 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. And welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Peter Burris and this is the last of two days of great presentations here at Cisco, DevNet Create. A show set up specifically to help software developers and networking professionals start to co-mingle their ideas and look at business problems differently, create new ideas, new innovations, new inventions that can change the way the world does things so that we can improve the quality of digital business and life overall. And I'm very excited that our last session, we actually have a real live software engineer here on theCUBE to talk about some of the things that are happening and it's a very important one because it's an app dynamics. Ball Winder Kerr, nice to meet you and welcome to theCUBE. Nice to be here, thanks Peter. So Ball Winder is a principal software engineer at App Dynamics, which is a Cisco property that came in within the last year. Yes. And has been especially important in thinking about how we're going to embed additional software controls and metrics into applications to make them more network friendly. Absolutely. All right, so let's start off by asking you this question, Ball Winder. You're a software engineer, you're a developer, you're at the show, first inaugural show that Cisco's put forward, what do you think of it? I think it's very interesting that Cisco is doing something for DevOps, for the cloud, for IoT that is not completely network focused, so it's great. Well, most of the content, as Cisco said, is coming out of the community, it's coming out of contributors and others that are part of this process. Has there been any particular theme or message that you've seen from the communities that's kind of come together that surprised you or really resonated with you? Well, I definitely, since we are very new to the Cisco family, I got a chance to meet with other companies and other parts of Cisco here, and I got a better picture of how different pieces like Jasper and Meraki and AppDynamics together can provide wonderful insights for the customer base, and that's very valuable, whether it's insights into the networking layer, application layers, again, within the applications, whether they're web applications, Java.net, or they're Android, iOS, and embedded applications, the Internet of Thing applications, whether they're multiple applications on one box or dedicated applications, so I think it's very exciting and the potential is just immense. AppDynamics has been at the vanguard of thinking about this notion of networkability of applications for quite some time. As AppDynamics has evolved and matured and you almost had an exit, they went to the public and you ended up with an exit that went to Cisco, how has the audience, the community around application development responded to AppDynamics vision of the idea of better instrumenting applications to make them more successful on networks and have networks be more appropriate for application developers? So, your question was quite complicated. True. Hey, you've got five minutes. I will try to answer it. So I had definitely the response that with AppDynamics being part of Cisco has been positive from the customers because now there's a lot of backing from a very big company and definitely there are synergies. Cisco is big in the enterprise, AppDynamics is also big in the enterprise and as applications become more and more of the business, definitely the customers like that part and I don't know how closely you've been following what AppDynamics does but we've gone from just application monitoring into business IQ, different parts of your business and providing more and more intelligence to our customers. So I think it's a good place and a good time to be. So we like to say that digital business is really how you use your data. The difference between business and digital business is the idea that data is an asset and can be applied differentially to create certain customers. And the trend to add new digital capabilities to business means that software and data are getting embedded deeper and deeper and deeper into business pieces, both as process, as for analytics and a number of other things. And it sounds as though AppDynamics, at least for that core set of enterprise customers, are also being embedded more deeply in the business as software takes on more responsibility for the core and differentiating capabilities that a business performs. Is that accurate? That's definitely one way of putting it. We like to say at AppDynamics that the application is becoming the business. So we have application focused and we've more and more businesses are moving into the application space. And so IT organizations are not a support function but getting to be more of the core function. So yes, it's two ways of representing probably what is very close. So as you move from monitoring to monitoring and analytics for crucial software applications, what new approaches or what new insights is your customer base gaining about how best to set up these capture points and how to use the data associated with application performance? So there's different parts of the application, right? And application architectures are changing so you need to have solutions that can cater to all of them for example, microservices is a big trend now, containers like Docker and so you need your monitoring solutions to be able to cater to all of that. The other piece is the depth of instrumentation. So not just in the application layer, your database, your network monitoring. So the complete suite of all of these and then not isolated, right? Being able to correlate all the data. And that's sort of within the data center but at the outside what we call the end user monitoring. We have browser and Android and iOS but we are also building solutions now for the internet of things which is basically traditionally connected and better devices but now they're talking to cloud services and so definitely a lot of these things are now very developer centric. So just like Cisco has this conference geared towards developers, yes we definitely understand that embedded systems they need more and more developer centric features where they have control of what performance data to pick up, what business data to pick up, when to send the data and so yeah just having the wide rich variety of support for different platforms, different form factors and different languages also, right? And then being able to all view it in a single pane, I think that's the strength of AppDynamics. But you also need more developers because there's going to have to be an enormous amount of software to bring all these devices, the IoT events and everything else that we're talking about when we think about digital business in under the umbrella of and AppDynamics are related type of technology. So bringing new developers in and having them be familiar with the value that these kinds of tools can bring to the party is crucial. How is AppDynamics looking at the challenges of attracting whole new classes of applications of application developers into the fold so that you can in fact have greater end-to-end visibility about how applications are performing and behaving? So we have dedicated teams now which are looking at increasing developer mind share and catering to them. Also there's like especially in this whole internet of things that's a very well understood factor in the industry that you don't have as many embedded engineers to build all the applications and that's why there is all the platforms are now coming with more support for JavaScript developers, Java, which nobody used to think could run heavily on embedded devices. It's a big player, Python, JavaScript. And so I think catering using embedded engineers to build tools so that the web application developers can write applications that run on embedded devices is the trend and we recognize it and absolutely support all those developers. So time is crucial, especially at the edge where you have to be able to often an event has to happen within a certain prescribed period of time and the round trip can be challenging. So what is the role that monitoring and metering, well not so much metering, but monitoring and event management plays as we start to deploy these more complex applications, especially IOT like applications? So I just finished the talk here recently and basically at design time, just you know how they say that security has to be built in at design time. Similarly, all solutions that get deployed now need to be built in with hoax for performance monitoring, right? If your devices are now talking to the cloud, you need to be able to know that when your hundreds and thousands of devices are there, which one of them are suffering from a network latency problem and which ones are not. And that is where AppDynamics comes in. You put the agents there, they correlate back and they correlate to all different parts of your businesses, whether the traffic is originating from a mobile device, a browser, or it's originating from an embedded device. And I think that's performance monitoring is absolutely crucial. It's not a luxury to have anymore. It is a must have and I think as more and more solutions get deployed into the field, the realization will be there. I think right now people are still in the IOT world still focused more on other problems like security, interoperability, connectivity, but this will become a growing pain when some of the other hurdles have been bypassed. Well, what are some of those lessons that you learn about how you appropriately embed performance management and monitoring hooks into applications? Where should people be looking? So if you're looking at the embedded side, then people should look at definitely small footprints. It should be, the agents should be configurable. You don't want, because different devices in use cases have different expectations. Some of the devices, they only want the performance data to be sent when they are done with whatever they are designed to do. Others don't want the battery to be up, so they want the performance data to be sent when they are powered up, not in deep sleep mode. Then again, offline mode also varies from application to application. There are some devices that go offline for up to weeks and they just want to store local data and upload it later on. There are others that cannot store more than one hour. So basically you're looking for agents that are configurable. The developer can control when they want to send data, when do they want to store data, how much they want to store data. Then at the back end, you should be able to correlate all this because in isolation, it doesn't give you the problem. There is a lot of complexity on the end user side as well as there's a lot of complexity on the web application side, right? There are microservices, Docker containers. So any solution that provides end to end monitoring and then is able to correlate data across different pieces to be able to give a true picture of performance is a good solution to have. So we want to make sure that the agent isn't forcing particular behaviors, but is in fact responsive and fits within the environmental constraints and considerations of whatever it is that that local device does. Yes, so you're looking for a lot of flexibility on the embedded side. There are other where auto instrumentation and ease of use and not necessarily developer development time is important. There are other factors there, but for the internet of things side, this is what is important. So as we think about increasingly, as we think about the evolution over the next few years of software, to what degree does the ability to reuse software get tied back to having visibility in the house software performs? Being able to move from one cloud supplier to another have depend upon having greater visibility in the house software performs. The ability to reapply software to new roles or purposes that weren't originally anticipated dependent upon knowing how that software performs. It seems as though an app dynamics tool is going to have a much greater set of propositions over the course of software as opposed to just a design time. Would you agree with that? Yes, absolutely, right? Because as, so multi-cloud is definitely one. You want to be able to see your performance data, how your business is performing, right? Because your business is an application. How is it performing as, you know, solutions move across different clouds or performance of the different clouds change. So we, there are already conversations about like multi-cloud for sure. And then yes, absolutely developers getting real-time feedback of, you know, their new deployments. How is it, how did it impact the performance or not? Yes, those are going to be very important trends. So as the, we've been talked a lot over the past few days about DevOps and the role that DevOps is likely to play in digital business as well as within the way the industry's evolving. Can you just relate the role that app dynamics and again this class of tools has to facilitating collaboration and communication and working relationships between operations and development people? So we already internally, we have applications because we are a SaaS solution too. And so we are very acutely aware of, we have to keep our systems up as well. And we are acutely aware of how when we develop and deploy new solutions, what does it mean, how the performance can be monitored. And that's a trend that definitely we are keeping an eye on. But is there something to suggest that we have tools right now? I don't think there is something that we can talk. But can the data be used by both parties? So is the data, does performance data, application performance data, can it be a lingua franca for both operations and developers as they think about making sure that operations people saying this is what works and application developers saying this is what I need. That data can kind of start bringing them together and giving them a common thing to talk about. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Well, so one last question here. This is the first, the inaugural Cisco DevNet Create. What do you think? We're looking forward to futures, future DevNet Creates. Absolutely. And what would you like to see coming out of this show as a consumer of the information, not as a presenter? But what would you like to see more of as these communities start to co-mingle and cross-pollinate ideas? I think some of the things that is a friction and will stay a friction till the embedded and operations teams become closer with the IT teams. And so I think best practices from both sides, being able to know what best practices are and then brainstorming and coming up with things that work for everybody is one. And maybe people put people in each other's shoes, right? Like IT ops doesn't always understand everything about what happens on the OT side and vice versa. So, you know, even like putting them in a situation where they get better hands on, like a lab, right? Where they have better hands on experience and now I understand what they're dealing with, right? Like the people who've never been inside a knock and they now can sit there and, you know, experience some of this. Which is not the most fun thing in the world. Yeah, so then we need to make it more fun, right? Yes, a knock as a world of warcraft. All right, so Bowender Kerr, thank you very much. Bowender Kerr is the principal software engineer or a principal software engineer in AppDynamics. And this is it, guys. Two days of Cisco DevNet Create. It's been a very successful conference. We've talked about some fascinating things, a lot of sessions on talking about DevOps, a lot of sessions on multi-cloud and the role that software is going to play inside businesses, digital business transform. This has been theCUBE, more of this and upcoming shows. Thank you very much for watching us over the course of the past couple of days. For John Furrier, Peter Burris, thanks for watching. Hi, I'm April Mitchell and I'm the senior director of strategy.