“We need to make things simpler. Networking is hard. It’s a special skillset, and it’s not something that people who build applications really think about,” Mike Cohen, director of Product Management at Cisco Systems, Inc., told theCUBE’s Stu Miniman in an interview during the Red Hat Summit in Boston, MA.

“One of the best innovations we had from ACI (Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure) is that we actually separated out what the application requires from how the networking works,” Cohen said. “So, now it’s easier to describe what you need if you’re an application developer, and have a network that can adapt to that and a network that’s still friendly to a network administrator.”

Shashi Kiran, Cisco’s Senior Director and Head of WW Marketing for Data Center and Cloud Networking, explained to theCUBE the impact of this for the customer. “ACI is one of the best tools you have in the toolkit to take customers down the path of SDN (Software Defined Networking).” Kiran added that regardless of the path the customer chooses to go down, the essence is “… getting to agility, it’s getting to automation, it’s getting to programmability, using policy as a means.”

Aligning with partners in the industry

As one of the a critical founding members of the open-source movement, Cisco actively participates in communities such as the Docker Open Container Project and aligns with partners in the industry to create solutions.

Cohen told theCUBE: “Customers are asking us to work with open-source technology, and working with open source means contributing and being part of the community.” This includes Cisco’s recent collaboration with Comcast, where, according to Cohen, “They’ve been writing code, we’ve been writing code, all around solving their use case and helping them go to market with an open-stack solution.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE