>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum
in Mountain View, California,
it's theCUBE covering DevNet Create 2018.
Brought to you by Cisco.
>> Hello everyone, and welcome back
to theCUBE's live coverage of Cisco's DevNet Create
here in Mountain View in the heart of Silicon Valley.
I'm John Furrier, my co-cost, Lauren Cooney,
our next guest is Susie Wee, is vice president
and CTO of Cisco DevNet.
This is her event, DevNet is a Cisco's developer team,
conference, community, DevNet created a cloud native,
much more dev ops oriented.
Our second year covering it,
it's only a year and a half old.
The creator with her team, Susie, great to have you back.
>> Great, it's great to be back.
>> What a success, again.
You guys are learning, we heard from the keynote
that you made some changes, heard some feedback,
you added more cooler elements.
But this is about technology enablement tools, education,
and then fun, and having people exchange information.
How's it going?
What's the upkeep?
>> It's going great.
So we're really excited to have our second DevNet Create,
and what happened was last year,
what we've always tried to do with DevNet overall
is to make sure that we had hands-on material
because people want to code, people want to learn
about the newest technologies.
We also made sure that the content of the first
DevNet Create was from Cisco, but also from
the leading players in the community.
And so we got feedback from last year on
how to improve it for this year, and basically
they just wanted more hands on,
and so we've actually expanded from having
three parallel workshops to eight parallel workshops,
where just folks can get hands-on and code.
We continued to have both Cisco content as well as
community content from leaders in the field.
When we got feedback last year, what happened was
we were collecting the feedback.
The people who responded, we asked a few questions,
and we said: Did you feel that this was useful for you?
Did you feel that you were learning about
modern tools and technologies
that would help you in your career?
Would you come back again?
The strangest thing that happened is like 100% of people
said that they were learning about topics that are
modern and they need for their careers.
And 100% of them said they would come back again.
And I'm like, is it still 100%?
'Cause one person says no, it's not 100%.
And so to everyone that responded, they wanted to come back,
so we just gave them more of what they wanted.
>> It's great, it feels great.
You've got a good vibe,
but I think there's some real interesting things.
We talked last time about how the cloud native world
connecting with the commercial liability of Cisco.
Cisco is not a small company, they invented routing
as we know it, they connect the Internet, and you
had that kind of ops networking culture
with this new programmable Internet kind of
coming together, so there's some notable news
you guys had here, why I was impressed by.
One is these business exchange, or business ecosystem.
Talk about some of the things that you guys
are doing now as a result
of these two worlds coming together.
It's not just speeds that feed tech goodness,
just like business value.
Money making!
>> (laughing) Just to go a little bit more into that,
what happens is you kind of have
your world of infrastructure, and you have developers
who are writing cloud apps, it's so easy to deploy,
and really get a lot of value out there.
But then you have the world of real companies,
real data, real existing infrastructure, enterprise data,
smart cities that you want to bring online
and everything there, and there's a new type of app
that's come to play, and there's a new type of app
that of course, needs to work in the cloud,
but also needs to couple in with the real world
and physical things, and enterprise data.
And so that brings rise to a whole new set of applications
and new ways to do business.
So in terms of what we're doing with that,
as someone writes this kind of an app, it's not easy,
just like download it onto my phone.
It's actually, how do I couple that
with the location based infrastructure?
How do I couple that with enterprise and hybrid cloud data?
And so what we have now is a business exchange,
an ecosystem exchange where we can
bring those applications up, where if someone
is using Cisco infrastructure, we have partners
around the world who install and manage solutions
that they put for their customers.
And we want to show them these are the applications
that work together with those products.
These are the solutions that you can deliver,
so we want to take the applications that our developers
are writing and make it available to our partners,
to let them use our go to market
that we have around the world.
>> We get the technical developer ecosystem,
and you have the business ecosystem, so that's an indicator
that there's some movement and growth.
Where is it coming from?
Where are you seeing the highlights here?
>> Yeah, so in terms of the movement and growth,
what happens is we're concentrated on technical enablement
for the first few years of DevNet.
But clearly, the reason to do the technical enablement
is to do that business pull through.
Where do we see the growth?
So, what happens is everyone in the world
wants to digitize, right?
So people want to take their manufacturing lines,
they want to digitize them.
People who have cities want to offer newer experiences
that are still kind of leveraging the old,
but then providing a top-notch experience for that.
So we have people that are in cities who want to
use our infrastructure, but also have innovative
applications to give to their folks.
We have partners around the world who want to
not only provide infrastructure, but to provide
interesting solutions and experiences.
So it's really interesting to see the hunger
and the desire now for people to use applications
in all different ways, and we're trying
to really package it up for them.
>> So you're actually stitching these applications
together and then packaging them up for consumption
for the solution?
Is that what you're looking at?
>> Yeah, because everybody's buying.
Everybody needs a network, everybody has something
that exists, but they want to go above it.
That boundary between applications and infrastructure
is kind of blurring, right?
And what an application can do when it's really
coupled in to an infrastructure with APIs
is completely new, and they want to play,
they want to innovate.
They don't want to just do the same old thing,
and they want to kind of unleash the power,
get the value from all of the application development
that's going on.
>> I think that's great.
One of the things I saw from the keynote
was the numbers in terms of your exponential growth
over the past four years and also the number of folks
who continuously visit the site.
I think that's awesome.
Can you kind of give folks that are looking
to build communities any tips or tricks?
>> Yeah, and actually, Lauren, you were with us early on.
You saw when I was begging for Cisco
to have a developer community, and so we didn't
have any members at that time.
But yeah, we've grown to 480,000,
actually 485,000 registered developers.
We have 60,000 active monthly users.
>> Lauren: That's great.
>> So they are really doing stuff.
But yeah, in terms of what it takes
to grow that community, I think really the key
is that my incentive, my goals, my mission,
which I shared, is that we want
to make developers successful.
We want to make our partners in that broader ecosystem
and our customers successful.
It's not actually my job to sell products.
Obviously any solution that's written around APIs
for a product will sell products, but my job
is to make the ecosystem successful.
So I think the key is just constantly keeping
their best interest at heart, and having a model
where obviously it will pull through
the right business for Cisco.
>> You've got great self-awareness, and I think that's
important to understand what they're trying to do,
but also you bring a lot to the table.
Cisco has massive presence and enterprises in businesses,
whether it's service providers, down to
the small medium enterprise to large enterprises.
As you look across Cisco, you bring
the goods to the party, so to speak.
How do you balance that, and what's your approach?
So you're taking more of the programmable net ops,
which I love, by the way, we talked about that
in Barcelona at Cisco Live.
You can bring a lot to the table, but you don't want
to firehose the developers with all this Cisco stuff.
How are you blending that together?
What's your approach?
>> This is a great point.
So what we have to do is we have to understand
who our audience is, and we need to bring the right material
and speak the language for that audience.
And to give you an example,
is that we've had you at DevNet Create,
we've had you at the DevNet Zones at Cisco Live.
When we go to Cisco Live
and we have our developer conferences,
that is the group in the audience that knows Cisco.
They're getting certified, they know how to deploy
infrastructure, it's a tremendous community.
We have millions of people around the world
who basically run, deploy, manage these solutions.
>> John: Over years of experience, too.
>> Oh, decades of experience, yes, and certification,
mastery, expertise.
>> They're the network nerds.
>> They are the network nerds! (laughs)
>> Moving packets around, but now it's changed.
>> And the way that we talk to them is different,
because what we present to them is how can you
automate your infrastructure?
How can you scale and use the newest tools?
How can you get observability and insights
from that infrastructure itself?
And then, here's the software tools that you need to use,
and here's the APIs you need to know about.
Let us understand your problems, and let's
work on this together.
Now, the types of platforms that we expose
and the APIs will be for networking,
it'll be for security, it will be for compute,
it'll be in many of these areas.
Then we come over to DevNet Create, and what we had to do
was create a separate venue to hit app developers,
cloud native developers, they're not going to Cisco Live.
They're actually going to developer conferences,
they're in the Bay Area, they're all around the world.
They don't think of Cisco or even of infrastructure
in what they do, necessarily.
>> It's a different culture. >> It's a different culture.
And we actually had to re-jigger our vocabulary,
we had to re-jigger what we present to them,
because when they think of IOS, they don't think of
a network operating system, Cisco's iOS operating system,
they think of a mobile operating system.
So we've actually had to even retrain ourselves
to show this is the value that we provide
to application developers, here's the platforms
and the APIs that matter to you.
Here's the right level of abstraction of what would be
relevant to an app developer, and really speak to them.
And DevNet Create is a separate venue
created for that reason.
>> And timing is everything, as we know.
The wind's at your back because you've got Kubernetes,
the container madness, the standardization of contains,
which is not new, the Google guy was on earlier
talking about containers.
You've got micro services, you've got Istio,
which is where you're partnering with Google,
so this is a new, real emerging tech area
that's a nice glue layer between the cultures.
How are you handling that?
Do you agree?
>> Oh my goodness. >> What's your focus on?
>> Yes, it's so amazing.
So the whole world's in containers and micro services,
is shifting how applications are developed.
We actually used it within our own system,
where we wanted to use the newest technologies,
we saw the benefits of working in container
and microservices based architecture,
to not write monolithic apps but to really be able
to compose and reuse services.
So we had to go through that change, but what we saw
is that when you're dealing with enterprise data,
confidential data, customer data,
and then public cloud data and everything there,
there's a lot of thinking about how to write a cloud app
that is a hybrid cloud app that uses OnPrim
and public cloud and the best of both worlds.
And the world of containers is interesting
because suddenly it's the performance of your application,
it depends even more on the network.
Getting security of how your containers are built up,
how they're connected, how they're spinning up
in different places, you need that consistency.
So having the whole tool of how do you now deploy
containers on OnPrim resources as well as
public cloud based resources is tricky,
and you need to build in that security
into the infrastructure itself, and then provide
the right abstraction for the developers
with tools like Istio.
So we're partnered up with Google.
It's been a fantastic collaboration where we start with
Google's leadership in just cloud native development
and what they have to do to scale,
and then take together the problems and the opportunities
of real enterprises, of real cities, and things there.
And as Allen said this morning, it's complicated.
It's not that easy.
There's a whole new set of problems
that we need to deal with, and this partnership
is amazing at putting that together.
>> Makes the network more important.
>> Makes the network more important, yes.
>> Awesome, so now talk about
what you're doing for incentives.
Obviously, you've got a great posture to the marketplace,
love how you're doing it, you're bringing
two worlds together, bringing a lot to the table,
but now you've got to keep people motivated
and keep them incentives.
Couple things you announced on stage,
DevNet Solutions Plus, which is much more curated
set of approved rockstar developers or apps
that can get on a price list.
That's like a lottery ticket.
It's like the golden ticket for a developer.
There's real value there, right?
You can't invite everybody, but you got to
do some QAing, but talk about
some of these incentive programs you have.
>> Absolutely.
So what happens is once again,
a company like Cisco has an entire community
and ecosystem of people and places of infrastructure
around the world, and they're looking to differentiate,
they're looking to have interesting offerings as well.
They're very relevant, because an app developer today
needs to figure out how can they make money,
how can they take all of everything they've invested
in software and bring it to a business value.
And so what we're doing is actually coupling
that app developer with the entire Cisco channel
and the Cisco partners that are out there,
and then letting their applications come forward.
So when you get something onto...
The way that it works is that Cisco has its price list,
partners around the world can create solutions
that they deliver with those products.
But in addition to Cisco's products, what we can do is
put on a software and ISV's products onto there,
and we're adding it on to the Cisco price list.
It's a whole new type of app store. (laughs)
But it's another way to go to market
to get into these places.
>> You're seeing some early returns in terms of the types
of ISVs that are coming into the tables,
or pattern to the match, or see more network-centric?
Who are some of the kinds of developers?
What's the make up look like?
>> Yeah, so it's really a combination.
So what happens is there's the set of applications
that are built on infrastructure, surprisingly.
So it builds on a collaboration, or a unified communication
infrastructure, things that are built on a UCS,
like a compute infrastructure.
Things that need the network in a mission critical way.
So like trading applications, right?
You need that network to work, the performance
of the application needs to be coupled,
so then people tend to buy a kit of here's the software,
here's the hardware that makes it all work,
I'm buying infrastructure, I want to buy these together.
And so it's really kind of putting that bundle of value
together and then letting that sell.
And I talked to our partners around the world,
it's an amazing ecosystem.
And when they can actually connect to the world
of software developers and this ecosystem
in a way that it helps them differentiate their business,
it helps bring the app developer money
and a business opportunity.
It's a whole new level of scale.
It's incredible.
>> You'll be pushing video apps on there, too.
>> Susie: Absolutely.
>> CUBE videos.
>> CUBE videos, there we go.
(laughing) Absolutely.
>> Interesting times.
Awesome.
Anything you want to add?
>> Yeah, definitely.
One of the things I was wondering about
is that with this whole app ecosystem and the partners
and the things along those lines,
what are the apps that you're seeing
that you actually never expected to see?
>> Well, some are ones that we actually did expect,
or we hoped for them, but the fact that
they're coming through is another case.
There's a set of applications that are built,
for example, around contact centers.
Contact centers are customer care, it's the way
that people are interacting, right?
And there's a whole kind of communications infrastructure
around that, it's how people are answering phones,
offering services, knowing what to do,
so how you build those solutions together.
There's a set of healthcare applications,
so when you're going into healthcare, your patient
monitoring devices versus your guest Wi-Fi services
are different, so the kinds of solutions
that you can provide there are key.
There's actually a great thing in terms of indoor
location based services.
So we have Meraki and CMX where your Wi-Fi infrastructure
not only provides wireless connectivity
but gives you indoor location proximity.
There's actually a company here called Map Wise,
which has built kind of a wayfinding application on top.
When I was at Web Summit, then they had Cisco infrastructure
for putting up the conference, then they had
their application to help people navigate
throughout the conference, and they came in,
and I actually spoke to Matthew, who's here,
and he was like yeah, I had to learn
because I had to go in early.
They had to set up
the network, and then I'm a software guy,
I had to get my app to work on that network.
I hadn't really thought about how to do that before.
Right, so you're starting to couple these apps into that.
>> Stu: New use cases.
>> These are new use cases, and so much value.
>> Yeah, and it's good that you get the terminology,
it's a language issue, right?
So you got to get the languages nailed down.
All right, final question for you.
What's the bumper sticker here?
What's the phrase?
I heard you on stage, create, connect, secure.
What's the current DevNet Create tagline?
>> So it is: Connect to Create.
And so in one port, it was about connecting the world,
providing that connection, and that's what we've done
over the last 25 years.
And over the next 25, even more things will be connected,
but it's really about the solutions that we can build
together as a team, and there's an ecosystem now that
you have APIs that are exposed.
You can build machine learning, and artificial intelligence
together with world leading connectivity,
together with world leading cloud companies.
And when you bring all those together,
you can have entirely new types of experiences
that we can do, so it's Connect to Create.
Along with that, actually comes the need
for security and protection, and so that fabric
needs to not only connect to create, but also
connect and protect to create.
And we think that by building that into the infrastructure
as well, we can help app developers to secure
their customers' data and to secure their users
themselves, access, and all sorts of things.
>> I love the concept of co-creation, really great
collaboration model, and you guys are doing a great job.
Congratulations on driving this developer program,
and programs now, from a handful of renegades,
now to a big organization, or growing organization.
>> We're still lean, but our pack is growing. (laughing)
>> You don't got to be a rocket scientist to know
they're going to be doubling down on this.
Cisco, cracking the code on the developer forum
about learning the languages, knowing how to lead
into the right cultures and bring them together,
and have the right technology, enablement,
and Susie, the creator, a part of the team,
member of Cisco team for DevNet.
Thanks for coming on and sharing, appreciate it.
>> Susie: Thank you so much.
>> Be right back with more live coverage
after this short break.
(upbeat music)