 From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Presenting Accelerating Automation with DevNet. Brought to you by Cisco. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studio with ongoing coverage of Cisco DevNet Create. We've been covering DevNet Create for a number of years. I think since the very first show and Susie, we and the team really built a practice, built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and getting Devs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software to find networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and developing solutions and using brain power that's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have our next guest, a partner. First one is Brad Haas. He is the engineering director for DevOps at Presidio. Brad, great to see you. Hey, Jeff, great to be here. Absolutely. And joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect for Cisco DevNet partners. And he has been driving a whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, great to see you. Thanks, Jeff. Great to be here. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Absolutely. So let's start with you, Chuck, because I think you're leading this kind of partner effort. And software to find networking has been talked about for a long time. And it really seems to be maturing and software to find everything, right? Has been taking over, especially with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the programability, customability in software and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is to have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. Yeah, Jeff, absolutely. So along this whole journey of DevNet where we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of our Cisco platforms. Most of Cisco's business is transacted through partners. And what we hear from our customers and our partners is our customers want a way to be able to identify, does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey? I'm trying to do a new implementation. I want to automate that. How can I find a partner to get there? And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices, going along this DevNet journey with us for the last six years. They really want to say, hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and give an edge to my customers to show them that, yes, I have these capabilities. I've built a business practice. I have technologists that really understand this capability and they have the DevNet certifications to prove it. Help me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what our DevNet partner specialization is all about. Right, that's great. And Brad, you're certainly one of those partners. And I want to get your perspective because partners are oftentimes a little bit closer to the customer because you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions. And just reflect on what happened back in March 15th when basically everybody was told to go home and you can't go to work. So there's all the memes and social media about who pushed forward your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO or COVID and we all know what the answer is. One of you can share some information as to what happened then and really for your business and your customers and then reflect now we're six months into it. Six months plus and this new normal is going to continue for a while. How's the customer attitudes kind of change now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment? And really we need to put in place some foundation to carry forward for a very long time potentially. Yeah, it's really quite interesting actually when COVID first hit, we got a lot of requests to help with automation of provisioning our customers and the whole digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there and I'd say it became more of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly migrating customers to new topologies where instead of the users sitting in those offices they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly and we did have a lot of success there in those beginning months with using automation and programmability, building provisioning portals for our customers to get up and running really fast. And that's what it looked like in those early days. And then over time I'd say that the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit. Now they're asking how can I take advantage of the technology to look at my offices in a different way? For example, how many people are coming in and out of those locations? What's the usage of my conference rooms? Are there situations where I can use that information like how many people are in the building at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that? Like do I even need this office anymore? So the conversations have really changed in ways that you couldn't have imagined before March. Right, now I wonder with you Chuck in terms of the Cisco point of view, I mean, the network is amazing. It had COVID struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly, entertainment, restaurant business, transportation, hospitality, but for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. And the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if you know kind of from your perspective as suddenly the importance of the network, the importance of security, and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that having DevNet with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space, as good a space as you could be given this new challenge thrown at you. Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. Cisco has always pushed the idea that the network is transformational, the network is the foundation. And as our customers have really adopted that message, it has enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. So for myself, I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years, this is the change to the normalcy as I never get on a plane anymore, but my day-to-day functions are still the same and it's built because of the capabilities we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry as far as kind of moving to that application type of economy, as we go to microservices, as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud, those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this COVID situation. And I think it's helped to justify the investments that our customers have made, as well as what our partners have been being able to do to deliver on that multi-cloud capability to take those applications, get them closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable to users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional four walls. Right, right. That's interesting. And Brad, you made a comment on another interview I was watching, getting ready for this one in terms of applications now being first-class citizens was what you said. And it's kind of interesting, coming from an infrastructure point of view where before it was, what do I have and what can I build on it? Now really it's the infrastructure that responds back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that apps first is the way to go because that gives people the competitive advantage that it gives them the ability to react in the marketplace and to innovate and move faster. So it's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. Yeah, no doubt. And I think that the whole push to cloud was really interesting in the early days. It was like, hey, we're going to change our applications to be cloud first. And then I think the terminology changed over time to more cloud native. So when we look at what cloud has done over the past five years with customers moving their assets into the cloud, in the early days that we were all looking at it just like another data center. But what it's really become is a place to host your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're no longer talking about the assets per se, we're talking about the applications what did those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially with the whole move to cloud native and microservices and the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure as code, you're now able to bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application as infrastructure as code, the application in the definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are all are wrapped together and you've got change control, version control and it's all automated. It's a beautiful thing. And I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. And when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking, I think everybody was trying to figure it out and they didn't really fully understand what that meant. Now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's Terraform or Ansible, whatever that might be, whatever method or tool that you're using to bring it all together, it's really interesting now. I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than those early days of SDN were out. Was it a controller or is it a new version of SNMP? Now it makes sense. It's actually something tangible. Right, right. But still Chuck, as you said, there's still a lot of APIs and there's still a lot of component pieces to these applications that are all run off the network that all have to fit together. We cover PagerDuty Summit and their whole thing is trying to find out where the problems are within the very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandons their shopping cart or whatever the particular application. So again, the network infrastructure and the programmability are super important but I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of and they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. Yeah, absolutely, Jeff. So the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference. I mean, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the internet. The amount of people necessary to be able to facilitate that type of traffic, if we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not scale. It's automation that makes that possible that allows us to look higher up. The ability to do that automatic provisioning now that we're in microservices, now that everything is cloud native, we have the ability to better adjust to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we can very quickly spend something up to take that load off where traditionally it was open up a ticket, let me get someone in there, let me fix it. Now it's instantaneously identify the solution, go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team, they just simply need to get notified that this happened and as long as there's traceability. And a point that Brad made as far as you being able to go through here doing the automation of the documentation side of it, I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the APIs from the infrastructure and then the ability to tie that into other systems like an IP address management or a change control or a trouble-taking system, that whole idea of I made an infrastructure change and now I can automatically do that documentation, update and record, I know who did it, I know when they did it and I know what they did and I know what the test results were. Even five years ago, that was fantasy land. Now today, that's just the new normal, that's just how we all operate. Right, right. So I want to get your take on the other trend which is hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, public cloud. You know, as I think you said Brad, when public cloud first came out, there was kind of this rush into we're going to throw everything in there then for different reasons people decided maybe that's not the best solution but really it's horses for courses, right? And I think it's pretty interesting that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're going to put their workloads and oh by the way, that might not be a static place, right? It might be moving around based on, you know, maybe I do my initial dev in Amazon and then when I go into production, maybe I want to move it into my data center and then maybe I'm having to do promotion or something I want to flex capability. So from your perspective and helping customers work through this is still, there's a lot of opinions about what is multi-cloud, what is hybrid cloud and you know, it's horses for courses. How are you helping people navigate that and what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through, you know, everybody talks about their journey. I think there's still, you know, kind of bumbling down past trying to find new things, what works, what doesn't work and I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. Yeah, yeah, no doubt it is still early days and you know, I go back to it being application centric because, you know, being able to understand that application when you move to the cloud, it may not look like what it used to look like when you move it over there. You may be breaking parts off of it. Some of it might be running on a platform as a service while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as a service and some of it might still be in your data center, those applications are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier, those resources, wherever they are, can be defined in that infrastructure as code and automation. But, you know, aside from provisioning, I think we focus a lot about provisioning when we talk about automation. We also have these amazing capabilities on the side of operations too. Like we've got streaming telemetry in the ability to gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before or at least in the early days of monitoring software, right? You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. It probably had a friendly name. Like maybe it was something from the Hobbit, right? Now you've got things coming up and spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place. And that thing, you used to know what that was now you have to quickly figure out where it went. So the observability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody should be paying attention to, moving forward with regards to when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers or, you know, in your premise, breaking that into microservices, you really need to understand what's going on and the programmability and APIs and, you know, Yang models are tied into streaming telemetry now. There's just so many great things coming out of this, you know, and it's all like a data structure that people who are going down this path and the DevNet path, they're learning these data structures and being able to rationalize and make sense of them. And once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or a switch, Amazon, you know, it doesn't matter. You're all speaking in common language, which is that data structure. That's great. Chuck, I want to shift gears a little bit because there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about, you know, DevNet really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco as really more of a software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you can put a little more color on that because clearly, as you said, partners are super important. It's your primary go-to-market. And Presidios, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world, that's a, you know, you said there's some, there's some, you know, non-traditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner that suddenly you guys are playing with because of really the software lead. Yeah, Jeff, that's exactly right. So as we've been talking to folks with DevNet, so whether it be at one of the Cisco Live events in the DevNet zone or at the prior DevNet create events, we'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resale market. This, what we're doing with the DevNet specialization gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem, share them with our extremely large DevNet community so they can get access to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner to partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they built a fantastic networking, they actually have the fantastic networking business, but they built this fantastic automation business that's there. They may come into a scenario where it's working with a vertical or working with a technology piece that they may not have an automation practice for. We can leverage some of these software-specific partners to come in there and do a joint go to markets so they can go where that traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value on top of that traditional stack. That brings us to this business outcomes that the customers are looking for in a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion. That's terrific. Well, again, it's unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the Cisco DevNet shows, they're still small, they're still intimate, there's still a lot of information sharing and great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the Computers Museum I think the last couple of years in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together. I hope maybe for next year's event, but thank you very much for stopping by and sharing the information, really appreciate it. Yeah, pleasure, happy to be here. All right, thanks a lot. That's Brad and Chuck, I'm Jeff. You're watching Cisco DevNet Live coverage on theCUBE. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.