>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE!
Covering Cisco Live US 2019
Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystems partners.
>> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, day two,
at Cisco Live.
we are live in San Diego.
I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host is Stu Miniman,
and Stu and I are very pleased to welcome back to theCUBE,
Mandy Whaley, senior director of the Developer Experience
at DevNet, Mandy, welcome back.
>> Thank you so much, happy to be here.
>> Well thanks for having us at the DevNet Zone,
The last two days this has been jammed packed,
it's been tons of activity from the morning in
'til it shuts down,
so you get a real sense of how strong this community is,
and so something, yesterday, that Chuck Robbins kicked his
keynote off with was 30th year of Cisco doing a partner,
a customer event. >> Yes, it's incredible.
>> So I thought, let's see what else is having
a 30th year anniversary this year.
And I discovered Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
is 30 and I thought I want to talk to Mandy
because how the DevNet experience has been
Suzy and Mandy's excellent adventure,
look what you've built in five years!
>> That is a really great analogy.
(laughing)
I really like that.
No, it is really exciting to see
where we are in this five year journey,
and I was reminiscing with some of the team who is here
in the very early days.
Our second ever DevNet Express was here in San Diego,
and we were in the same space, and I think
we were maybe, 1/3 of this space was DevNet,
we had a classroom, and a few meeting spaces and some demos,
but it was very vibrant and the community showed up then,
but it's great to see five years later
how we have workshops, and demos,
and more interactive things,
and what we've been able to build
to really help enable the community,
and then to see them just soaking it up,
that's one of my favorite weeks of the year.
>> Mandy, I really see the coming together
of Cisco's traditional business, when I think about
when I would write about Cisco, it's that army of CCIEs
that are out there, whose jobs were relying on
Cisco products and technology,
and what you've built with the DevNet group,
and how you have about 600,000 in this community
and everything like that.
Now, the certifications went through some major updates
and there's some people who was like, oh my God, wait,
it's not just the treadmill every year where I get my stamp,
and keep my number.
Bring us inside a little bit how that happened,
and what the new career is
and how certifications fit in to that.
>> Absolutely, so this has been an exciting week
for that reason as well, because we've been working,
my team of developer advocates, and our DevNet experts
have been working hand-in-hand with learning at Cisco,
on this project around certifications,
and it's so exciting to be able to finally
tell people about it,
and share it with the community and get the feedback.
And what's really interesting about that program is
we started from the beginning, really designing it
with this idea of the IT team of the future,
the infrastructure skills,
the software skills coming together.
Whether that's one person that learns both sides of it,
or it's a team, that's combinations of those skills,
that's really how the certifications are designed.
So, there's abilities for someone to go
very deep on the networking side, our CCIEs are incredible,
and they have this incredible amount of knowledge,
and that path is still the same,
but there is also an addition of automation and software
into that path,
even in the very network focus certifications.
Then we added the DevNet certifications,
and these allow someone who's coming more from,
I have a software background,
but I am starting to automate infrastructure,
I'm starting to span into the OPS world,
I'm building on Cisco platforms,
and allow those to connect together.
And then there is this new concept of the specialist
certification and that's where we really let people,
kind of, choose and pick,
kind of choose your own adventure,
in terms of the certifications that you choose
and the skills that you've build,
so that you could start to take
a security automation specialist with a DevNet
professional developer and a data center certification,
and really focus it on something like DevSecOps,
or same kind of things for IoT,
where you can put together wireless
with IoT application development,
and go towards roles like an IoT architect,
or something like that.
So, it's been an incredible project,
my team has been very energized by the work
with learning at Cisco
on really taking the certifications
and adding the software skills to it,
and seeing how that's going to help enable this
amazing community of people that's here at Cisco Live.
>> This seems like this is a part of Cisco's transformation
from purely a hardware network appliance vendor
to a hardware plus software,
subscription service at DevNet
is part of that as an accelerate.
>> Yeah, it definitely is and I think it really shows,
with the certifications
how Cisco is putting real effort into that,
and how that is the direction that we're heading,
and it gives a clear signal to people
that we do need both sets of skills,
and it gives you a pathway to get those skills,
is the really important thing,
because we heard requests from our community,
We want a DevNet certification,
We want a certification path for these software skills,
and so, it's really in response to things that we've heard
from our partners and our customers,
they wanted these define paths to get there,
and now we got this way to help them.
>> All right so there was some other announcements this week,
why don't you walk us through the rest of the news?
>> Yeah, the other DevNet announcement
that we're really talking with people a lot about here
is the DevNet Automation Exchange.
This is really focused around network automation
and how DevNet and the DevNet community can help
lead the way in network automation.
And so the automation exchange
is focused on tangible use cases,
that we've heard from partners and customers
some of them very simple, we have a walk, run, fly
methodology that we're applying.
So a lot of people when they start with network automation
they come to us and say, "I don't know where to start.
"I don't know where me, personally, with skills,
"my organization does not know where to start."
And so the walk phase is a lot about
using automation to do read only kind of activities,
get insights, get information,
use it to help maybe do zero touch auditing
or something like that.
Things that are small projects people can pick up,
and start building confidence around that work automation.
The run phase is start taking action,
you can start to implement policy,
and start doing configuration through automation.
And then the fly is really connecting all of that together,
into a DevOps workflow, where maybe you're adding in
a chatbot to communicate back to an Ops team,
or you're noting that something drifted out of configuration
and taking action to fix it.
And so, the automation exchange is a place where we have
50 initial use cases, that we go through, we explain,
and then we also give a code project,
we actually give sample code, it's a repository on GitHub
that matches to solving that use case.
And so, automation exchange is curated by Cisco
and created by our community.
So people would be submitting them in,
bringing their use cases in, bringing their code,
we'll also be bringing use cases and code into it,
and we really want it to be this vibrant place
to move that conversation forward, and find out
what are those walk, run, and fly use cases
that people are really working on.
>> With so much of networking changes today,
being done manually,
I think I saw a stat on the Cisco website,
that upwards of 95% of all network changes
are still done manually,
and I think that's got to be a huge hit to OPEX.
What are some,
in this early history with network automation,
what are some of the success stories
that you guys are hearing with the impact that this
walk, run, fly methodology or path
is enabling businesses to achieve?
>> Definitely, so yesterday in Chuck's keynote
we heard him talk about the complexities
kind of moving beyond human scale,
and that's one of the things that automation
really helps with, and that's where we hear
some of the first real wins from our customers and partners
around is we've been able to approach something
we couldn't before because we've put things
in place using automation,
it helps us work more efficiently and scale further.
So that's definitely a very common one.
And then the other part of it is really,
not necessarily just about speed or scale,
but it's about reliability and reducing risk,
and so doing things in an automated way,
also can really help with that,
and so it's really the combination of both of those
where you get the biggest impact.
>> Mandy, can you bring us inside a little bit the ecosystem
because we heard on the main stage,
lots of discussion of keynote,
especially in this multi-cloud world that we live in,
Cisco spanning across lots of environments here.
From a DevNet standpoint we've talked to startups
that are involved, as well as some of the big people,
so give us the latest there,
and what lessons learned from your team
have you started to share with
some of the other big companies that are looking
to go down similar journeys?
>> Yeah, I think that is one of the things that's very
unique about the DevNet community is within the community
we have technical stakeholders from small startups to
really large partners or huge enterprises,
and when we're all here in the DevNet Zone,
we're all engineers, and we're all exchanging ideas
kind of no matter what the scales.
So it becomes this great mixing
of shared experiences and ideas.
And that is some of the most interesting conversations
that I've actually heard this week,
is people talking about how maybe
they're using one Cisco platform
in these two very different environments,
and exchanging ideas about how they do that,
or maybe how they're using a Cisco platform
with an open source tool, and then people finding value,
and thinking, "Oh, maybe I can do that in my environment."
So that part of the ecosystem
and community is very interesting
and then, we're also helping partners find each other,
so we do a lot of work around
here's a partner in the Cisco ecosystem
who goes and installs Meraki Networks, right?
Here's a software partner who builds mapping technology
on top of indoor WiFi networks,
and getting those two together,
because the software partner
is not going to install the network,
and the network person may not write that application
in that way, and so bringing them together,
we've had a lot of really good information coming back
from the community around kind of finding each other,
and being able to deliver those outcomes.
>> There's so many impacts that DevNet has made,
I'm certainly thinking of expansion of partnerships,
and ecosystem, like wow,
that you probably in the beginning
didn't even realize were going to be some of the outcomes
that you're seeing five years in.
>> Yeah, it is exciting to be five years into it
and certainly when I taught the first coding 101
for network engineers at Cisco Live
five years ago in San Francisco
I did not expect there to be DevNet certifications
five years later, that is a really interesting path to think
about how that evolves, and then certainly on the ecosystems
side of the same thing.
You know, we always knew that the APIs were going to become
prevalent across all the Cisco platforms,
and up and down the stack.
And we always knew developers are this creative force
and if you get those two things together,
you can unlock a lot of interesting things,
but it's been great to see it come into reality.
>> So, Mandy, I had the opportunity to hear Fran,
who is the chief people person at Cisco,
talk to kickoff the event here,
and they talked about the fact that 40%
of the leadership team at Cisco has changed
in the last 12 months,
and they did that because something was right,
it wasn't that there was problems,
but Chuck Robbins has been here for four years
the stocks been going gangbusters, but give us
a little bit of insight,
what does this transformation of DevNet
which talk about 600,000 people in the giant community,
but what does it mean inside?
Fran talked about the people that are engaged
are six times more engaged when they work,
if they really like what they're doing,
and we know kind of the quality of life
benefits that happen if I, you know--
>> Definitely, yeah so, I think it's been very positive.
I have super confidence in our leadership team right now,
and the Cisco culture is one of the biggest things
that I love about working at Cisco
and I'm a mom of two boys,
and I have flexibility to have this amazing job and career,
and also be around with my boys, and that's a life goal
and that's really meaningful to me.
Within DevNet, working within the company to kind of
drive some change, I think within this five years
we have seen awareness of what developers need and want,
and how to be developer friendly,
like that has certainly been something
we've been working internally
to help lots of groups understand,
and there's been a ton of progress around that.
And then also just the attention from the product teams,
and engineering teams,
into the work they're putting into their APIs
is just incredible,
and I think that's the voice of the community
coming back in and them seeing that the kind of innovation
that it drives in our partner community,
and all these people here learning about their platforms,
I think that is the best kind of virtuous cycle
that you can have.
>> I can only imagine Cisco, history as it is,
and as large as it is,
that having a reputation being developer friendly
is a massive competitive advantage.
Especially for some probably larger enterprises
that are still trying to make that pivot.
You have so many demonstrable prove points
of Cisco's developer friendliness,
that I can only imagine that's probably contributing
to all this great revenue numbers we're seeing.
>> We do believe it is really important
for Cisco's future, if we're going to be a software company,
being developer friendly is certainly a very important
part of that, and that was part of the original thought
with DevNet starting five years ago.
We always have more work to do,
but it's great to see how far we've come.
>> Definitely, well Mandy,
congratulations on your excellent adventure,
we're excited to see where it goes from here,
we also appreciate being in the DevNet Zone,
and getting to feel the buzz and the excitement,
and I can just imagine
how many partnerships are forming behind us,
how many new products and services are going to be created,
maybe new companies, it's very exciting.
>> Mandy: Thank you, it's great to be here.
>> We appreciate your time.
For Stu Miniman, I am Lisa Martin.
You're watching theCUBE live, from Cisco live.
Thanks for watching.
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