Community is important. Whether at work, at school, or at play, the people and culture surrounding us are the keystone to a productive and happy lifestyle. Emphasis on growth through community is very much apparent at Cisco Systems Inc.

“One of the things that’s very unique about the DevNet community is we have technical stakeholders from small startups to really large partners or huge enterprises,” said Mandy Whaley (pictured), senior director of developer experience at Cisco DevNet. “And when we’re all here in the DevNet Zone, we’re all engineers, we’re all exchanging ideas … no matter what the scale.”

Whaley spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in San Diego, California. They discussed ways in which Cisco is supporting the DevNet community (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Training the information technology team of the future

Cisco has undergone radical changes in the past four years, morphing from producing network hardware into a service provider bridging the worlds of hardware and software. Now it is reaching out to help its community undertake the same journey.

“We started from the beginning. really designing [the developer training program] with this idea of the IT team of the future,” Whaley states. “It gives a clear signal to people that we do need both sets of skills, and it gives a pathway to get those skills.”

Integrated training for both infrastructure and software allows students to choose to learn a wider combination of skills or go deep into specialist areas. “A chose your own adventure” in learning is how Whaley describes the specialist certifications. Areas to pick from include collaboration, data center, network programmability, operating system software, service provider, and internet of things.

“You can put together wireless with IoT application development and go towards roles like an IoT architect,” Whaley said, describing just one of many potential combinations.

Walk, run, fly …

Eighty to 95% of networking changes are still done manually, according to Cisco. This statistic will have to change, as network complexity is moving beyond human scope. To help customers and partners master the switch from manual to automation, Cisco has created the DevNet Automation Exchange.

Here, partners and customers, big and small and in all stages of the digital transformation journey, can come together to share use-case scenarios and exchange information.

Acknowledging that customers are sometimes unsure where or how to start with network automation, Cisco has a “walk-run-fly” methodology for the exchange. “Walking” involves simple, small projects intended to build confidence around network automation. Once that confidence is achieved, it is time to speed up the pace and “run.”

“The run phase is start taking action. You can start to implement policy and start doing configuration through automation,” Whaley explained.

During “fly,” students meld the knowledge gained into a DevOps workflow, enabling automations such as chatbots to communicate back to ops teams or fixing configuration misalignments.

Network automation allows customers and partners to “work more efficiently and scale faster,” as well as increase network reliability and reduce risk of security breaches, according to Whaley. “It’s really the combination of both of those where you get the biggest impact,” she concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Live 2019 event. (* Disclosure: Cisco Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE