 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. The run, welcome back to the theCUBE's exclusive coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, Stu. This is a wrap up of the show. It's just day three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage and I got to say, I'm surprised on how it's evolved and the clarity of what's happening is coming into focus. We had a great kickoff, I thought, on day one. I thought we laid it out and kind of predicted and connected the dots on what was going to happen. But some kind of new white spaces were filled in. I want to get your thoughts on it. One, DevNet success with the number of developers, clearly a number of success. But what's really interesting after watching all the activity here at DevNet, talking to people in the hallways, is that DevNet is changing the face of Cisco. Because Cisco has an energy and an openness now that's bringing the momentum and success and proven success of open-source software to the networking layer, engaging and energizing the core base of the Cisco constituent, which is the customers, the network engineer, and allowing a path to cloud-native, a path to multi-cloud, and a path to innovation. I mean, this is the story, in my opinion, at this event. There was some announcements, certainly, that tie into it, but the notion of what DevNet and DevNet create are proving, besides being good execution by Susie Wee and the team, is that this is a tell sign that the programmable network is at a seminal moment where, like the iPhone was in 2007, that changed telephony and created apps. The network is now programmable and new things are going to happen. This is, to me, the biggest story here at DevNet. Yeah, and John, in case somebody's just listened to our rap and hadn't heard the three days of coverage here, that number is 500,000. It was up, Chuck Robbins announced it on stage, on day one here on Monday, 500,000 developers registered. And by the way, Susie said, we'd actually, we kept having to scrub the list and bring it down, so we had 300,000 and went down a little bit. She's like, aren't we still growing? And now the momentum continues, so they're growing. But, you're right, John. We've done two of these Cisco lives. You and I did the Barcelona show and we did this show. And what's been crystallizing and what I learn and in processing here that actually excites me is I'm a networking guy and so many waves of these technologies, remember it was like, oh, Ethernet fabrics are going to change everything. So SDN will totally revolutionize everything. I kind of looked at things and I was like, we're fixing networking problems and how do I tie that to the business? Oh, I need to be more agile and I need to move faster. The punchline to what does it matter this intent-based networking, which is kind of a wonky term, but really we are building new applications where the network is how we do that. It's built for microservices, it's this modern environment and I have to have this DevNet ecosystem to enable it because it can't just be I'm managing my switch and I'm going in, okay, I download software and I do some things over here. It's this is the career path for all of the people that the 25 years of CCIEs that we had here, we've had this huge line next to us here of everybody getting their badges and they've got their area where they've got a little bit of special treatment for the CCIEs. There's an army of them and that's been Cisco's strength and can they take that army and get them ready for the new guerrilla warfare that is this modern application building and John, how many times have people said, ah, networking, they're a bunch of plumbers sitting down in their wiring closet, they'll be left behind? Yeah, and this is the false narrative and that's absolutely the case. There definitely was a lull there. If you look at Cisco and what's going on in the networking world, we've talked, this is our ninth year at theCUBE, Stu, you and I have pontificated and rift many times about the network's the bottleneck and it's always the network, everybody comes down to the network which is why the network guys have always been the most powerful in companies but here's what's happening here. The gestation period of SDN is interesting dynamics so here's what I think no one's yet reported and I think this is the real story. The SDN has been incubating and gestating now for what, four years, give or take, roughly? So SDN's embedded in at the network layer, the network's getting smarter. Then you've got the cloud scale happening and you've got security issues in cyber, you've got cloud scale in the public cloud, accelerating the valuation of things. This costs this for per minute so creating the economic kind of disruption. Then you have the Kubernetes on the scene taking Docker containers and making it a global container, it's not just Docker, all containers generically as a key vehicle for wrapping around legacy and with Kubernetes and now with service mesh on the horizon there is a clear, visible path to the value creation. Combine that with the continuing explosion of open source. Open source has proven that the way to run things in the open is exactly how DevNet's doing it so all these things are elements that have just come together at a perfect time and Cisco is taking advantage of it and we were critical of Cisco at Barcelona by saying they'd be crazy not to double down on this. I would quadruple down on it. It's proven not we own the network, you got to go through us. Blockchain points to, I was just setting a blockchain session today. The central authority model in communities is flattening. This is the new normal. I think Cisco has lighting in a bottle here. Let's see what they do with this too. I don't know what your reaction to that is but they have an opportunity to make the network programmable, energize their base, it's just really exciting. I got to say if I worked at Cisco, I would be all over the DevNet, the DevNet create, get in the cloud scale and ride that wave. Look John, Cisco has been dominant in networking so long that there's been so many waves hitting against it and said we were going to overtake Cisco. Open networking is one of those big waves. I've been to many conferences and know a lot of the companies we've interviewed on theCUBE, many of the companies that are going to go take a chunk out of the monolith that was Cisco. Well, Cisco, they're not deaf. They're listening to their customers. They're disrupting themselves. They are disrupting themselves and especially, the line I heard for years was, Cisco was the standard. It's like oh, well, they're spending, they're dominating at the standards bodies and trying to push their way through. Well, they've got the customers and they've got an ecosystem and while they've invested in open source over the years and we've talked to many of them, this DevNet activity has really pushed along and is impressive. Doesn't mean that there aren't some pockets where other people are more advanced with the technology. You can always have the debates as to who is more open than the others which you and I have gone down many times but it is impressive to see how Cisco is changing. What's here, the excitement has been palpable and it's not just, it's an infrastructure show. It's a networking show. When you and I interviewed Rowan Trollop at the Barcelona show, it's Cisco of the Future is a software company and they are making progress. If you give a little bit of a nudge as to what they didn't have, it's like there weren't a ton of announcements but the ones that they were, they were talking about the progress they make, like the DNA center. Look, if you want to look for critiquing, I mean you can look anywhere in anyone's life and find faults. There's plenty of things that Cisco's not advanced on but time's on their side. They don't have to have baked out Istio version running on switches. That's coming down the road. They can work with Kubernetes. We saw some great demos in here. So I think time is a good friend for them right now but they're doing all the right things. So again, it's an opportunity. The other thing I've noticed with the DevNet and the DevNet Create and all of our CUBE coverage do, you know, I've been looking at the CUBE data and the SiliconANGLE and Wikibon data and a new kind of persona personality is emerging in at least in our audience and that kind of is a tell sign to innovation. One, developers are kind of forming two lines of developers. Developers, well there's three, three. Classic developers who just geek out and program but two new personas. Business-oriented developers who are being pulled to the front lines who are dealing with issues like capex, opex, digital transformation. And we're seeing that. People who don't want to get an MBA but they want to learn business. The other new category that I see developing here at DevNet is the entrepreneurial developer. This is the developer that has all the same attributes that someone starting a company would have. They're resourceful, they're looking at connecting the dots outside the box. They're using their creativity to identify using software to solve problems in the network. So this is kind of interesting because those are the ones that are going to jump on the grenades, take the chances and they're inside the company. So this is going to be a wealth creation opportunity for the networking because the networking is, right now I've been waiting, we've been waiting for the network to be scalable and programmable. We've been saying it for how many years? Your thoughts? Yeah, boy John, we live through, I've said it many times on theCUBE. The decade of making networking work properly in a virtualized environment was kind of painful. When we look at containerization, what's happening in the cloud native space, I think networking understands the networking ecosystem and especially Cisco knows what they went through before and they are tacking the space and going at it hard to try to make sure that they get on this next wave, win some mind share and don't lose these customers because John, something we've said many times is right now is probably the ripest time for customers to say I've trusted and used this company for a really long time but it's okay for me to try new things and therefore Cisco, its massive customers could be disrupted if they don't try it and move hard. The customers have to try new things too, that's definitely the case. Well okay, let's get into some of the landscape issues. We saw a lot of startups come on, growing startups, so the question of M&A will be M&A in the future Cisco but we had IBM on, we had NetApp on, AV networks, a lot of companies, we also saw Cohesity score a huge round of funding, $250 million, we haven't seen a lot of venture backed activity here at the show, we haven't seen a lot of VC announcements but the big round from Cohesity crystallizes the competitive landscape. Your thoughts, you've got the big players that are like IBM doing great with storage, cloudified, NetApp with Flexpod doing very well with the cloud. I mean, is the tide rising where everyone's floating and there's not a lot of competitive and if so, is the scale attainable for the startups or will they have to be bought by the big players? Your thoughts. John, to go back, we were just talking about DevNet, I actually feel like Cisco's pulling some of their ecosystem along. The storage networking interactions isn't the most exciting thing in the world and I spent 10 years living these environments. I mean, storage networking doesn't exactly get most people excited but it is one of the fundamental things it needs to make your environments work. Every time you did a bank transaction or bought a plane ticket, probably that was your storage and the networking underlined that making that work. So what's your point? The ecosystem is going to grow? The ecosystem is following Cisco's lead and getting involved in developer and cloud native activity. So we're not just talking about boxes anymore, that wave towards software, NetApp, really nice story as to how they fit into the multi-cloud environment. They kind of rode down on the box trend and as they really focus back on their core which has always been software, they're making some strong moves there. You mentioned two of the vendors we had on, Cohesity and Avi Network. Both of them, part of their funding is from Cisco. So Cisco investing in some of the hot areas, Cohesity, data protection. Don't forget live action was bought, Savas last Friday, their aperture of the market goes up. So you're seeing the partner network really interesting dynamic. You're growing, you're going to see more people come in. What's your vision on this? The ecosystem is very dynamic. So really good show floor here. You can feel the energy when you walk through this place and you go see what's happening. Big ecosystem is show, by the way, we didn't say it on the intro, but the number I heard is 26,000 which this is a good show. This is bigger than a VM world, smaller than an AWS re-invent, but really much more, it's not. It was my first time. My first show at Cisco Live in North America. I got to say, I wasn't expecting the show floor to be that good. I was like, okay, Cisco, we have the vendors out there, partners, a lot of people, typical enterprise show. I was blown away. Blown away by the energy of the future of creating value. I mean, the stories, it wasn't just people mailing it in. There's real compelling use cases of cloud scale, not just selling boxes too. And John, talk about community. You and I both have a lot of networking DNA and our backgrounds. I love this community. It's people that they love to collaborate, they love to share, they love to dig in. Lots of bloggers, there's big podcasting going on. We brought some of those people on the program. And I love, some of them are working for cool new startups. They're doing coding, they're doing developer activity. A section of this felt a lot like a KubeCon or even some of the AWS and Google kind of mojo that we see at the cloud show, which I enjoyed Barcelona, but that was my critique was they're not as in that multi-cloud world. They were talking about it, but they're kind of stuck in this transition. It's not like they're fully there. The Cisco still sells a lot of kit and everybody makes money, but we know this transition's going to take a while. Chuck Robin said on the keynote that there'd be no cloud without networking. Networking and cloud people have a symbionic relationship because networking people are inherently smart. Okay, now you can may argue once someone's sitting at a desk doing network, someone more have different personas inside that, but most of them are pretty smart, right? Networking people aren't dumbasses, so generally speaking. The cloud people are innovating on the app side and with the scale piece, also smart people. So when you get networking people with cloud, I just see the nice fit there. And I think Kubernetes and the Istio and the service mesh, I think that's where it connects because if you're a networking guy using Ansible, using Python, you're going to naturally gravitate towards Kubernetes because it's the same concept. So I think I'm watching that very closely. I think you and I have been talking about this at Linux Foundation. That's going to be the tell sign. If the network engineers can adopt the Kubernetes concept and take the service mesh to the next level, that to me is going to be a tell sign. Yeah, and John, we go to a lot of shows. We got some really smart people who came on the program. We're a bit of intellectual snob sometimes. You know, when we come on this program. No, I mean, we love to talk to smart people. As I always say, John, if I'm the smartest person in the room, I'm in the wrong room. And I'm really excited. Most of the time we're on theCUBE. We bring some really smart and interesting people on. Let's wrap this up. Actually, the big story is DevNet. I think the community approach is great. Christine Heckard came on. She's a new senior executive. Just started at Cisco when we were at Barcelona. We saw her there. She saw DevNet, kind of a fresh eyes in Cisco. What impressed me about my observing her on theCUBE and then watching her walk around is, she's fresh eyes and she's been in the industry. Her eyes were lighting up. She sees DevNet, she understands and she came on and talked about network effects. Stu, our business is community driven. theCUBE is very community oriented with the content. We have network effects in our business. And I think she hit on something that I think is the next conversation point is the network effects is a technical and business dynamic. And I think she's got our hands on a very successful narrative around where the value will go and then with the engineering and the business come together to create value. And I think DevNet has done the right thing with the open source model of being welcoming, not elite. And I think that is worth noting. Yeah, and a lot of hard work went into reaching where we are with DevNet today. I love, we dug in with Susie, with Mandy. One of the interviews I did, John Apostolophilus. He's one of the ones in the labs inside of Cisco. So it took, walk me through John, basically five years that led to this new DNA solution we had. We of course had some great VIPs on the program like Lynn Lucas, the CMO of Cohesity. Lee Howard and of course Zag and Sash himself. Eric Herzog, who both of those gentlemen, when you walked around the show they're everywhere. They're plastered on the screen before the keynotes. They're walking around and talking to them. So we love as part of our community to get to talk to those as well as, you know, just all different aspects in our, about 30 interviews we did this week. Well, we're looking forward to more coverage. So I want to thank you for great coverage. Thank the guys here. We're going to be going and covering Cisco, like a blanket, we're going to be hitting all their events, Cisco lives, Barcelona and the U.S. will continue, got a great thing going on here with the DevNet and the DevNet create events. Look for those, check out the cube.net with the Q-Series. We also want to put a shout out to the sponsors. We wasn't for sponsors. We wouldn't be able to bring the great crew here. Want to thank NetApp as the headline sponsor. NetApp's FlexPod, great stuff. Check it out. Those guys got a new module going on with cloud and on-premise, really creating a software model. And also Cisco, IBM, Live Action and AVI Networks. Thanks so much for that community support. That sends a signal that you're investing in the co-development of content and it's great stuff. And John, yeah, actually Cohesity and Presidio helping round that up. It's John highlight, one of the highlights of the show has to be the Ludacris party. Yeah, Cohesity's new funding, great concert. $250 million, it's the Ludacris round. Stu Miniman with the Don't Meme. Thanks for watching, we are here at Cisco Live. That's a wrap up for the show here on day three. I'm John Horst, Stu Miniman, thanks for watching.