 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2020. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Everyone, welcome back to the Cisco Live 2020 show in Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE's live coverage, four days of action. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman's in the house. We've been really interviewing all the thought leaves all the action here in the DevNet zone of Cisco. We're here with Susie Wee who's the senior vice president, chief technology officer and general manager of Cisco's DevNet and CX ecosystem. Success, Susie, great to see you again. Thanks to you with our third year. We've been watching the growth of DevNet explode and DevNet create a separate event for developers. Great to see you. Great to see you, great to be here. So how does it feel to be on a wave of success? You've had quite an impact in the industry and I think the biggest story that's going on in the industry is the role of developers. You guys have embraced that four years ago, brought it all together and really just been marching to that cadence of just humble training, education, and programming all the Cisco products, enabling what it looks like to be the future of Cisco. Yeah, I mean, it's humbling to me. So, you know, what's been really great. It's really all about our community. And you know, I mean, you guys have jumped in, been with us on this journey. You've seen it like all around us in terms of how it's progressed. But what's interesting is that, you know, the networkers, the software developers, the DevOps pros, the people who are coming into DevNet are really progressing. They're getting to the next level and then we have more and more new people coming in. And what happens is the technology keeps advancing, right? So networking, security, going to intent-based networking, multi-domain, how do you integrate these things? Cognitive collaboration, IoT and edge computing. As all of this comes together, you get to a really interesting place. But what happens is we have to think about IT departments, networking departments, like how do people use this to their advantage, right? So there's actually users of people who install and run these things and how do they make that available and actually get business advantage out of that infrastructure? And that's what this is all about. And the big theme of Wendy on the opening keynote kicked off before David Geckler came on. She had a slide that I thought encapsulates what I think is the future of all business. And you guys have been on and I want to reference it. It was people and communities, business model and business operation was almost like a three-legged stool. You've been on this because your team, Mike Adams was on theCUBE just now, said people are betting their careers on Cisco. But Cisco's betting the business on the people. It's ecosystem, it's developers. It's CCIEs, it's certifications. This dynamic of the role of the people is critical and they're driving the change. It is and what was tremendous about Cisco's business model and how Cisco was founded. So this was pretty me and it's just the brilliance of the early folks is like Cisco made this router. It was a little startup. It was like five people, right? And then it started flying off the shelf in the mid-80s and late-80s when the internet started taking off. And then the way they scaled that out was by growing a community. They didn't say we're going to hire people around the world to install these networks. We're going to create a community of professionals who can go around and install these networks. And then we're going to create a partner ecosystem of partners who are going to build businesses around this installing networks for customers. And so really Cisco very early on learned that we had to be very customer focused and build with an ecosystem of partners. And then we created Cisco certification program and that started to take the people who are getting trained to do networking and give them certifications and then they were able to get jobs in customers and partners and build their careers. And so now we move that to today and we're continuing with that philosophy and doubling down it's about them except there's a shift in technology. So the network has changed. It's not the same old network. Like now there's new capabilities that require software. It requires DevOps. It requires applications to hit the infrastructure. It requires IT and infrastructure to solve business problems. But we need to bring the people along in doing that. And that is absolutely what we've been about. You know I said in my breaking analysis there were many things that helped Cisco rise with the three things I pointed out were the bet on IP, the M&A. And then I was too narrow. I like how you describe it as the community but it was sort of really talking about the army of trained engineers that were advocates. And you're extending that to the partner ecosystem. What's interesting about watching this rise over the past three years not only the transformation of Cisco from hardware to software and now even business transformation as you see IT go from a cost center to a profit center but you're sort of following that track. I don't know if you're leading it or following it, it's sort of concomitant to what's going on. I wonder if you can do something about it. No, I would say that we're doing both because obviously we're listening to customers and partners all the time to see what do you need. So we're listening and that would make us leading or sorry, following as we're listening and yet we're creating technology to enable them to do these new things. So there's a reason that you can think about the network to be solving business problems. It's because we made the networking programmable and based on software. If we didn't make it software it would still be running the old way and it wouldn't be able to play in a DevOps loop or be automated or anything there. So I would say that it's very combined but Cisco takes a holistic approach. Like right back there we have an IT managers forum where there are people who are trying to say, hey, you know, I've been leading technology teams in IT but I need to learn how to talk to the business, right? So there's a transformation that needs to happen which is okay, the technologists, networkers, IT folks themselves need to learn about software but then also these folks and their managers need to be able to talk to the business and think differently. So take some design thinking, think about what are the business stakeholders' problems? What are our customers' problems? How can I make my technology work for them? So we really have a lot going on to build in the kind of success of our ecosystem. Yeah, what's interesting, you mentioned technology shift and that's causing a lot of changes. Obviously how people are certified, business models and it's interesting, when we were chatting years ago DevOps was obviously out there, the hyperscalers around, you saw it evolving, it was pretty clear to a lot of the insiders that saw DevOps infrastructure as code then you kicked on something where programmable networks. I heard this week, and this is kind of again, goes to the next level and kind of connects the dots, BizDevOps, so the AppDemics guys look at this as, okay, so this agile attitude has been on for a while. Could you comment, because I think a lot of people that are looking at Cisco and are trying to understand its evolution and where it's going to go, it's rooted in years ago, a shift in thinking. And it's an agile, it's a DevOps mindset but the DevOps notion from whether it's pure DevOps cloud native or network DevOps or BizDevOps or what's next, so this has been around for a while, can you just share your vision on this? Yeah, absolutely, so I have a slide and we don't show slides here, which is a good thing, but I was called it the hamburger slide, so the hamburger slide where there would be infrastructure and then applications and then there was this other layer up here, business. And basically what happens is the infrastructure became programmable, so as opposed to infrastructure and then applications being separate, the IT teams did the infrastructure, the AppDevs and the businesses did the apps, then now that the infrastructure is programmable, you can get into a DevOps workflow. So for cloud applications, the apps and the infrastructure can really mix. And now the network is programmable, so there's NetDevOps and it's not just compute that can get into DevOps, but the network can too. But then now that business layer can flow into this. And so what happens is once again, you could say that cloud enables business, right? So if a business is trying to say, how do I compete like a retail store? How am I completing with a cloud competitor? Well, you have to embrace it, take your traditional infrastructure, your customer data, your stores, but then mix that with cloud offerings. That's a huge transformation that needs to happen. But now there's even more capabilities as you're saying, hey, I'm like a coffee shop and I'm rolling out to all of these stores. How do I make sure my business applications get there? How do I get customer intelligence and business intelligence together so my workers can serve my customers with the right knowledge and information they need? So you can actually use the infrastructure and apps as an advantage in how you serve your business. And you wouldn't even be able to do those things if you didn't know about the technology. So I'd say that there's like a workforce trend where the technology is enabling business and it can grow your business in different ways, but we need to make sure that we can express that. Because a technologist doesn't usually talk in terms of the business, but that's where all the value is. The application has always been that point of business value and connection to the business and the infrastructure has been removed from that. Now that the infrastructure is becoming programmable, it's embedded into that application and developers can now add value on top of it. I mean, the striking thing to me was just behind us, just seeing the number of your customers lining up to learn how to code in Python. And then IoT was off the charts and I've always been saying that look, the edge is going to be won by developers. And I think you really got that right. I'm curious as to why you think, I mean, Cisco really is the one company, you know, large established player that has, I think, figured it out. And I've said that many have tried throwing money at the problem, reaching out to developers, but fallen flat. I mean, even very successful software companies are struggling. Why do you think Cisco has had success? Is it culture? Is it the leverage of that certification and community that you talked about earlier? Yeah, it's, wow. It's really hard to say one reason why because these are tricky things. Like, so taking on a new business strategy, getting everybody aligned in a big company, even in a little company is hard, but it takes everybody pushing towards the direction and what happens is different people get it at different times. So obviously with DevNet, we were trying to push something along. The CEO, Chuck Robbins, he got it and he was pushing it. And then the businesses and product team, some of them had API first and some of them did not. But now more and more and almost all of them do now. All the products have APIs and they're getting more API first and now what we're doing is aligning APIs across the portfolio. You need to get your sales teams to understand and to engage like the regions. We have people in Italy who are engaging with the Italian community. We have our SES around the world that are basically engaging the people in each of their countries to evangelize it and to work with customers and partners in their local languages using this material to get them on board. So when we started DevNet, we had different ways we could take it. No one defined a developer program for a company like Cisco before, like a networking company. But we actually didn't do it by saying, oh, we're only going to talk to application developers and ignore those old networkers. We said, we're going to make them core and bring them along and bring in the app devs and bring them together. We didn't say we're going to like forget about the old Cisco products. We said, we're going to work with them as they add APIs and make that better. We didn't say we're going to ignore our sales guys and the ones who don't. We're going to bring them along and make them our evangelists and advocates to work with the region. So we kind of used the whole fabric along with it and just kind of gained the community of growth. It's been recognized the appetite for it, you know. And build it. And some people are like, I'm going to jump in and give this a try because I think it's important. And so I'm going to like, I'm going to wait and see. And they're like, oh, it's something now. Okay, now I'll jump in. And we're like, that's fine. Come on in now. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, you know, anecdotally, we do a lot of Cube interviews and many different events here at Cisco over the years. It's interesting to see when people get in and you can see it when their eyes pop up. Oh, I get it. And it's a progression of whether they're their orientation, what their background is. But it seems to me the early people who click it on it is our systems thinkers. Most of the techies that are systems, systems folks, they see as a system, not as one thing. Yes. As you said, it's not just apps and infrastructure. So a lot of the system guys get it first. And then on the business side, they see it from more of the, I'm making money. So you see the impact of the application changing the business model. It's a retail app or whatever. They get it that that's going to be the future. Yeah. So it all kind of depends on where you're coming from. It does, it does. And what's interesting is to see how this community has evolved and actually how we've evolved to be able to support people along the way. So as you remember, when you were first here, it was really some techies who realized they needed to learn something new. So it was about learning about software and APIs. And then we evolved and it became about coding. So how do we use DevNet Automation Exchange and Code Exchange to use a software-based model to build community code around networking use cases? Because they wanted to use it and get it into use cases. And then now we have people are like, okay, I'm doing it, I get it, but I can't get my business leaders to understand. So now we're actually helping them express the business case and to create use cases that solve business problems more directly. It's been growing. And you're a customer success too. A customer success piece. And customer success, so now I'm... Please explain that piece. What is that? Is that to be successful at training? Is that to be successful at customer interaction? What is that piece for you? Yeah, so me and my team, we are Cisco employees and sometimes, I mean, this doesn't get represented, but we move around the org. So, you know, as different things change. And so there's a recent move where I've been in the engineering team. I've now moved into the customer experience organization where we're doing a transformation like a customer experience, customer success transformation for Cisco. And so, you know, as we think about that, well, first of all, Cisco's always been customer oriented, but what does this mean in a world of software and a world of partners, ecosystems with the products and opportunities we have now? And so as we're gearing towards this kind of customer success and customer experience model, is that, you know, they're trying to do a transformation and it's actually very similar to what DevNet has already done, which is specifically, let's see. So when you engage with a company on new technology, right, we can say, okay, come here to the DevNet zone and learn about the APIs. You know, but as you're working with a customer and you say, hey, you know, you're from the customer, let's go on this journey together. Did you know that we have APIs? Let's learn about APIs. And did you know that this product performs this function, but it also has APIs? So let's teach you about those. Then you learn a different aspect of the product that you might not have thought about before because you're like, oh, it can be a platform. And then you say, hey, and you know, you need to solve automation. This can be used to solve automation. And so then you're like, oh, I'm thinking about automation, but how do I do it? So you can't have just one product that's done. So it's a progression that depends on what the customer's orientation is, whether the environment looks like or what their needs are. It is, so it means like start to evolve and think about their problem. Actually, their problem is automation. Their problem is not using this product, right? They're trying to solve a bigger product and hopefully this, oh, sorry, a bigger business problem or an automation problem. And this product is a piece of their puzzle into it. So we want to kind of engage in the full discussion from what is your need in automation and then work backwards to like, how can this product help? And so it's kind of like turning things upside down and ensuring the customer uses and you know, we understand their business problem, we're helping them solve it and this is how these products can play a role in helping you achieve that. In every business is looking at that, from the corner office, they all want to drive automation into their business. They're looking at, you know, okay, if the economy turns out with more automation, whether it's, you know, you see an RPA takeoff, obviously the cloud is supporting that. So, you know, it's a big trend. It's a huge deal. It is. And it's, you know, and actually moving to an automation infrastructure, it's not like buying a new product and you've automated it and you're done. It's actually very hard and it requires an architectural shift. It means like, I'm going to start to build telemetry, analyze data and get insights from it. Well, if you don't have that implemented somewhere, then you know, you need to architect for that. And then once you start building into that and seeing dashboards and then connecting that into other business apps, then you start to go further and further. So every step along the way, we want to get them closer to an automation architecture, but that takes work. And it's cultural as well because people hear automation and they're like, well that's my job. And so it takes a little education and then once they see it, oh, I mean, I can get rid of all these things I don't like to do and I can do this instead, then they really lean in and create new value. Yeah, so what we're getting at is this like really interesting, I'll call it a new technology trend of looking at kind of automation plus AI together, right? And so I've been talking about it out here in some places, which is now we've been talking about automation, we've been talking about AI, you look at these together. There's a set of people who are like, let's think about what automation means. That can mean, oh my gosh, someone's going to take my job away, I don't need people anymore. That would be called like autonomous. And there's some things that you do want to make autonomous and work themselves. But then you can also look at kind of assisting humans, right? So assisting like, what are you trying to do? Roll out configurations across different places and get them set up. Well, we can automate that and you can assist a human in being able to do it. And then this next stage is augmenting humans. What is there that a person really couldn't do that they can do now? And an example of that is, you take a look at threat intelligence and security going around the world. Cisco has products around the world that are looking for security threats. You put those together, you can see a threat before it comes to a customer environment and say, hey, we found this threat, we better shut it down over in your system to make sure you're blocked and protected from it. You've augmented a human capability using automation and AI. You know, one of the things a lot of companies can do is they focus on a big wave and they focus on it and they get on that new wave. Cisco's on a lot of different waves. You've got IoT and security, which you kind of were talking about. There's Kubernetes and CloudNative. It's like all these get collaboration. They're all their own big waves coming. So I have to ask you, because you've been so successful with DevNet and been a great leader in the industry with all your experience. What's your vision as this comes in? Because Cisco's one of the venues that's uniquely positioned with all the complexity and all the opportunities to go DevOps like across the board, up and down the stack. These waves are coming. It's not just one. You got to focus on Kubernetes. You got to focus on security. There's all these different big things that you guys are working on. What's your vision of how this all plays out? Like, so while there's different things going on, Kubernetes and Cloud, we're doing networking, what's going on in IoT and edge computing and the future of cognitive collaboration and AI and ML and all of this kind of thing, security, I don't actually view them as separate. I actually view them as all part of a bigger system. They're part of a platform that's trying to solve a bigger problem. And the secret is APIs. So it's actually a combination of architecture and APIs and how this works as a fabric together. And there's benefit, like if you're trying to do security, sure, you can use security products to do security, but why don't you also use network segmentation to do security? Like literally segment out pieces of the network and data and apps that should not be talking to other places and use that for security. So I kind of view it as all working together towards a bigger architecture. And because you're using APIs, you can start to put these things together and start to apply policies across these different domains. So this kind of whole new area, another new technology trend is looking at multi-domain opportunities and cross architecture. So that's really key. Well, and the data that you get out of that as well, right? I mean, now you've got data and metadata that you can analyze and enact upon and drive insights. Well, multi-domain, multi-clouds, having data models, right? Look at how do you take, so that all these different systems are adding up to a bigger thing. You need to create data models that these different applications can kind of pour into. That used to be locked inside of a box. They'd be stove-typed, like an application would have its own kind of model, but we're really all working towards the bigger thing and software is what lets you do it. And the silicon is a great thing too. You got silicon one coming. Yes, yes. Moving from the box to the chip. Yes. Not a bad strategy. Super interesting. So yeah, what you look at, you know, where are the bottlenecks in this? And this is where you need to rethink what your business strategy is. And it's just like, yeah, down in the optics, down in that layer is where the big opportunities are. And if we can differentiate and provide value in that space, then that's what we've done, right? We were riffing the other night in the taxi cab and I said to Dave, digital and digital, which is the internet, it's all digital now, the business model is the killer app. And just more of a provocative statement like, what are you trying to do with that? What's the purpose of all this? Is to have a business model that actually works. It is, it is, yeah. And what's interesting about the business model also to think about that, it's not just your own business model. It's, again, that's why I called our new group, Ecosystem Success. It's what you do, you know, and there's this whole model of success meaning you, your customer, your supply chain up above you and then how you deliver. But it's east-west now too, right? It's like, how does your innovation work with your partner's innovation with another area that's come, and how do these all happen together? Like, how do you take trends in security and advances there and, you know, in workforce and people? And as you take a look at, you know, everything that's happening in cloud and then intersect so that we're all successful together. And it's enabled by what you're saying before, automation and AI, obviously supported by cloud, you know, APIs and data across that system that you guys were talking about. Yeah, and I think that, I think the bumper sticker for Cisco is, Cisco connects businesses because that's really what you're doing. There we go. A new bumper sticker. Congratulations. Well, we got a shout out for the first 500. You got to, Oh, yes, yes, yes. So yeah, so some of the big news over here is that, well, in this world of where the infrastructure becomes programmable. So what Cisco's had a long time is Cisco's certification program. So we have CCNA, Cisco Certified Network Associate, CCNPs, CCIEs, the expert level. And that's been an industry standard for the last 26 years and people have job roles, they've gotten promotions, they get recognized, they're certified for delivering quality. And what we've introduced is the DevNet certifications. So in addition to the engineering certifications or the software certifications and DevNets kind of growing to the next level by, you know, so far, everybody who's been in here has been into DevNet because of their hearts and because they knew they had to learn anything. But now we're giving them a certification. So they can be recognized as their efforts and we're expanding Cisco's certification to cover it. Now this represents the move of engineering plus software together in your IT teams and together for your technology teams and the new certifications, the DevNet certifications go live February 24th. The first 500 people to earn a DevNet certification, we're going to call the DevNet 500. And so they're going to be the founders, the first ones who are really stepping forward in this new industrial shift towards combining engineering and software, making the world of the infrastructure, talking to business and driving business happen. Well, we'd love to be first, we got to get that list taped. You better get started. Hundreds of thousands of people, 500 seats. Now we'll take the 500 first and the thousandth and the 10th thousandth and the millionth developers. I've heard Susie some Cisco VPs want to get into that 500. They do, they do, yes, yes. Gamification, always a good strategy. Susie, it's great to watch your success and for the folks watching, seeing DevNet come from an idea to execution and now core to the business model. It's been quite an evolution. Congratulations for all your success. Thank you and thank you for joining us on this journey. So we've been working together on it. It's been fun. We've learned a lot. It's been so much fun. We're here in the DevNet zone. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. With Susie, we the chief of the DevNet team in the big zone, it gets bigger every year and theCUBE's getting bigger. Thanks to you and the team appreciate it. Just to keep more live coverage from Barcelona, Cisco Live 2020 after this short break.