 Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2018. Brought to you by Cisco. Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's live coverage here in Mountain View, California. Heart of Silicon Valley, the Computer History Museum for Cisco's DevNet Create. This is their developer ecosystem for cloud native. It's an extension to their popular and successful DevNet developer programs, a special event, really getting down and dirty on Kubernetes cloud native and how to create real-time applications on the cloud. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Lauren Cooney. Our next guest is Raj Krishna, who's the VP of Product Management, Francisco Muraki, doing some great things here, made a big announcement on stage. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me, it's a pleasure to be here. So before we jump into the speeds and fees of some of the real impactful things that you've been doing with this cool area in cloud, as you just had some news on stage, you announced it, you guys are giving away a lot of Benjamins and product. Yeah, we're going to be giving away, we're going to be giving away 1.4 million dollars worth of our products, our cloud-managed switches. And the reason why we're doing that is because we want to see the ecosystem, we want people to have access to our technology because they're going to build all kinds of cool and interesting applications that we may not have thought of. So by giving this gear away, we want to help evangelize and help promote the ecosystem. You guys are creating a nice culture here. I got to say, I give you guys props, second event you guys done with DevNet Create, where you're really looking at and aligning with the cloud-native developers. You got things, you got some hackathons, you got some team-oriented camps here, but really it's about giving them the enablement and the tooling to do things. You're not telling people, you need to develop this. It's not really, it's not, you're not jamming stuff down their throat. Talk about the role of that and what you guys are doing with your product and how does that fit in? Because IOT comes right to mind for me. New sensors, new things are happening. Talk about specifically the things that you guys are offering from a tech standpoint, tools that you offer, and some of the things you expect that might happen. Most definitely, but throughout the years as we kind of built out a very large-scale cloud management platform, we've realized that the need for external orchestration tools, external monitoring tools, data aggregation tools is paramount because people want to build not just interesting and cool applications, but they want to build security applications. They want to build data logging applications, analytics applications where they can take data from the infrastructure and then take data from their CRM, their customer resource management systems and mix and match that data to be able to understand, hey, is there a pattern here in terms of network traffic and foot traffic in my stores? So as we've come to terms with this trend, we've been building out a very rich set of APIs that can help you aggregate data, that can help you visualize data, and we've realized that that's not enough. So that's why we've been investing heavily in the ecosystem play. That's why we've actually set up dedicated teams at Meraki. We have a brand new solutions architecture team that is hyper focused and their sole mission in life is to enable developers, is to go out and evangelize the technology, but then also have whiteboarding conversations with those developers, give them sample code, show them other sample applications. They've also stood up a brand new application app store where third party developers can have their apps featured and they can have their apps purchased on their store. Take a minute to explain the Meraki's role in this ecosystem because it's a product, it's a switch, but it's not just hardware. Can you just take a minute just to lay it out? What does it do and what does it enable? Yeah, so the reason why Meraki was so successful and acquired by Cisco was the cloud management aspects of it, the ability to roll out and provision and monitor, manage and scale a network, whether it's wireless, whether it's routing, whether it's switching, whether it's security, and to do that at a gargantuan scale where you have 10,000 sites or 20,000 sites, that was Meraki's bread and butter, but almost by accident what we realized was that would give you a large scale programmable platform. So we built these APIs on top and what we've learned through the years is that this is a massively programmable orchestration layer, right? For being able to program things, being able to extract data at scale. Like what? Like program what? So let me give you an example. We have a service provider that we've worked with in Europe that services a million end customers and what they do is they're offering their services, they're broadband connectivity services, they're VoIP services and they're also offering Meraki hardware in their web stores. I can go to their web store and I can click, I want to buy a three year broadband contract and I want to buy these widgets that come with it. One of those widgets is a Meraki widget. When they click buy, that makes a series of API calls to the Meraki backend and everything gets provisioned automatically. Not just the Meraki services, but also the service provider's own portfolio services. So it's enabled a seamless ordering experience where someone can take Meraki, just as one part of the solution and wrap a bunch of other services around it and enable provisioning of that at scale. Versus the alternative is ship a box, unpack it, connect to it, ship a box to a warehouse, unpack it, plug it in, command line interface, command line interface, I mean it's a nightmare compared to what it has automated, turnkey. Right, exactly. And the way that we really see ourselves fostering this ecosystem and our role in the ecosystem is we're just the platform. We are enabling the platform. We want to make the platform easy to use. We want there to be rich documentation. We want there to be a set of APIs. We want there to be scripts that we can make available. But really the creativity is going to come from those developers who come on board and solve unique customer problems that we may not have even thought of. So it's about working with those people and making sure that they have the tools, the knowledge, the expertise, and just enabling them. So what would a traditional kind of Meraki developer look like? What kind of skills do they need? Do they have to have experience in networking or app development, or what are you really looking at? Yeah, we're getting experience with an entire range of different types of application engineers. People who are more mobile app centric, so we've seen mobile apps that are crafted that integrate with Meraki Beacons to trigger some kind of an action when I walk into a store. So very mobile app centric developers. We've seen a lot of interesting web centric applications. Developers who are provisioned in JavaScript, things like Ruby on Rails, building very rich front end visualizations of Meraki data. And then we've seen some even more hardcore networking engineers who really understand bits and bytes and the flows of data coming out of the network to, for example, take a net flow feed from our security appliance and say, hey, this is a threat and I'm going to create, using this API call that tells me this is a threat, I'm going to have a tie in with something like a light bulb so that light bulb goes off any time I see a network threat in my environment. So what's kind of cool and interesting here is I have a range of different types of developers with different types of skill sets and they're able to enable use cases and applications based off of their area of domain experience. All right, so I ought to ask the hard questions. This is the tough one. Increased surface area increases more potential security threats, malware. I mean, there's light bulbs out there that have, you know, connected to your Wi-Fi. I mean, they're basically a PC. Right. You've got a processor in there, so great for malware to attach to, sit there dormant, get inside the network. This is a huge concern. How do you guys look at the security paradigm for this? Absolutely and that's why building a large scale network means having security first and foremost in your mind. So we actually have a very rich set of security products that can help you secure your endpoints and help you secure your network. So just giving you an example here, we have a security appliance that actually integrates with Cisco's TALOS threat engine. Cisco TALOS is a team of hundreds of security researchers and they're constantly staying up to date with the latest security vulnerabilities, security patches, Trojans, malware, et cetera, et cetera. If you're running a Meraki security appliance, you have visibility into these real-time threats and also you can extract that data and visualize it in a third-party portal or you can save it for logging. So making sure that people are aware of the security threats, making rich tools available to our developer ecosystem that can help protect them against these threats and then also having a privacy-by-design mindset when we're building and constructing APIs. Let me give you an example. The upcoming laws in Europe, the GDPR laws going into effect May 25th, we're actually building APIs that will help you abide to these laws by letting you delete personally identifying information for a specific client. So we want to help our customers and our developers be compliant with GDPR for their end users. So if their end users come to them and say, hey, I was connected to this network but I want to be forgotten now, I want you to delete all my data, they can do that programmatically using an API. So it's the kind of entire spectrum, right? It's building the awareness, building the product suite, as well as building the tools to help developers build privacy applications as well. That's definitely enabling the developer ecosystem like we were talking about before. Now, what do you think is, when you talk about the industries that you're in, and I can see enterprises, retail and manufacturing and lots of different areas there and there's probably service providers examples where they can make a lot of money working with you guys and adding services to what they deliver to their customers. Where do you see kind of the most growth coming from or the most interest? Yeah, we see the most growth coming from kind of a range of customers across the board, to be honest with you. Some of our traditional sweet spot verticals that we're very, very, we were very strong in were distributed enterprise, retail and education because in these kinds of environments you often have lean IT teams that want to do a lot more with a lot less. But what we found is our historic sweet spot was that kind of mid-market customer between 100 and 1,000 employees but over time we've been moving more and more up market because we've been adding enterprise features, we've been really hardening and stabilizing the platform so that I can deliver enterprise networking at scale and what we're finding now is increasingly more and more interest from that very high-end premium segment of customer into the Fortune 1,000 companies. We're saying, this is interesting for all my branch sites. This is interesting for all my distribution centers or all my warehouses. So we're seeing growth across the board which is why it's such an exciting time to be at Meraki. That's awesome. Raj, good luck with everything. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. What's next for you guys as this thing evolves more programmability, more automation? More of everything. We're going to be launching more products. We're going to be crafting more APIs. We very recently released a new series of HD video surveillance cameras and we're seeing a ton of very interesting IoT type of applications where those are being used in manufacturing or farming. We're getting interesting API requests for that. So we're going to be continuing to invest heavily in our portfolio, build out more hardware products and more software features as well as more API calls. You guys are targeting the developers at the edge on the cutting edge, pun intended. I hope so. Great stuff. IoT, certainly a great opportunity for developers. Stuff that you couldn't do years ago now or possible, certainly with the cloud and IoT and Cisco's DevNet Create. I'm John Furrier, more live coverage here in Mountain View after this short break.