 Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's Ecosystem Partnerships. Okay, welcome back live with theCUBE here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, been co-host all week here for three days. The live coverage day one kind of winding down. Great keynotes, CEO of Cisco laying out the next generation network, and it's not just the old networking, it's a whole nother thing. And our next guest is Salman Aswadala, who's the CTO and VP and engineer in NetNology.io. Like technology, NetNology.io, former Cisco Fellow been 20 years. Distinguished engineer. Distinguished engineer, sorry. Fellow distinguished, well, you look distinguished today. So how many years have you been at Cisco? 22 years. 22 years, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for the invitation. So I got to ask you before we get into the company, which we were talking before we came on camera, you're doing really, I think you're on the front end of a big wave, we see, certainly in theCUBE. But you've been at Cisco 20 years, and I've been working with Cisco since the beginning of time, it was in 1993. You know, in some capacity or another on the industry. And I've had friends with sole companies at Cisco. There's always been a debate within Cisco's engineering organization is how to move up the stack. Yeah, this one team, yes, no, so there's been, but now it's time. Yes. Can you add some color and reaction to that? Because I think that's kind of where it is now. So all those conversations even go back 15 years ago. Where in the stack should we go? What's the right time? Talk about some of the history of Cisco. Now they're moving up the stack. Yeah, so I think first of all, just to start with, our company name is netknowledge.io, right? But our tagline is full stack system integrator, because we call ourselves a full stack system integrator. Because okay, we know in networking, we know Cisco, right? But we know how to move up in the stack as well. You know, with the APIs and the SDKs and whatnot, right? So the thing I think what has happened when you kind of look into this from Cisco's perspective, and I was there for 22 years, I am what I am because of Cisco, right? Like when people say in Cisco, when they work in Cisco, I am Cisco, but I still say I am Cisco because all of our business, 70% of our business is around Cisco. But the thing is when people are in Cisco, or from Cisco's perspective, when they say, okay, we're a software company and all of that good stuff, they look at the software from networking perspective. But the world, the industry, when they say software, they're kind of talking about up in the stack from the application perspective. And this is what you see even at Cisco, they're sort of trying to pivot and all the acquisitions which are happening is around that, that they're acquiring companies which are basically up in the stack. They're more application-based companies and also they're building some organically some stuff in there as well, so. What's interesting is that the trend is their friend right now because they're getting to have their cake and eat it too, they're going to have best of both worlds. The networking is becoming more and more important with software to find. And then you've got Kubernetes, which Google Cloud is out there on stage today. You've got Kubernetes and containers and service meshes coming on. That all look like networking. It's got words like policy, QOS. I mean, this is networking world. Moving it up the stack. What does that mean for a customer? Is that the path in your mind? Yeah, and I'm a big believer of that. I'm a big believer of that even before leaving Cisco for last five years when I was, last five years of Cisco I was basically working around all of these SDN, NFV, APIs and making sure in organizations that I was leading or I was part of that how do I enable our engineering force to do some of that, to gain those capabilities. So, and this is what we are trying to mimic, right? On a much smaller scale in our company that we have, the way we sort of call it, we have a bunch of hybrid engineers and the people who are CCIs, but they can also code as well. So this is our sort of a focus because just like what you said, John, like five years ago or three years ago when people talked about this stuff it was only about, okay, if you're a data center, cloud, these things matter. But now, if you really see all Cisco solutions are around APIs, around SDKs, around SDN and NFV concepts, right? So let's say if you look into Cisco enterprise solution like SDA or SDVAN, right? It's all around that. If you look into collaboration, Spark and Tropos all around that. So the point is that for any network, right? For any engineer or any organization to get to the next level, they have to go through this evolution. And that's scaling too, for them too. The network's got a scale and the new software environment. You bet. So that's been a big debate in the networking world, Salman, for many years now is, okay, you know, I ran networks, wait, I have to be a coder? Yeah. Maybe there's not that skill set. Will my solution providers and my software providers and the platforms I build on take care of some of that? Or is the traditional role of the network dead? You're saying your company's got a hybrid role, but what percentage of people that are the CCIEs, the network admins today, how many of them need to be coding, developing, working with APIs and everything in the future? Yeah, I think the way I've sort of looked at it is that there is some pushback, right? There's some pushback, but mainly more in the, I would say younger generation, right? They get it, you know, they get it because if I give you an example of our company, you know, we are 15 people, between 15 to 20 people company, the last two hires we had, these were fresh grads, computer science grads and what I asked them to do, first six months, go get your CCNA. So then they start to understand some of the basics of the networking, so they can work with our senior CCIE engineers, right? Who know how to, you know, write 50 line of Python script, but they can work with the coders to get bigger things developed. That's the new strategy for millennials. Throw them in CCIE training. Get them up to speed. Okay, I got to ask you the question because I want, the net knowledge of the company you're the co-founder of is small, but you're doing a new thing. You're taking an SI-like approach, obviously Cisco DNA is in your blood. You're a Cisco family, if you will, but you still got to work with other platforms like Amazon and whatnot. As you guys go out, there's a trend towards automation and we're seeing that professional services, whether they're from global SIs, the trend is towards accelerating down the cycle of deployment, faster, faster, faster. It's almost like, you know, the old days was back in there, eight months to roll out an SAP deployment. Now that's eight weeks, now it's going to be eight minutes. This is the trend. It requires automation. What's your vision on how this is going to pan out going forward, because it's the beginning of a new kind of cloud scale at a service level. What's your vision? So if you really see from the compute world guys, they were already doing that stuff for the longest time and they always asked us, the networking people, how come, you know, if my CAPEX is kind of 30%, but my OPEX is 70% when it comes to the networking because we were lacking all of those capabilities. And the reason was that all the vendors, right, they had these closed systems. But now with this whole trend of SDN, NFV, and people want to have more control, Cisco and a lot of other vendors, they have all opened up their APIs and given the SDK. So now you have the capability to really kind of go and take this, you know, talk to the compute guys that okay, you know, yeah, you're ahead of the game, but we are catching up as well by using all of these different tools what we are using in our deployments day in, day out, right? So if I give you an example, recently we did a project for a customer which was a multi-vendor fabric, VXLand Fabric, fabric for data center, and we automated that whole deployment using Ansible Tower, right? So the thing is that if you would have done that manually, my God, you know, it would have taken a long time, but now you could do it in minutes, right? So I was talking about the DevNet explosion because obviously we've reported all day today, came out of the keynote, over a half a million developers are on DevNet. Suzy Wee who's heading up DevNet and now DevNet Create, which is the cloud native version of DevNet. Those two worlds are coming together and you're seeing network guys, even old school folks adopting cloud native. It's a natural migration. The younger guys are going and getting networking, as you pointed out. DevNet's been popular. You're seeing some great demos here. You can get a free Meraki switch if you code a little bit, take it home with you and play with it. A lot of tools, a lot of APIs, as you're talking about, this is the new software development environment. What are you guys doing with DevNet? Can you share some insight into some of the things that you're doing that's relevant, things that you're kicking the tires on? What's up? Okay, so first of all to start with, right? We do a lot of work with Cisco DevNet and we are so humbled and honored by that because we get to learn while we're kind of working on a lot of cool stuff, right? And then we can go sell that to our customers. But just to kind of tell you tomorrow, Susie V is announcing DevNet's code exchange you might have heard about, right? So we are among those few partners who have contributed to that code exchange. So we have put our code for everybody, go get it, play with it. We have two, like a couple of use cases we have shared on that code exchange, free for everybody, is think about you have Cisco VNFs running on AWS. How would you use Cisco Cloud Center to model and deploy that service on AWS? Using the APIs and then in the back end we have done scripting using Python and Shell and Ansible, you know, these sort of things. So we are basically kind of, and also we have a booth over here at the DevNet zone partner village and we are demonstrating some of these demos over there as well. And that's really the standard. Now people are actually getting the scale up in multiple clouds, then deploying. That seems to be the big trend, automation there. Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, because, you know, as I said, the way we are partnered with Cisco, we are also partnering with AWS and GCP. So we have like close to 35 certifications in our team, you know, including 13 CCIEs, so. You're a veteran at Cisco, obviously to work at Cisco that long, I mean, it's very entrepreneurial insights that's always kind of been there. It's still a big company when you were there, but now you're an entrepreneur. What's it like on the other side? Oh my God, you know, I'm living someone's dream, you know, and I'm blessed to be, you know, afford to do this, right? Because it's just, it's awesome time for us. You know, we're really kind of, of course it's a little stressful, right? It's a heavy lift there, it's not easy, right? Yeah, but you know, me being in the Silicon Valley and I wanted to kind of do this, but I tell you, you know, I recently, Cisco included me in the Cisco designated VIP, which is a very selected group of people in worldwide, so I'm one of those people, and I wrote a blog about that, and I said something in there that, you know, I, although I have left Cisco, but I don't feel like I've left Cisco because I'm still, you know, all my- Extended family. Yeah, extended family. All right, so what's up for the company? What's next? What's your mission? What's your hiring? What are you working on? Share some insight into what's next for you guys. What's on your road map? Yeah, so it's the growing pains, right? It's the growing pains, we are growing, we are, you know, our work is expanding, we are basically hiring some good talent, right? But more exciting, something that we're also building a platform, right? So hopefully in the next six months we're going to be releasing something around that as well, which is again, think about, you know, as I said, we were recently named as a top 10 SDN providers by Enterprise Networking Magazine. So we are focusing on three Cisco SDN solutions, ACI and data center, SDA and branch, and campus, and SDVAN on the VAN side. Now think about that you have segmentation and all of these solutions. How you can simplify this whole thing, right? How you can, you know, map these different parameters between these three different solutions. So we are working on some cool ideas and some product as well. So that's something really exciting for us. Are you guys self-funded? Until now we are all privately funded, yes. Paul, I'll put the hard question to you. As a startup, congratulations by the way, you know, we know all about startups, we start up ourselves. It's a, you got to, it's growing pains, but it's fun, it's hard work, but it's a whole different joy. But what problem are you solving? I mean, when you look at, when you're hiring an engineer, what's the tough problem that you guys are trying to tackle? If you could boil it down into, when we say the full stack, great mission, what's the hard problem that you guys are trying to solve? So we just want to further simplify the Cisco story, or, you know, and as a matter of fact, in some of these SDN NFE based environments, right? That's our goal, that how we can further simplify it, because, you know, we are small enough that we can, you know, tackle some of these things. So tackle the complexity. Yes. That's where your mission is. Yes, yes. So thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great to meet you. Great to have you here. Thanks for sharing your insight here on theCUBE with us. Live here. I appreciate the opportunity and the help of that. Yeah, let's follow up. Love what you're doing. I think the future's going to be changing the game on how professional services are built, deployed, and leveraged, certainly code sharing. Collaboration is the new competitive behavior. You don't have to beat the other guy to win. You can work together. This is the new normal. This is what's going on at Cisco Live here in theCUBE. We're bringing all the content. Stay with us. We'll see you tomorrow for day two of coverage. Thanks for watching. Thank you. Thank you.