>> Live from Barcelona, Spain,
it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live! Europe.
Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners.
>> Hey, welcome back, everyone.
We're live here in Barcelona, Spain,
for Cisco Live! Europe 2019 Cube coverage.
Three days, we're in day two of three days of coverage.
I'm John Furrier, your host, with Stu Miniman
as well as Dave Vellante's been on interview.
Our next guest, Saurav Prasad, Principal Engineer
and Technical Marketing at Cisco
as part of the Cisco DNA Center Platform.
Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us.
>> Thank you.
>> So you guys are having a DNA take,
and we're in the DevNet zone all week.
This has been a real revitalization within Cisco DevNet,
Cloud Native, Cisco coming together.
The DNA center has been a part of this from day one.
>> Yes.
>> What is the DNA center these days, what's happening?
>> Okay, so, let me take you a bit back in time, right.
So, back in October 2017 is when we
first launched the Cisco DNA center.
Since then we have added a lot more application,
work flows in the DNA center.
And last year in May or June of last year, 2018,
is when we launched the DNA Center Platform.
And this protocol, FCS, some time during October of 2018.
So, we now have the DNA Center Platform,
which essentially is an open platform
which lets our developers, our partners,
our ISVs build applications on top of DNA Center
which will let them talk to the network.
And the way they do it is using our APIs, our SDKs,
and then we have a lot of other modules, which help them
interact with the network via the DNA Center.
Now the benefit of this is not really
with respect to APIs or SDKs,
it's more about we give them a very
easy way to talk to the network.
Instead of talking to 10,000 network devices,
they talk to one DNA Center.
So, that's the, you know,
idea behind the DNA Center Platform.
>> Well why not expand a little bit
when we've been talking about platforms
in general for many years now,
and it's one thing to say you're a platform,
but the proof is, who's actually building on it.
What can they do on it?
So, you've got the platform, FCS, first customer ship,
it's available, it's launching.
What can you tell us about, you know, real customers,
what they're doing, give us a little bit
of the spectrum as to what we see out there.
>> That's right.
So before we FCS'ed our platform in October,
we actually relied on early field trials
for almost three to four months.
And in then in that time we were
actually working with our 15 top partners.
And this was across the world, right.
So they were actually using the platform
to build some integrations from their side
which was beneficial for them, right,
so these are partners like Dimension Data, Accenture,
WWT, and I'm just naming a few of them.
These are all listed on our DNA center portal, on DevNet.
But, then, we were working them and we were actually
looking for feedback on whether it was useful and
we found that it was really, really useful for them
to build some good applications, good work flows,
good integrations, and that helps them
drive their own business with their customers.
>> So, what's the mission of the DNA center?
What is the purpose?
Why do you guys exist?
>> So, the DNA center is built to provide you
intent based networking.
So instead of you having to go to
each and every network device
and provision things on the network devices,
you now go to the DNA center and say "Here is my intent!"
An example for an intent would be,
"I want to prioritize Cisco job or traffic".
It should be high priority.
Now that means there is a lot of network devices
that I need to provision quality of service.
I need to make sure I have the right
cue instructors in place.
And guess what, we have so many devices,
each one of them might have some different CLIs,
different architectures, we now give them one single place
where you provide the intent and not worry
about the device level details.
And I am just giving you one example.
There could be a lot more where,
for example I'm getting the telemetry back
from a network.
Each and every device is saying I am having
some issues but they might all be the same issue here.
What DNA center does is takes all of those issue
provides you an insight into what really is happening
in the network, so that's our idea of DNA Center.
>> Saurav, come on, who doesn't want to use this?
Everyone who's gone out and provisioned a device
knows how much a hassle it is.
I mean think about the manual labor involved.
Just going out and doing all of this stuff
so it's an action center, basically.
You take action, one spot, window into the network
policy, whatever it takes.
It's driven by, and now applications can come in as well.
Am I getting that right.
>> That's right.
So the greatest work says, again this is what we do with
platform is, different partners, different customers,
might have some different workflows.
So within the DNA center we have decided,
here is how the workflow should look like.
So if I want to do an upgrade of a network device,
here are the steps I might follow.
But when you use the API's,
you can almost define your own workflows.
So this allows you the flexibility
of building your own workflows.
That's one example.
Other is, say for example, I need some feedback
from a different system, not the network
maybe some other IT system.
I need to get some information from them
and based on that, I need to configure something
on the network.
You cannot do that automatically.
There has to be an application in between
which talks to both of these systems,
one of them being the Cisco DNA Center.
Now this allows you to do that.
If I have the API's, if I have the event framework,
I can do all of that.
That's the benefit of using these.
>> What's the alternative if someone doesn't use
the DNA Center 'cause this is a no brainer.
You've got, I get the device piece,
that's just a nice window.
Now the platform allows applications to integrate
and be programmable with the network.
Why wouldn't someone use this, it's a no brainer.
>> If you don't use this, what you do is you go to
each of your thousand network devices
talk to each one of them and take care of all of the
device level details and do it.
It's doable, people have been doing it for years now
but now we are making it slightly more easier
to make it faster.
>> Well, it comes to, we have been talking for years
the need for scale and if you don't have good automation
if you don't have tools to be able to help you there,
you're not going to be able to reach the scale
that you need for your business,
explain why this is important.
>> For example, what we are seeing is
and we have been talking about digital networks
for some time now.
What really is a digital network,
that's a key point to understand here.
What we are seeing is there was a time
10 years back when you had to roll out a new service
network admins, network architects had
six months to provision that.
Nowadays they don't have that.
>> Six hours
>> They probably have six hours, that's right.
In order for you to do all of that so fast,
you really cannot go into each device and talk about it.
You have to abstract some of that
and that's what the DNA Center provides
and using our API's we are now adding
a new level on top of it,
which really makes it much more easier for you to scale.
Again, not just scale, also integrate
with other IDSM systems, other IBM systems,
other reporting systems.
So this is all happening automatically,
instead of you having to manually
touch each of these systems.
>> Talk about the plug and play process.
How does that fit in with DNA Center,
compatible, not compatible?
>> So plug and play is an application or workflow
within DNA Cneter.
When I look at plug and play, every network device in Cisco
has a plug and play agent running.
I'm going to get into a bit of a technical detail here,
but they have a plug and play agent running
and so when this device comes up,
say for day zero onboarding,
you open up the box, take out the device
power it up, the agent fires up.
What it looks for is the plug and play server.
The Cisco DNA center is the Plug and Play server.
So now I am allowing you to onboard new devices.
You could roll out a new site with 25 network devices,
100 network devices in a matter of minutes.
>> So all of the configuration gets pushed down
from the DNA Center? >> Exactly!
So you build your own profile in DNA Center
and attach the templates or the configurations.
You say here is a serial number
and when this device comes in,
I push in all the configuration,
I provision a new software image on it,
so your device or your site is up and running.
>> Great for campus, great for remote sites.
>> Exactly, so you really don't have to send
a network admin on every remote site to do that.
>> Will it take policy so if I set policy up in the
DNA Center, will it automatically take that down through?
>> Yes, yes, yeah.
Once a device is onboarded,
it gets added to the Cisco DNA Center
and once I do that, now I can throw in policies
any kind of provisions.
>> I don't mean to get in the weeds,
sorry Stu, go ahead.
>> What's great about a platform,
you've talked about some of the partners.
My understanding, not just some of the integrated partners
like WWT that you mentioned but even some of the
technology partners like IBM have services that
plug into this environment.
We've seen in platforms, where you can,
one of the other dimensions is the customers
and what are they asking for
and how are there feedback there.
Is there anything in the DNA Center platform that
if one customer is asking for something that
more customers are going to get value of that.
I think back to the day of Salesforce.
When Salesforce gets something, we add a new feature
and that's something that can roll out,
we can learn from all the customers,
you get that fly wheel of development in a platform.
>> What we are doing here is we are actually
working very closely with Cisco DevNet on that.
They have a partner ecosystem exchange.
What's happening is a lot of this channeled partners
technology partners, ISV's, when they build something
they go into the ecosystem exchange
and they can post it there.
So its not just useful for them, there are other partners,
other customers that can use it.
They have a data repository of all the core, sample core
and again, not everybody shares it
to the extent what we would like
because there's a lot of intellectual property
which they have built and they might want to monetize on it
but that is the whole idea behind the ecosystem exchange
where I am allowing partners to
share what they have built and this could be used by others.
>> Saurav, talk about the success, what's the uptake?
It must be well received, obviously we see a lot
of action her in the DevNet zone.
Give us some color commentary on what the
momentum has been, who's using it, how?
>> From our side, I'm from the business unit
which is actually building this product.
The way we judge whether this product is getting traction is
what is the amount of feature requests I am getting?
So, we are getting a ton of feature requests
with respect to new API's that we want to expose.
With respect to new documentation that we have to build.
I mean, what we don't want is we release a product
and we got no feedback.
>> So what's the fee for requests?
Backlog big or what's going on?
>> Oh yeah, so for example when we launched
we had a limited set of API's available.
Now since then, with every release,
now we have a release almost every month,
where we are adding newer API's and newer functionality,
we are actually adding more and more API's
and again there is much more to add
but that's the process and--
>> Just keep jamming and taking it in, backlog it,
get it out there, iterating quickly?
>> Exactly, and again, the one point to add here
is we are not really just exposing an API,
we are exposing an intent API
so it's got slightly different.
So instead of, say for example,
I want to provision a wireless network,
that is probably a 10 step process
even within the DNA Center.
What we want to give you is a single API
which will do all of that and all of that heavy lifting
will be done by the Cisco DNA Center platform.
So, we will internally call the 10 separate API's.
So for a developer who is building this,
he or she may not be a network expert,
they might not be an expert into how the network works
so all they have to do is call one single API
and all of the details or all the heavy lifting
will be done by the platform,
so they don't really have to worry
about some of those details.
>> So this is where the automation will get done
on behalf of the customer.
They'll come in, deploy DNA Center
understand what's going on
and that's where they do all of their work.
Figure out what to do, get it done there.
What's been the biggest use case so far?
>> So, a lot of use cases.
Like, we have a partner
who is actually building a mobile app
so we have a DNA Center which is sitting on prem
in their own data center,
they can go and look at the browser,
open up the Cisco DNA Center console
and look at the various workflows
or see what's happening in the network.
They might see there is a router which has crashed.
Or an application which is having
some application performance issue
but what we want to see, is also, send us even send remotely
and now their network admins could be walking
in a grocery store, for example
and the mobile, that alert shows up.
Guess what, that is application is having an issue
lets do the debugging so we will provide you
all of that details within our API's,
which can then show up in the application externally.
>> So DNA Center platform has a takeover going
on in the DevNet zone.
We see classrooms, we've seen labs, give us a little bit of
the flavor of the solutions for the next hour
as well as at the show in general.
>> In general here at the Cisco DevNet zone,
we have a Cisco DNA Center takeover going on right now.
We have workshops, we have sandbox labs,
we have learning labs.
You can go to any one of them and try it out.
That is not only for this hour,
that is there for throughout the show,
but for this hour, we have a tech talk going on
from one of our distinguished sales engineers
Adam Rattford, he is talking all about DNA Center Platform
in deep dive, showing live examples.
We have some demo systems up and running here
where you can actually see how we are able to
generate events, how we are able to send
events to external systems, so all of that is going on.
Plus, we have all of our experts.
A lot of our experts from the engineering team
are here on the show right now on the show floor
so if there are any questions around DNA Center Platform
they will be more than willing to help.
>> The brain trust is here.
>> My understanding, I mean, when I have talked to people
the DevNet group has labs running all the time.
And that's what's great,
I have talked to customers that say,
I need to be able to play with this
and here's something that's online, it's in the cloud
I just do with it whenever so.
>> Just to add to that, of course for our customers,
our partners, our developers who want to try this out,
they are more than welcome to come and join us
in the Cisco DevNet zone here.
Even if you are not at Cisco live, these sandbox lives
are live online and we have I think around
five or six of them and we are adding more to it.
You can go anytime, try our API's on that sandbox.
You don't really need to have your own environment.
Now of course when you go production with it you will
but just for trying out or building some applications,
you can do it on the sandbox.
>> Saurav, thanks so much for taking the time
sharing some technical insight,
went a little bit deep on the plug and play
but appreciate your time
coming on theCUBE, thanks for coming on and congratulations.
DNA Center, the Cisco DNA Center Platform,
the official name, really an oasis,
a place to go in and configure the networks
no brainer as far as I am concerned, check it out.
theCUBE's bringing you the DNA of the show here,
which is all the action, coverage,
I'm John Furrier, Stu Minimin.
Stay with us more here live in Barcelona
and we will be back after this short break.
(upbeat music)