>> Live from Mountain View, California
it's theCUBE covering DevNet Create 2019.
Brought to you by Cisco.
>> Welcome back to theCUBE,
Lisa Martin with John Furrier live
at Cisco DevNet Create 2019
at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
John and I are pleased to welcome to theCUBE,
Jeff Levinsailor collaboration engineer from Presidio.
Jeff it's great to have you joining us today.
>> Yeah it's great to be here.
>> So lots of energy you can hear,
all this noise behind us.
We heard this morning in the keynote
that the DevNet community is now,
oh well over half a million strong.
You mentioned before we went live
this is your second DevNet Create
so before we get into Presidio
and Cisco tell me a little bit about
your involvement in the DevNet community.
>> So I got started just looking for support
and it's not like it's a supported product,
this is a new venture for everybody
so you go out and you find these little
avenues to get questions answered
and WebEx teams has a great community support
and you just ask a question.
Ended up answering more questions than I was asking
and you know that kind of like got me started down
this path of you know people bounce ideas off each other
so really this is a homecoming
and it's just people inspiring each other.
If you really want to learn and deep dive,
obviously I'm a self learner
so I'll just sit down and really get into it
but I come here to get inspired
and the keynote just... whew.
>> Blew you away.
>> Yeah.
>> What was the highlight for you in the keynote?
>> Anything Ashutosh has to talk about.
So Ashutosh is on the I guess the incubator side,
he comes up with these things
and his job is to get people excited about the APIs.
So today he had an augmented reality app with his phone
and he would go around and show network coverage
of a Wi-Fi hotspot.
You can go up to an access point
and troubleshoot network of problems
by seeing if an access point is registered or not.
So my mind I'm thinking,
how many times do I go in the data center
and I have to plug in a laptop to look
to see what VLAN is on a port,
now I can take that same approach to
put my phone out and in a data center and
okay this switch has this VLAN's here I could plug
it in I don't need to even need
to plug my laptop in.
>> I mean he first introduced the beginning of that demo
at Cisco live in Barcelona.
Totally blown away.
He's the demo god first of all.
>> Yeah
>> He's amazing.
But it shows the automation right and
also shows the new kind of experiences.
I think to me what's inspiring to me about this community,
and I'd love to get your reaction to this,
is that it kind of shows a new way to do work.
And it's all about making life easier
but it's also more capability.
You can see all the configurations
and then ultimately writing new apps.
This seems to be the theme.
Create, DevNet Create helps you with all these capabilities.
Is that kind of something that you're seeing as well?
What's your reaction to that,
kind of this new way of doing things?
>> Wow I mean it's, we have a code competition
at our, at Presidio, called shark tank.
It's really just to inspire people.
Tell me a business use case for this.
Use case is really 90% of it.
You can find help, you can find mentors at your work.
But really just finding a use case
and stuff like this coming here just
thinking about new ways to do things and
new things to create.
>> In collaboration what are some of the things that you see
that are low-hanging fruit use cases of
either mundane tasks or
stuff that just needs to be kind of like abstracted away?
What are some of the things?
>> I have a ton of those.
So somebody came to me, a law firm that had these
attorney-secretary assignments
and they wanted secretaries
to be able to schedule meetings for attorneys.
Now you can do that in a GUI,
but we're seeing more and more is away from the GUI
and it's becoming this API first.
So anything that's not in the GUI
it's in the API so that's where
our value as integrators has really become
this gap between the GUI and the API.
So what we did or what I did is go in active directory.
They have some fields filled out
because they're already populated in one thing for this.
I read from that, and then I go to a WebEx API
and I populate it.
And that runs a nightly basis.
>> So you automate that away, piece of cake.
But this is the trend.
This is kind of what we're seeing happening with the cloud.
The question that comes up in the enterprise is,
we've been doing this thing for long time.
It's the way we do it.
Ten years ago we built out this system.
Don't touch it,
but I love the new stuff.
How do I get the new stuff in?
How do I deal with the old stuff, the legacy?
We got containers, you get some new stuff,
APIs are a big part of this integration fabric,
composing apps.
>> I think you have to show the business value.
It's saving time, it's saving people hours,
and it's really...
Checking code into git is something you wouldn't
think about or checking network configs into git
is something you wouldn't really think about
just a year ago.
But that's really becoming the trend
and having testable code.
You know, kind of...
If something goes wrong you have a backup.
You have somebody,
you'd know exactly who did what.
Before it was just people hacking away.
>> So let's talk about unlocking value for a second.
When you were talking with John and me about
what some of the things that blew your mind
during this morning's keynote,
what I was hearing from you in one sense is,
wow, how much easier certain functions of your job
are going to be because of this.
What value are you seeing that
even just the few things that were announced this morning
is going to bring to not just you and your business
but Presidio and Cisco's customers.
>> Well, I mean...
So for instance the Meraki thing.
They release bulk actions.
API is typically, if you write the code one at a time,
that's going to limit your ability to do certain functions.
Having all these APIs in one endpoint,
immediately I'm thinking cloud formation templates in Amazon
but as a Meraki solution.
So you can take this entire network
and copy and paste it as one slice of code.
That's tremendous.
>> What's the community vibe here at DevNet?
I mean you mentioned...
>> Oh it's a homecoming.
I know all these people.
I've met so many people from other areas
and people, competitors, we're all friends here.
And it's not a marketing venture at all.
You don't see a lot of people
scanning badges and bugging you on email later.
This is all about
just people nerding out about what they've done.
>> It's organic too.
>> It's an adult show-and-tell.
>> I like that
>> It's not just a hackathon, you know hey we have an event.
They throw a hackathon over and it turns,
most of these events turn into marketing events.
>> It's completely >> This is not that.
>> As unorganized as I would want it to be.
There's conversations just passing by in the hallway
and I get just as much out of that as I do in a workshop.
>> So you're giving a breakout session later today,
Contact Center AI for More Efficient Governments.
Tell us about that.
>> Yeah so that's a 20-minute lightning talk
on just a recent project I did
and taking an on-premise solution
and being able to do more by moving it up to the cloud.
This is Amazon Connect, could be another one,
but just basically enabling through the cloud
different functionalities.
We're using Alexbot,
We're using Elasticsearch, we're using Lambda.
And we're taking the top 10 tickets
that this helpdesk would receive
and trying to automate those.
So I need to reset my PIN.
I need to transfer me to this person.
That was an operator before in an Excel spreadsheet.
So what we did was completely not change their workflow.
They're going to upload an Excel spreadsheet into S3.
It's going to kick a lambda function
to separate that spreadsheet into a Dynamo database.
Elasticsearch is going to read that database,
and then Alexbot is going to interact with Elasticsearch.
>> And this all in real time?
>> It's all in real time.
>> And the bot and the human...
>> It's all natural language.
>> Talking together?
Or working together?
>> Yes, working together.
>> To solve those customer problems or get
well that and I guess get the customer ticket
routed appropriately?
>> Yeah so there's ticket look-ups, ticket creation,
ticket closure, anything that you would typically,
anything that you can automate,
we've done it within the IVR.
And we've measured containment rates.
>> Jeff, this is exactly why we've been covering,
this is our third year,
been here since the beginning,
at the creation of the event,
because what you just described is so valuable
and so kind of basic if you think about it.
The number one tickets that everyone,
that are stack ranked,
that happen over and over again.
But if you break it down,
this is got a database for this,
I got a database for this, I got a database for this.
In the old world, you'd have a waterfall process.
You'd have a product project manager,
people would go in a roundtrip meeting after meeting
arguing about schemas and databases.
I mean what would it be like in the old days
if you went through the old traditional models
versus this agile hey let's just put it together
hack up, just string up some APIs,
sling the APIs, roll it up, wire it up.
>> What's exciting to me, you're moving from
a static IVR to
self-service and then even more what I think,
forget who coined this term but, selfie service.
You know more about a user.
You're able to predictively say,
"I see you have a ticket open."
Or go a step further and say,
"I see you have email on this phone."
And we're having ActiveSync issues
and only alert those people of issues
and not bother everybody else.
I see you work out of this office and you're calling in.
Are you calling about your office closure?
Because we have a temporary office for you over here.
So being able to get ahead of anything and predict,
that's the next step.
>> You know this really also highlights
what we tend to talk about at some of these data conferences
where the underlying value being here
is the creation and stitching together of solutions.
But it's the data that's driving it, right?
The tickets, the ranking the tasks,
getting into these reasoning aspects
of reasoning with the data, predictive or prescriptive,
is a personalization benefit.
These are the things that are exposed
on this new way of creating.
>> There's some real exciting,
very consumable APIs out there.
One of them I'll named is Indico IO.
This is something that you could just plug in some data,
and it'll make a prediction
using just a bunch of learned data set that it already has.
And I'll give you an example.
A WebEx team space that we just chat away in for
I don't know months and months,
I funneled all that data to a simple API
and it comes back and it tells me who's the angriest person,
who's the happiest person.
(laughter)
There's an API for who's a conservative, who's a liberal.
There's an API for the Myers-Briggs test.
>> Wow.
>> You can get all of this...
>> What's the URL?
>> Indico.io
I-N-D-I-C-O dot I-O
>> Awesome well thanks for sharing that.
On the API thing I want to get your expert opinion on this
because this comes up a lot recently
at these conferences we go to.
Where, oh a new way to develop modern applications,
blah, blah, blah, Waterfall's going away, fiber cloud,
all that's good stuff, check, check, check.
At the end of the day
the key ingredient in all this is APIs.
APIs are becoming the center point for,
one, data sharing, integration, coding, middleware,
a new kind of middleware evolving.
What's your view on this
because this is a central part of integration too.
Like if someone wants to adopt a new product,
I want to bring it in.
>> It's really recognizing that your use case
isn't everybody's use case.
So you come from a static fully-functioning product
to an API first approach.
You build the API then you build things around it.
So when WebEx teams was released, for instance,
it had certain functionality there
and certain functionality wasn't there,
but you could do it through the API.
So it's partners and Cisco kind of competing
at the same time to come up with a better solution.
And any time you compete, you know, it's good.
And any time something is open, it's good.
So you have these open APIs and you have a community
trying to come up with the best solution.
>> And that's really where your communities
are shining too right now.
Because communities are great at giving feedback.
If something (laughs) if something's not right
they'll raise their hand up.
>> Very honest feedback, right?
>> Yeah. Competition.
So Cisco telling Cisco something's not working,
you know you bring in some other people that maybe
they're more apt to tell you when something's not working.
They don't have any dog in the fight, you know.
They'll tell you if something's not working.
They'll give you feedback.
And it really enables a better end product.
And a product that's more formed to, tailor-fit,
for that user, that use case.
>> Which is exactly how it should be, right?
So last question, Jeff, before we wrap up.
You already talked about how excited you were
with some of the things in the keynote
which is day one of two.
Any kind of expectations or hopes and dreams
for what you're going to learn the rest of today and tomorrow
that will help evolve the Presidio-Cisco partnership?
>> I mean one thing is just making connections out here.
But learning I think...
so I'm a collab guy
and I'm getting to be more of a developer
and that's making me more of a generalist again.
Because as a developer you have to interact with
more than just collab APIs.
I'm getting into wireless and enterprise
and everything, security.
So what I get out of conferences like this is
going around and seeing what's happening
in other technologies and other verticals
and, once again, competitive ideas.
Seeing what other people are doing.
Adding to that, telling them what I'm doing.
>> A lot of collaboration, pun intended.
>> Yeah. If you like if you like puns,
the keynote tomorrow is going to be amazing.
>> Is it? Dot, dot, dot.
>> We'll be watching.
>> Excellent, Jeff thanks so much for joining
John and me on theCUBE today.
We appreciate your time.
For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin.
You're watching theCUBE live from Cisco DevNet Create 2019.
Thanks for watching.
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