Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. It's theCUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier, the host. Here for three days of wall-to-wall coverage, our next guest is Shabaa Kovil, who's the director of product management for Cisco DevNet. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, John. Thanks for having me on theCUBE. Great conversation before the cameras came out. We're talking about development in cloud native, but we're super impressed with the work that you guys have done at DevNet. Certainly, the top story of the show here is that Cisco has now crossed over the flywheel of innovation where 500,000 registered developers, not visitors to a website or some marketing program. Real engaging developers. Absolutely. Congratulations. Thank you, John. Thank you. Thank you for being here. And you're here. You got DevNet and DevNet Create, which we've been covering extensively as well, which is the cloud native world coming together. Yes. This is for the first time in Cisco's history where you have now a clear line of sight for network engineers, network developers, network experts who have been certified in their CCIE and other certifications, CCNA, CCNPs, all the stuff that you guys do. You can now see a clear line where you can extend the capabilities and knowledge and expertise and power of networking up the stack. Absolutely. Finally, Cisco's moving up the stack. Yes. Tell us what's going on in the product side. Absolutely. And I'm going to talk about very specific example today. And today, if you heard the keynote speak and Susie opened up a few things and announcement, one of them was DNA Developer Center. And I'm going to talk about that because part of it is how network is an open platform now. And that was part of the announcement. You will hear a lot about that. And linking it back to developers, right? Why they should care about, why they should look into it. So three things I'm going to talk about. DNA Developer Center and what they can find there. And once they go there and they really start learning about our platform on APIs on DevNet, what code exchange does for them and how they can start not only programming the intent based on our intent APIs and what they want network to do for them, but also sharing some community code or using that community code if they are just getting started, right? So on DNA Developer Center, we have four capabilities highlighted. These are the APIs, whether they are intent APIs, integration APIs to connect with other third parties or SDKs to manage multi-party devices. Or they are for ITSM or a specific use case integrations. Hold on, go slow because I'm kind of like not as on the uptake as you are on this because you're in it. If DNA is a set of abstractions APIs on top of the equipment, so it's not natively, it's a set of services, not services, a set of APIs. A set of APIs. So that people can use those APIs to create services. To manage their network wealth, right? To automate and drive these right use cases. So I might, yeah, let's talk about an example, right? Intent, my intent might be to, we were talking about video conferencing a while back and I come from that environment. I want to drive a particular QoS for certain level of execs, right? If they are on the call, this was the thing of like eight, 10 years back. If my execs are on a call, make sure they have the best experience. So the QoS quality of your network should be set up to a level that there's no disruption, there's no latency in the call, right? So that's an intent, that's a business intent. Give best experience to my execs. Right? So really that's combining policy and QoS together to make it meet the outcome which is no latency. To meet the outcome, but for the network engineer now, now let's connect back to the developer. The network engineer who's trying to make this intent possible for the execs, there's a lot of places they need to set up this QoS and won't it be easy for them if there was a simple API that they can use to create that solution to drive that policy across the devices whether Cisco devices or non-Sysco devices? This has been the challenge for network engineers in general because you want to have things in control and lockdown, but as you want to do more things that are programmable, there's been some provisioning and some configuration management things. Correct. You're saying, hey, you can lock down all the architecture and then move up, use the APIs to do better integration, make things run smoothly without disrupting the network. Is that right? That's part of it, but also it's about making it easy for them, right? Simplify the process of doing it. The process of making it happen was long steps of CLI command that now the network engineer was going and continuously, a lot of the time, people actually tells us that they would have this cut and paste copy of the command that they will take from one place, go to the next place, next device, and next device and continue to do that step. And that's the productivity gain we are driving by simplifying where one API call can go across all the devices and make that change happen. We heard that a lot from people on DevNet in the hallway conversations is that DevNet's made my life easier. I don't have to do those mundane tasks. Exactly. That's part of getting things done. Okay, let me ask you a personal question. Okay, as Director of Product Manager for DevNet, what is your product scope? What are you working on? Can you take a minute? Yeah, that's a very good question. And that's where some of these offers we are talking about early comes into play. So for example, within DevNet, we create a lot of offers to make developers life simple, whether we are talking about giving them the best quality of learning content, or giving them Sandbox, hosted Sandbox environment to try and test. All of that requires a lot of product management knowledge underneath, but really what the two areas we have worked more closely to get them out to market, one is this thing called Code Exchange. It's a tool for our developer community, where we have aggregated the public Git code across the Cisco technologies. That's on GitHub, I think, right? GitHub code, right, absolutely. But the second powerful thing on top of that is our ecosystem exchange. This is where we are bringing an aggregated view of every partner out there, every Cisco partner, who's creating great solutions on our APIs in a single place. Our developers can go and find that solution to really, in the end, address the outcome, the business outcome they are looking to address. Shibha, talk about the, I want you to put some color commentary around some of the feedback you've heard. We hear people of the DevNet community saying, you know, come to Cisco Live, I end up spending all my week here in DevNet, because it really is kind of like a kid in the candy store from a computer science or developer perspective. What are some of the cool examples and demos that you guys have here? What's your favorite? What are some of the things that are jumping out that people are gravitating towards? I will tell you one of the most popular sessions that I have seen in the last few days here is network programmability for network engineers. That's one. There's also a very network programmability one-on-one, coding one-on-one class. It's basic Python, but applying it in network context. Those are some of the most popular sessions that I have seen, but when it comes to cool demos, there's a cool demo around Flex IQ. I think you might be talking to Ashutosh later about that. And really it's a retail scenario how you are tracking using the location-based service example, but in this case, camera feed, really analyzing where people are. And you will get to hear more about this. He took an, I saw the demo of the Flex IQ. I first of all loved the name. I said, trade market immediately, get it out there, first use wins. And it's already out there, but it's really taking an A access point. This is an access point. And it plugs into a camera, and it's really a great example of some of the coolness you can do with a pre-existing condition. It's the information. So each of these information point, that data point that they are collecting, whether it's a camera feed, it's a location service like information about the devices and the environment. Each set of data is the relevance in this, which is driving the new use cases. And this data is coming through these APIs that are available, whether it's a Miraki access point API, or the camera APIs that are available to enable the CIS. Yeah, this is really the aha moment for me. I mean, I've been following Cisco really since the 90s, early when they formed and being a young gun at the time, younger than I am now, 30 years ago. But it was really networking, connecting companies together. It was the plumbing, it was the core, and unstoppable since then. Now the success is still there, but it's really the problem solving is never going away. I saw the security challenges that were outlined in the keynote. We all know cyber ops is a huge issue. Cloud is here, you got industrial IoT going on and IoT. But these examples of DevNet showing is that these new capabilities with, I won't say a hack, but a maker fair culture. It is a maker culture, right? Which is a lot of the DIY stuff. So there's a lot of learning by playing with the APIs and multiple one of them. And you really find the use cases that you have never addressed before. We also have a design thinking workshop here going on. And part of it is really thinking about the use cases from the user perspective, what you are trying to address before finding the cool technologies. Really understand what your users needs are. And we are doing a lot of things around that and bringing it, connecting it back to the APIs once we learn the right needs and finding these new use cases that were never possible before.  I know she's really hardcore on this, but you guys have nailed the community aspect as well. You brought that open source ethos into the formula, which makes it more collaborative. No one wants to be alone. The last thing a network engineer wants to do is be like the old way of being tied to the chair on the network, troubleshooting problems. They want to have more collaboration as some of this creativity kicks in. So it's really a new time. How are you guys handling this? Are you just like people are having an awakening moment or what are you guys doing to nurture this? What are some of the exciting things? And the best part about the community is that community is learning with each other. It's this feeling of we are enabling our community both digitally and through events like Cisco Live and DevNet Create. We bring them together to be able to learn from each other as much as we learn with them and trying to define the right use cases and solutions. And that's what the community is behind. So the 500,000 developers who are coming and learning with us, they have found the use cases they were addressing for their business. They also found a new skill set that they were looking to learn before. And a lot of them have come along where they are showing their tech cred in the community, really being the community leaders. You know, it's been kind of a downer. Some of the narrative I've seen from press outlets, other press outlets and other kind of naysayers has been, hey secure, hey network guys, you're going to be automated away, go learn how to code to save your career. Actually, that's not happening. That is not happening at all, yeah. The power of networking certainly as security moves down lower on the stack and policy and these cool service oriented, service meshes, Kubernetes, really points to the relevance of the network engineer more than ever, SDN, Software Defined Data Center, that's not going away. Automation is going to take the mundane tasks away, but the action's happening at the app layer. They have that expertise and 20 years plus experience knowing how networks should be running to make these things possible, the use cases around the applications possible. They're more relevant than ever. They are more relevant than ever, I would say, exactly. That's the key. Well, you guys are at the beginning, I think of another set of an inflection point. Certainly DevNet's gone from in quick four years, you're connecting to the cloud native world with DevNet Create, which is phenomenal. Those are two worlds that are coming together. I just see another inflection point coming. Maybe it's a million developers, but you've been successful in the enterprise where it's been really difficult. I mean, even Microsoft with their legacy developer program like DevNet and Visual Basic and all the MSDN stuff had to buy GitHub to be kind of maintained relevance. Other companies like Oracle and VMware and other ones, they're having a hard time with the developer programs.  Part of it is for us not only focusing on traditional infrastructure developer, also talking about the app developer. So these application developers who did not know about network at all and a lot of times they had to fight with their network engineers to get their application, the particular function they wanted to have. So that's what we are enabling by bringing them together. Also, we have been running small programs like we're trying new market, global markets, China, India and some of the things like really reaching out to the big, large hackathons which are digital. So for example, in India we were recently doing a smart India hackathon. It's the largest, there are 500,000 students participated in solving real problems for the country. And DevNet was the provider of applications and APIs, bringing them into the application world with the understanding of network. A lot of growth in India and China, certainly massive new developers coming on board. Okay, final question to wrap up the segment. I got to get your perspective, put your, I mean take your DevNet hat off for a second. Put your Cisco hat on. For the folks that couldn't make Cisco Live this year, what's the big story coming out of the event this year? Obviously, you guys have been successful with the 500,000 developers. What's the big story developing here? What should people know is the most important story for Cisco Live 2018? I think the biggest story I would like to call out is that network is open for business. Network is really open for you to really come and make your intent, your use cases, your business outcomes possible. And that's the biggest story I will call out. I've got Govill here, product management for DevNet. Here on theCUBE, live coverage day two of three days. I'm John Furrier. Stay with us for more live coverage as we start winding down day two. A lot of great action. The network is programmable, it's creating value and new use cases and the developers are in the center of the action, network engineers seeing a clear path to the cloud and more. Back with more after this short break.


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