 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. Hello everyone, welcome to the special presentation of theCUBE here in San Francisco Live, for two days of wall-to-wall coverage for Cisco Systems inaugural developer event called DevNet Create. The hashtag is DevNet Create. This is a new opportunity for Cisco, a new event, again inaugural event. Peter, I'd love to go all the first time events cause you never know it was going to be the last event. inaugural event, but really Cisco has very successful DevNet developer program, all Cisco. This is a new effort to go out and talk to cloud developers in the DevOps community. This is Silicon Angles, two days of coverage of Cisco's foray into the DevOps world, really bringing app dynamics and all their great stuff above the stack together. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Peter Burris, the next two days live coverage. Peter, big story here is that Cisco is moving up the stack because they are the leader in networking. They have been for years. We've been joking on theCUBE for many, many months now. Plumbers are turning into machinists. Machinists are being automated away by machines. The value of the network for infrastructure at code becomes super paramount now that automation is starting to happen at the application layer where data is being used for value purposes to create new experiences for users. I think this is an important story here of Cisco systems as they move out of the network guys, plumbers, network box guys, who have been incumbent data center presence, as well as powering the biggest and basically the internet. This is a big story. What is your analysis? What's your take? What's your view of Cisco's DevNet create opportunity? Well, I think there's three things we should be looking for over the next couple of days, John. The first one is the very, very big strategic picture is that the world wants to better understand how to program the internet. Now, if you think about it from a computer science standpoint, the internet is still a computer and we're still trying to find those ways where we can apply any process, any data, any time, any person, anywhere. Now, there are some physical limitations of being able to do that, but the basic model for how we're going to do internet scale computing still isn't obvious, it still isn't clear. In many respects, the cloud is an approximate to that and we'll get there. Cisco's going to have a major role to play. On a tactical level, one of the reasons why Cisco has been so successful and remain so successful in that networking space is because of this enormous body of experts that are still using the Cisco command line interface to set up routers, to do configuration in the network, to do an enormous amount of work down at lower levels inside the pipes. Now, that group also has to be modernized along with the technology and Cisco wants to bring those people along and having them become full members in this whole dev ops transition is going to be really crucial not only to them and their businesses, but also Cisco. And I think you mentioned the third one at a very practical reality level, Cisco needs to bring app dynamics out to a position of, I don't want to say primacy, but certainly importance within the overall Cisco ecosystem. And so this show is going to be one of the ways to make progress on that. And Peter, I got to say the research that you're doing at Wikibon.com for the folks watching, go to Wikibon.com. Peter's been leading the research team there and it really has some amazing research. Key stakes in the grounds of the two big waves that are happening, cloud computing, aka dev ops and other things, and the role of data, data science, what are we going to call it, data in cloud. Peter, the wave that's hitting its musical chairs and the music stops and you're a big player like Cisco and you don't have a play in cloud or data, you're screwed. And so it's clear to me that with the app dynamics acquisition of Cisco, again a foray into establishing the relationship between applications and code of the network really gives them a unique opportunity to add a lot of value and have a big seat at the table of those next two waves. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, John. In fact, the research that we're doing is very, very compelling and starts to point to the idea that we used to have hardware as infrastructure, now we're doing or hardware to find infrastructure and now everyone's in this grip of software to find infrastructure, which is really important and we'll be here for quite some time. But as you start thinking about the real asset that's going to dictate how digital business works, how it gets, how businesses get reconfigured, how they re-institutionalize the work that they need to do, and how infrastructure ultimately gets deployed, in many respects it's time to start thinking in terms of data-defined infrastructure. And it's a term that we're starting to play with inside Wikibon to see how far it actually goes, but I think it's got a lot of prescriptive potency to it. But the idea is, increasingly, your digital business is going to be a function of where your data is, what you can do with it, how fast, all those other things, and its notion of data as the asset that ultimately guides and shapes the characteristics of what customers want and what businesses can do is going to become increasingly important and this conference and the people here are absolutely part of that change. The reason why I like this event and why I'm here and why we're doing this small little event is that I think this is a tell sign, a canary in the coal mine of what's coming on this big wave, and I'll give you an example. I watched Cisco dominate the internet generation because they connected the networks together, they moved and created great value in connecting offices and then ultimately internet-working the rest is history. We are now at the next seminal moment of internet scale going cloud and data. So to me, there are two main storylines that I'm watching and I want to get your reaction to on this. One is customer facing digital transformation. Every customer is trying to figure out how to transform in Cisco's- Every business. Every business is trying to figure out or Cisco's customers or potential customers have to transform and be a better business. You look no further than the Ford CEO being fired for less than five years on the job. How the hell can you transform a company in four years? You can't. Pressure stocks down for 39%. He's ousted by Wall Street. This is the pressure on the real world. Two, the notion of cloud computing. And machine learning and AI. Application-specific goodness of DevOps infrastructure code is bringing up the issue of automation, jobs going away. So two major threads. Growth with digital transformation for Cisco's customers. And two, the fear of what will cloud do for my job. It's the number one question asked in our crowd chats and our conversations on theCUBE is, hey look, there's a fire going on around us. Where the machines are going to take over our jobs. There's going to be a further gap between the haves and have-nots as Sarvita and Joe Hall just mentioned on Twitter as I tweeted a Jazzy thing, but it's come up on all the crowd chats. Jobs going away as an impact personally, I think they're going to shift, but that's my opinion. Your reaction, digital transformation and automation machine learning, these things automating away jobs. Well, let's start with the second one because in many respects, it's the practical test of what happens with that first question about digital transformation. First off, I agree with you. I think we'll see tasks go away and jobs reconfigure. And the better way of thinking about this is his businesses have historically institutionalized the work that they perform around the assets that they regard as most important. In a very practical sense within IT, you can track the history of IT by watching how CEOs and businesses configured the work of people within IT around the assets that the business regarded as most valuable. When a mainframe costs 50 or 70 million dollars, not surprisingly, that's what you configured around as moving to the client-server domain, it became the PCs and the applications. And the data center. And the data center. Now we're moving to data as an asset and work will get re-institutionalized that as well. But data has some very specific and interesting characteristics as an asset that maybe we'll get into. But I think what it really points up is not that we're going to see people suddenly be thrown out of work. If you've got knowledge and you can apply that knowledge and you can work with other people, the world is going to continue to find a place for you to make money and to add some value. So that's not to say that this notion of being thrown out of work isn't important, it's not going to have a major implication. But more likely what we're going to see is, data as an asset is going to force a re-thinking of how we institutionalize work, which is going to force a re-thinking of what tasks do and do not create value and what we can automate. And that's going to give people an opportunity to learn or not. And if they don't learn, then yeah, there maybe are a lot. We're old enough with our gray hairs to say that we've seen some waves before and I broke into the business with the computer science degree in the late 80s. And so I was on the back end of that punch card and mainframe generation. I watched people clutch onto the mainframe and the jobs just did go, they went away. And there were a few people who did maintenance and they kept their jobs, it became a political football and people got laid off, but they got shifted. They got shifted to the mini computer and then the data center. So the same exact things happening and this is why I like this show, because Cisco has to move from those plumbers, the networking guys, the guys who were the A1 resource, networks were the kingpins of the enterprise. They ran the show, they ran the networks, tier one personnel now being commoditized. And if my advice to my friends in the networking business, and this is why the show exists, you got to shift your skills to the next value proposition that's data. By the way, it's still the internet, so I think they're going to be in good shape. If you're a networking guy, you got to go to the next network effect, that's not necessarily boxes, it's still packets, it's still policy, it's still good work. Still security. So let's think about what you just said, John, that you move from a world where I perform the tasks on a particular set of Cisco boxes to I am responsible for ensuring that distributed data works. That's not subtle. I mean, it's a major transformation, but we are going to have an enormous need for people that can handle and deal with distributed data. I'm going to come back to something you said earlier. And that was the mini computer revolution. I've been around for a long time too, I came in just before you. What killed the mini computer was not the microprocessor. People could easily put microprocessors in the mini computers. What killed the mini computer was that digital had their own proprietary network, IBM had S&A down to system 36, AS 400, et cetera. You had Prime and DG, everybody had their own proprietary network to handle what they did from a business standpoint, from a business value standpoint within the businesses. What killed the mini computer world was TCPIP and this company, Cisco. Now the question is, three comm was involved in that, so let's not forget, three comm was involved. Oh, three comm, absolutely. Three comm and Cisco, the internet working class. But it was this company in particular that said we're going to flatten all those networks, put them into TCPIP, here's the routers. Three comm and Banyan and a whole bunch of others were very important. Coming back to this show at this moment right now, we also see on the horizon, a focus on cloud and not data. Focus on your supplier and their wants and needs and not data is going to lead to a world where inter-cloud connectivity and computing is going to be a major challenge. That's ironic, inter-cloud is ironic because I talked to Lew Tucker three years ago at OpenStacks, Cisco CTO, and inter-networking parallel to inter-clouding. Now Cisco- It's even worse. It's more complex. Cisco canceled the inter-clouding initiative, but if you look at where this is going to that point, it's semantics. Multi-cloud is the hottest trend right now because hybrid IT, hybrid cloud is the gateway to true multi-cloud. And I think you're doing a lot of research on that, but let's talk about that. What TCPIP did for inter-networking, you could argue that data and cloud does for multi-cloud. Well, I would say that somebody, the data becomes the determining, data becomes the most interesting thing to worry about. And then the question is who's going to do that? Are Amazon and Microsoft and Google going to get together and say, here's a set of cloud standards that will ensure that you have seamless end-to-end computing? Maybe, probably not. Will OpenStack emerge out of Red Hat as the kind of the universal, well, it's not happening. Will Oracle be successful in saying, oh no, forget all that stuff, bring it all inside Oracle? Probably not. Here's a question. This notion of end-to-end is going to be really crucial to a business, really crucial to architects, and really crucial to development. And how you handle that end-to-end is something that has to start emerging. The answer to those questions has to start emerging out of conferences like this. And Cisco certainly has to make this move now, otherwise they'll be driftwood if they don't get out from that next wave and ride this wave. But here's what's interesting. They call this the IoT Cloud Developer Conference where applications meets infrastructure. Kind of clever wording, but very specific in the wording. And I want to unpack that and get your reaction. AppDynamics coalescing with Cisco's network knowledge. Because some people are like, oh networking guys, how could they be DevOps guys? They're just configuring networks and they're not relevant. Here's the issue. IoT is a network issue. So you're doing a lot of IoT research. So IoT, I would still classify as in that network pool of talent and domain expertise. Now AppDynamics, which Cisco had acquired, brings the application stack to the table. So you got the collision between AppDynamics and classic Cisco DNA into a melting pot. This is a huge opportunity and I want you to get your reaction. How important is IoT and how important is the AppDynamics component for this new vision of Cisco? IoT is essential. AppDynamics, they have to make it important. That's on Cisco to make it important. Quite frankly. And I think that's again, I think that's one of the things that the show has to do. But you know, it's interesting, John, as you mentioned that, let's unpack it even a little bit further. You said it's a networking issue and you're right. Network's clearly part of the component. I mentioned earlier, it's a distributed data issue where the networks has a major impact on that. We might even say it's a distributed application issue. The point is, we are still in the midst of creating the language that we're going to use to describe how to approach and solve these problems. That hasn't been done yet. I mean, people say, oh yeah, let's talk about blockchain and security or let's talk about data gravity or all these other concepts that we're throwing around out there. We need more precision. We need more conventional agreement, consensus. There's a lot of work that this industry has to do to really address the challenges that Cisco and the people at this conference face as they try not only to ensure their relevance looking forward, but very importantly, to solve these extremely complex problems of how we're going to dramatically expand the distribution function and the distribution of data while at the same time increase things like near real time. So I like to say, for example, John, I like to say that the edge is not a place, the edge is a time. That at the end of the day, what's most important is can you process something in the time envelope required and the place is just a way of measuring that. These are all major challenges that Wikibon research is focused on, but also folks at this conference are going to have to address if we're going to solve that next generation of business opportunities. That's Peter Barris, Head of Research for SiliconANGLE Media, also a general manager of wikibon.com. Check out the research. A lot of great stuff going on. Digital transformation, evaluation of data and certainly cloud computing infrastructure and the impact for customers. Check it out at wikibon.com. I'm John Furrier. We're about to kick off two days of wall-to-wall coverage with Cisco as they put their foot in the water in the cloud DevOps developer community for IoT and applications. It's where applications meets infrastructure. Infrastructure is code. We'll be right back with more coverage. Stay with us for two days at Cisco DevNet Create.