 from San Diego, California. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, theCUBE is live at Cisco Live, San Diego, California, this year's sunny San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin and my co-host is Dave Vellante. Dave and I are going to be talking about Marocchi with Tony Carmichael, product manager, API and developer platforms from Cisco Marocchi, Tony, welcome. Yeah, thank you, I'm super happy to be here. See, we're in this really cool Marocchi t-shirt. I gotta find out where I can get one of those. We can get one for you for sure. All right, this is Marocchi takeover hour here in the DevNet zone. This DevNet zone has been jam packed all day yesterday, all day today. People are excited. Talk to us a little bit about what Marocchi is and then let's talk about what the takeover is and what people are having the chance to learn right now. Sure, yeah, so Marocchi founded in 2006. I can't believe it's been over 10 years now. We really started with the mission of simplifying technology, simplifying IT, making it easy to manage and doing so through a cloud-managed network. So that's really what Marocchi was founded. And then in 2012, Marocchi was acquired by Cisco. So we've continued to grow triple digit, double digit growth every single year and we've expanded the portfolio now. We've got wireless. We actually just announced Wi-Fi 6 capabilities. We've got switching. We've got security appliances. We've got video cameras. And then on top of all of that, we've got a platform to manage it. So you can go in and if you're in IT, it's all about is it connected? Is it online? And if there's a problem, solving it quickly, right? And so that's why we're really here at DevNet and doing the takeover because we're seeing this transition in the industry where really IT is more about being able to just get the job done and work smart, not hard. And a lot of times APIs and having a really simple platform to do that is paramount, right? So that's what we're talking about here. And the takeover, just to answer the other question, is an hour here where we just basically, everything is Marocchi, right? So we're doing training sessions, we're doing labs, we're doing education and some fun too. So we're doing social media and we've got beers if you want to come up and have a beer with us as well. All right, hit the DevNet zone for that. So how does Wi-Fi 6 affect, for example, what you guys are doing at Marocchi? Yeah, so that's a really great question. So Wi-Fi 6 means faster and more reliable, right? That is fundamentally what it's all about. Now Wi-Fi over the years has very quickly transitioned from nice to have to you and I check into our hotel and within seconds we want to be online talking to our family, right? So it's no longer best effort, it's must have. Whether it's in a hospital, a hotel, or an office environment. Wi-Fi 6 adds a lot of new features and functionality and this is true for Marocchi, for Cisco at large and it's all about speed and reliability, right? Now on the developer side, and this is a lot of what we're talking about here at DevNet, it also opens up completely new potential opportunities for developers. So if you think about, when you go to a concert, for example, and you see a crowd of 30,000 people and they're doing things like lighting up lanyards, the plumbing, the stuff making that tick is, it has to work at scale with 30,000 people or more and that's all being delivered through Wi-Fi technology. So it opens up not just the potential for us maybe as concert goers, but for the developer being able to do really, really cool things for tech in real time. So you talked about a simplification was kind of the mission of the company when it started and it had some serious chops behind it. I think Sequoia, I think Google was involved as well, right? So anyway, were you able to, or how have you affected complexity of security? Were you able to drive simplification into that part of the stack? So that's a fantastic question. If you think about, you know, this shift towards a cloud connected world, not just for Meraki, but for all devices, right? Consumer, you know, iPads, iPhones, Android. The thing that opens up from a security standpoint is that you have the ability from a zero day, right? So you got a zero day of vulnerability, the, you know, it gets reported to the vendor within seconds or minutes, you can roll out a patch to that, right? That is a very new kind of thing, right? And with Meraki, we've had a variety of vulnerabilities. We also work with the Talos team at Cisco, who are, you know, they've got over 250 researchers worldwide that are finding these vulnerabilities proactively. And again, within, you know, certainly within a 24 hour period, because we've got that connectivity to every single device around the globe, customers now can rely and depend on us to get that patch out sometimes while they sleep, right? Which is really like, it sounds nice and it sounds great from a marketing standpoint, but it's real, right? We have retailers that, you know, they're running their business on this technology, they have to remain compliant and any vulnerability like that, you got to get it fixed, right? Before it becomes like newsworthy, for example. So as networks have dramatically transformed and changed as has Cisco in the last, you know, you count name the number of years time. So we look at the demands of the network, the amount of data, the amount of video data that's being projected, you know, like 80% plus of data in 2022 is going to be video data. So in that construct of customers in any industry need to be able to get data from point A to point B across, you know, the proliferation of IoT devices, Edge Core, how can Meraki be a facilitator of that network automation that's critical for businesses to do in order to be competitive? Yeah, so it's a fantastic question. I think it's something that's at the heart of what every IT operation is thinking about, right? You hear about, you know, digitization. What does that mean? It means supporting the business and whatever they're trying to do. And a lot of times nowadays it is video. It's being able to connect in real time with a team that's maybe working across the globe. Now to get right to your question, there's two things that Meraki is delivering on that really enables IT teams, right? To deliver on that promise, or that really it's more an expectation, right? The first, you know, we've got a series of technologies including our SD-WAN product that allow for you to really get the most efficient effective use out of your WAN connectivity, right? So being able to bring in broadband, bring in whatever circuits you can get a hold of, and then do application delivery that is just reliable and dependable at scale. The other aspect to this is giving data and insights to the teams that are responsible and reliable for that delivery. And this is where APIs are really, you know, it's really at the heart of all of this because if you're operating more than, say, 50 sites, right, there's lots of beautiful ways that we can visualize this, right? And we can, you know, add reports that give you top 10. But the thing is, depending on your business, depending on your industry, different things are going to matter. So this is where Meraki is investing in an open platform and making it super easy to run system-wide reports and queries on, you know, which sites were slow, which sites were fast, prioritizing the ones that really need some love, right? And giving data back to the IT teams that have those big, hairy questions that need to get answered, whether it's, you know, your C-suite that's saying, are we at our SLA? Or just a really proactive team that's just trying to make sure that the employee experience is good. What about some of the cool tools you guys are doing? Like, talking about the Meraki camera, what's all about? Oh yeah, I mean, so the other thing I was thinking of when you asked about this was, you know, video as a delivery medium. Of course, it's necessary when you're doing, you know, a video conference saying and things like that. But when we look at, say, the Meraki MV, which is really our latest product innovation, it's really us kind of taking the architecture of a typical video surveillance system and flipping it on its head, making it really easy to deploy, really simple, no matter where in the world you are to connect and see that video footage, right? The other thing we're learning though, is that why do people watch video surveillance? Either you're responding to an incident, right? So someone tripped and fell, there was an incident, someone stole someone, or someone stole something, excuse me, or you're just trying to understand behavioral patterns. So when it comes to video, it's not always about the raw footage. It's really about extracting what we often call like metadata, right? So the Meraki MV, some of the really cool innovations happening on that product right now, are giving customers the end state visualization. Whether that's show me all the people in real time in the frame, give me a count of how many people visited this frame in the last hour, right? So imagine we have cameras all over, we want to know what those trends and peaks and valleys look like, right? That's actually what we're after. No one wants to sit there looking at a screen counting people. So this is where we're starting to see this total shift in how video can be analyzed and used for business purpose. So you're able to detect anomalies, you're basically using analytics to say, okay, show me what something changes. That's right, right? And we've seen some incredibly cool things being built with our APIs. So we've got a cinema, right? A really large customer, cinema's all over, and they're doing these immersive experiences where they're using the camera as a sensor, and they're saying, okay, when there's more than a handful of people, so we've got kind of a crowding within the communal spaces of the cinema, change the digital signage, right? Make it a really immersive experience. Now, they didn't buy the cameras for that, they bought the cameras for security, right? But why not also then, two birds one stone, right? Use that investment and use it as a data sensor, feed that in and make a completely new experience for people in the environment. So I can see a use case too, excuse me, Lisa, for security at a large venue. Oh yeah, big time, right? In fact, I think you demoed along that front. Susie and Mandy did, yeah. DevNet create where there was like a soccer, yeah, where there was like a soccer match and they're showing this footage and asking everyone, what did you see happen in a few seconds? And actually what they did was using Meraki, they were able to zero in on a fight that was breaking out, alert the venues security team and dispatch them within a very short period of time. Yeah, and we've seen like, there's amazing, there's tons of use cases, but that's a great example where you've got large crowds, really dynamic environment and you're not, again, you don't want to necessarily have to have folks just looking at that feed, waiting for something to happen. You want an intelligence system that can tell you when something happens, right? So we've seen a ton of really cool use cases being built and we're going to continue to invest in those open APIs so that our customer, you know, we can move at the speed of our customers, right? Because Meraki, like ultimately our mission is like simple IT, there's different layers of simple, like what matters to a customer is like getting what they need to get done, done. We want to really be able to enable them to innovate quickly and APIs really are the center of that. Yeah, and so talk a little bit more about your relationship with DevNet, how you fit into that and the symbiotic nature of Meraki and DevNet. I would love to. So we've been working with Susie and the DevNet team now for really since the start of DevNet and I think it's brilliant, right? Because Cisco, of course, from a networking standpoint, we're always at the forefront, but what we've started to see early on, and I certainly wasn't a visionary here, was this transition from, you know, just like your core quintessential networking to starting to like bring together your network stack with the ability to also write and rapidly develop applications. So that was kind of the precipice of like bringing together and founding DevNet, and we've been with DevNet since, which, you know, it's been exciting, it's also really influenced where our direction, right? Because it's a lot for us to see what are customers trying to do, how are they trying to do it, and how can we from the product side enable that through APIs, but then work with DevNet to actually bring, you know, bring that to life. So we've got, you know, developer evangelists working with customers, we've got solution architects working with customers, building incredibly cool things, and then putting it back out into the open source community. Building that community, I mean, that is really where we've had an amazing relationship with DevNet, right? That has been huge. Like we've seen our API adoption and usage just absolutely shoot through the roof. We're at 45 million requests per day, and it straight up like couldn't have been done without DevNet. The DevNet vision's amazing. We have Susie on in a minute, but I mean, why do you think other sort of traditional companies, you know, in the, you know, computer business, haven't created something similar? I mean, it seems like Cisco has figured out Devs, and you know, the traditional hardware companies haven't. So it's a really good question. Like, at the end of the day, it's an investment, right? Like, I think a lot of companies, like, tend to be quite tactical and look at, okay, like maybe here we are now and here's where we're going, but it's an investment and customers really say, okay, this is the thing that they're trying to accomplish, and we're not going to keep it closed and closed-source and try to develop intellectual property. We're going to enable and empower an ecosystem to do that. Now, I think like you're quickly starting to see this trend, right? Like, certainly I wouldn't say that Meraki or Cisco are the only ones that are doing this, which is this, you know, cultivation of technology partners that are building turnkey solutions for customers. You know, cultivation of customers and enabling them to be able to build and create things that perhaps Cisco might not even ever think about. But that is a shift in mentality, I think, right? And I think like, we're starting to see this more in the industry, but I am proud to say that like, we were right on that bleeding edge, and now we're able to ride that wave. Meraki's also had the luxury of being cloud-native, right, cloud-born. So our technology has always been, you know, at a place where if we want to deploy or create a new API endpoint that provides new data, like literally the team behind me can take that from prototype to production to test it into a customer within weeks. And that is, in many cases, what we're doing. It seems to me, looking at kind of alluding to Dave's point from a Cisco overall perspective, a company that has been doing customer partner events for 30 years, what started as a networker. We now know it is Cisco Live. Large organization, large organizations are not historically known for pivoting quickly, or necessarily being developer friendly. So this seems to me, what DevNet has generated in just five short years seems to be a competitive differentiator that Cisco should be leveraging because it's truly developer friendly. I could not agree more. I mean, and this goes right to the core of what I think has made us so successful, which is this, you know, this idea that at the heart of everything we do, we have to think about not just the customer experience, right, which is like, what does it look like to buy? What does it look like to unbox? What does it look like to install? And what does day two look like? But also, and very importantly, a distinct track around thinking about developer experience. A developer experience, like when you're first building APIs and things like, it's easy to say, okay, this is what they need, this is what they want. But Cisco, and really DevNet more than anything, has gotten to the heart of we have to think about the way these APIs look, the shape of their responses, the data they contain, the ease of use, the scale at which they operate, and how easy it is to actually build on them, right? So that's where you're going to start seeing more and more of our kind of SDKs and libraries and just a lot of, like we just this week launched the Automation Exchange. That is, again, right at the center of, we're listening, and we're not just listening to the customers who are trying to deploy 4,000 sites in a month or two, but we're also listening to the developers and what the challenge is that they're facing, right? I'd love to see more of this. I mean, we're seeing a huge amount of adoption across Cisco, and I think that there's other, there's plenty of other tech companies that are really, I think, just helping push this forward, right, adding momentum to it. Speaking of momentum, the Meraki momentum's going that way. I mean, it's good to, yeah, I would agree with you. Well, Tony, it's been a pleasure having you on the program, continued success. We're excited to talk to Susie next, and it's like this unlimited possibilities zone here. We thank you so much for your time. Absolutely, thanks so much, happy to be here. All right, for Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Cisco Live, San Diego. Thanks for watching.