and they're getting paying customers through this. Did you start hunting for ISVs? Did they find you? How did that all transpire? It kind of happens in all different ways. So in some cases, yeah, yeah, it happens in all different ways. And basically in some cases like we actually sometimes have innovation centers and then you have kind of, as you know, the eye is the startup that's trying to figure out how to get their stuff seen. They show up, we look for it. In our case in Italy with the manufacturing company, then what happened was the government was actually investing and the government was actually giving tax subsidies for manufacturing plants to modernize. And so what they were doing was actually giving an incentive and then looking for these types of partners. So we actually teamed up with our country teams to find some of these and they have a great product. And then we started working with them. They actually already had an appreciation for Cisco because they, in their country, they did computer science in college. They might have done some networking with the Cisco Networking Academy, so they knew about it. But finally, it came that they could actually bring this ecosystem together. Well, Susan, congratulations on all your success. It's been great to be part of it in our way, but you and your team have done an amazing job. Great feedback on Twitter on the swag, at the arts, swag bags, getting a lot of attention, which is always a key important thing. But in general, super important initiative. Share some insight into how this has changed Cisco's executive view of the world because the cloud had horizontal scalability, but Cisco had it too. And now the new positioning, the new branding that Karen Walker and her team are putting out, the bridge to tomorrow, the future, is about almost a horizontally scalable Cisco. It's everywhere now. Yeah, the bridge to possible. The bridge to possible, yes. Yeah, well, I mean, really what happens is, there was a time when you're like, I'm going to buy my security. I'm going to buy my networking. I'm going to buy my data center. But really more and more, people just want an infrastructure that works, right? An infrastructure that's capable that can allow you to innovate. And really what happens when you think about how do you put all of these systems together? Because they are still individual and they need to be individual and best in class products. Well, the best way to put them together is with APIs. So it's not that you need to architect them all into one big product. It's actually better to have best in class, clearly to find the APIs and then allow this kind of modularity and to build it out. So really we've had tremendous support from Chuck Robbins, our CEO. And he's understood this vision and he's been helping kind of, like DevNet is a startup itself. Like he's been helping us navigate the waters to really make it happen. And as we moved and as he's evolved the organization, we've actually started to get more and more support from our executives and we're working across the team. So everything that we do is together with all the teams. And now what we're doing is we're co-launching products. Every time we launch a new product, we launch a new product with the product offer and the developer offer. So here we've launched the new IoT products. With APIs. With APIs and IOX and app hosting capabilities. And we launched them together with a new DevNet IoT developer center. At developer.sys.com slash IoT. And this is actually, if you take a look at the last say half year or year, our products have been launching. You'll see, oh, here's the new DNA center and here's the new DevNet developer center. Then we can say, here's the new kind of ACI and here's the new ACI developer center. Here's the new Meraki feature, here's the new ACI. And it's no secret that DNA center has over 600 people engineers in there. That public information might not be. But we've actually gotten in the mode in the understanding of, every product should have a developer offer because it's about the ecosystem. And we're getting tremendous support now. A lot of people ask me about Amazon web services because we're so close, we cover them deeply. And they always ask me, hey John, why is Amazon so successful? I go, well they've got a great management team and they've got a great business model. But it was built on APIs first. It was a web service framework. You guys have been very smart by betting on the API because that's where the growth is. So it's not about Amazon being the cloud, it's the fact that they build building blocks with APIs that grew. And so I think what you got here that's lightning in a bottle is, having an API strategy creates more connections, connections create more fabric, and then more data, it's just, it's a great growth vehicle. So congratulations. So is that your marketplace? Do you have a marketplace which is I guess SDKs and APIs and now as you have ISVs coming in, is that sort of in the plan? We do, no we do actually. So yeah, so basically when you're in this world, then you have your device, it's your phone. And then you have apps that you download and you get it from an app store. But when we're talking about the types of solutions we're talking about, there's infrastructure. There's infrastructure for, again, utilities companies, for police stations, for retail stores. And then you have ISV applications that can help in each of those domains. There's oftentimes a systems integrator that's putting something together for a customer. And so now kind of the app store for this type of thing actually involves our infrastructure products together with kind of, and infrastructure, ours am third party ones, ISV software that can be customized and have innovation in different ways together with that system integrator and we're training them all, people across that. But we actually have something called DevNet Exchange. And what we've done is there's actually two parts. There's code exchange, which is basically pointers out to source code that's out in GitHub. So we're just going out to code repos that are actually helping people get started with different products. But in addition, we have ecosystem exchange, which actually lists the ISV solutions that can be used as well as the systems integrators who can actually deliver solutions in these different domains. So DevNet ecosystem exchange is the place where we actually do list the ISVs with the SIs with the different platforms. So that's the app store for a programmable infrastructure. Susie, congratulations again. Thank you so much for including us in your DevNet zone with theCUBE here. Three days. Thank you for coming to us and for really helping us tell the story. It's a great story to tell and it's kicking butt and taking names as we say. Susie, we Senior Vice President and CTO of DevNet, making it happen just at the beginning, scratching the surface of the explosion of API based economies around the network, the network value, and certainly cloud and IoT. Of course, we're bringing you the edge of the network here with theCUBE. In Barcelona, we'll be back with more live coverage, day two after the short break.