 Live from Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE. Covering DevNet Create 2019, brought to you by Cisco. Hi, welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with John Furrier. We are live at Cisco DevNet Create 2019 in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum. John, this is the third DevNet Create, but DevNet started as this ground swell sort of grassroots out of Cisco Live about five years ago now. You and I just came from the keynote, which I think is really awesome to highlight that it was kicked off by two strong female leaders in technology who will be on our program this week. I'd love to get your perspectives on what you saw and heard today, knowing the history of DevNet as you do. Yeah, you mentioned strong leaders. Susie Wee has been now promoted to Senior Vice President and CTO of DevNet and DevNet Create two communities. And that's been a really interesting ride because she's got real technical chops, but has a good business acumen and saw the wave early on. I remember me, I met Susie Wee at, I'd say almost seven years ago in and around Palo Alto. She always had that energy, but she's super technical, great business mind. She saw the open source wave and cloud connecting. And then when she came to Cisco with DevNet, she took that open source kind of mojo and took the developer community, which were very centric to Cisco plumbing, moving packets from point A to point B, configuring large scale networks to much more of a developer focus. And she's evolved that program and started DevNet Create three years ago to bring in the cloud native, used to be called the hoodie crowd, the people who were coding in the cloud cloud first. And she wanted to cross-pollinate them together with DevNet. And the result of that experiment or that kind of mechanism and community collaboration has changed the face of Cisco. Absolutely. You can see Chuck Robbins as the CEO and others within Cisco seeing that they're on this new wave and it's actually paying off dividends for them. It's changed their strategy, customers like it, the community has grown, the metrics are all kind of up and to the right on terms of adoption. So success from that experiment, they're doubling down and they're bringing real technology, real workshops, a real co-creation, a real community vibe and it's working. So again, don't fix what's not broken. And in terms of the community, one of the things that Suzy mentioned this morning is that the DevNet community is now over 585,000 members strong. They talk about this, yes, it's a conference, but it's also, it's a strong community, it's hands-on learning, it's code and the theme of the event, see it, learn it, code it. They did a great job only in the first hour of the keynote about actually showing some great examples and also how, to your point, Cisco is evolving digitally, IT transformation and how they are really staying quite far ahead of their competition. It's interesting because one of the things that we've been doing in the queue for 10 years, we've seen a lot of trends come and go. This one we like a lot. We use the term builders, creators, Andy Jassy, use that term builders. That's what they talk about, this new era of this renaissance of value creators. They're building stuff and with cloud computing and with now AI and other things coming to the table, there's an unlimited tool set out there and platforms and computing with cloud computing, you can now build things faster, so conceiving it, understanding it and building it is critical. Now what's interesting about DevNet Create is that they're bringing that, again, that community vibe where it's not just a bunch of hackathons and a bunch of rah rah, use our code and get developers locked into a platform. It's authentically and genuinely right meaningful to the developers because they do it in a group setting. They do it with communities, so they have, they do have hackathons, they got creation tools, they got different stations and they roll out the toys, if you will. Meraki has things going on here, there's all this new technology. So Cisco's bringing the goods to the party. That's like I always say, when someone brings beer to the party, everyone's having a good time. So they're bringing the technology and the tools into the community without kind of jamming it down their throat. That creates a good vibe. That's cross-pollinating to the core Cisco with DevNet and every year the DevNet section within Cisco Live becomes the number one place everyone goes to because that's where the feedback is and the company's listening and this is part of their flywheel. So this is a game changer for Cisco because their culture was pretty much build networks, run them, lock them down, highly secure. Everything's good, but now the world's changed. They want programmability and this again changes the culture of Cisco. So I think it's a great move and I love this, I love the vibe here and this event's popular because there's engineers here. So you have people who are savvy with code, savvy with community and savvy with building and creating and being creative. So design thinking to hackathons to any workshop you can imagine. And there's engineers here to your point of all and Susie's point too of all levels, of all ages. And I'm always curious about the engineers and the folks who've been in an institution for a very long time and are very used to working in that traditional model. How do they get access to the right education tools to start shifting their own mindset? Because really in this day and age, they don't have a choice whether they want to continue working at a company like Cisco or any other company these days that has to be a tech company. So you see all levels of coding experience here. They provide education for that. You also see all levels of the veterans, those in their early stages of their career and those in their mid-career. So a lot of collaboration in this community. And the CEO Chuck Robbins points out and always kind of gives Susie weak call-outs because even though developer.sysco.com is the destination that you can go to to learn, go to developer.sysco.com to get kind of the goods, that's from Cisco's perspective. But what Susie and Chuck have recognized is that the real action's out in the organic community so the co-creation, the learnings. This is where the canary and the coal mines are. This is where companies are getting early feedback on products. This is where peers are starting to figure out what's right. So if companies listen to their community not just provide the goods and have some destination URLs to go to to get onboarded, it's the action is in the organic communities. That's where people are developing friendships. That's where discovery's happening. People are learning. And that's where the action's happening. So Cisco's actually listening. So this is an interesting change for Cisco. And it seems like to your point on the listening, it's almost becoming the lifeblood of Cisco and really giving them this fuel and momentum to allow any type of industry, the SVP and I think CTO of Maraki was saying, we don't build specific solutions for specific verticals. This is for all types of verticals because every industry has to transform and become a tech company. But this community really seems like it's, I don't want to say a rebirth of Cisco, but it almost feels somewhat something similar, but really that lifeblood of this transforming organization. Well one of the things that's not going to be on the financial analysis in the look at the 10Ks and all the Wall Street guys are going to go and squint through the numbers and look at the financial analysis, try to figure out where the stock's going to be. But if you look at what's going on with Cisco, if they can continue to do what they're doing, if they convert their core developers in DevNet and allow this cross-pollination to happen with cloud computing, you're going to start to see product transformations happen faster. You're going to start to see business results that aren't reflected in any kind of pro-former or forecasted financial analysis. And this is going to put pressure on Cisco. Cisco's under a lot of pressure and this old school guard manages at Cisco. We're like, no, the data center, we got to hold down. And so if Cisco doesn't cannibalize itself by bringing in the new faster, that's the trick of the management. This is Chuck Robbins hardest job as the CEO is to understand when to start cannibalizing pre-existing businesses like data center servers, UCS, and have them change over to a scalable revenue model on the cloud side. So they're in a transition. I think they're in good shape. The way they're on is positive, but the real upside to this is if they can convert those network engineers into coders, they would have an army of awesome, talented people setting and building out the next generation data centers to cloud computing architecture. So strategic strike, if they can pull it off and they continue to do it, that's what we're going to be watching. Well, we're about six weeks or so, I think, before Cisco live, which is down in San Diego, the queue will be there. What are you thinking? You gave a pretty good kind of your perspectives on what you're thinking. What are some of the things that you think we're going to hear and see and feel and learn from Cisco Live? I think we're going to hear some more of the same of what we're seeing here when we start Cisco Live. I still think that Cisco's got some internal reorganizations to do to get on this wave. There's an article in Fortune magazine this week talking about the rise and fall of Kleiner Perkins and the thesis was they were on the wrong wave, missed two generations of investments. Cisco right now has to decide what wave they're going to be riding into the future. That's Chuck Robin's strategic imperative and I think we're going to start to see more and more of the Cisco ship turning to get on the wave of cloud, cloud native, hybrid cloud. And I think multi-cloud is probably the biggest opportunity Cisco has and they can bring multi-cloud as a multiple network, multiple programmable network. That to me is a way worth riding. The question is, when does it need time to revenue? When does the whole ship just go full steam ahead? I think it's still going to be transitioned but we'll probably hear more of more DevNet, more DevNet Create, more programmable networks, more use of data, a lot of multi-cloud. Yeah, and this year there are three tech tracks, one on enterprise transformation which is something that we'll talk about with our guests over the next two days and we've got businesses have real-time data access, AI and machine learning, infrastructures that are programmable now, how are, what are the tools and the trends that enterprises are using to generate business insights that actually drive outcomes? Yeah, so I think that all these tracks kind of point to the big high-level pillar trends that I think Cisco has to really nail and I think they have clear sights to this, they just got to put the wheels on the bus and get the bus rolling and that is three areas. Application modernization, so a renaissance and application development, so you're seeing a new kind of app developer emerging, we hear about that all the time, you know these guys want infrastructure as code, those app developers are going to be coming into the enterprise in a large scale and they need to be hybrid and multi-cloud oriented, so application modernization, a renaissance in applications, Cisco has to be on that and they got app dynamics for that and a variety of other cool things. Hybrid and multi-cloud absolutely is going to be the architecture for enterprises and the third area is security, those are the things I think if Cisco can nail those three things, they will be well-positioned and they've got to bring the tech to the table and have product leadership, so that to me I think that's going to, we're going to see a lot of that at Cisco Live and that's I think the core plan. Well we'll be listening for that over the course of the next two days, John and I are fortunate to be here for today and tomorrow with a spectrum of guests from Cisco folks, DevNet folks, partners, users of the technology and members of active members of the DevNet community, so John looking forward to being here the next two days. Stick around, John and I are going to be right back from Cisco DevNet Create 2019 with our first guest.