With its acquisition of AppDynamics Inc. application performance management software, Cisco Systems Inc. appears to be trying to catch the digital transformation wave before it crashes. What this transformation actually means for the market, however, remains hazy.

For certain, digital transformation has data and cloud (particularly DevOps) as its two main, swirling currents, according to John Furrier (@furrier) (pictured, left) and Peter Burris (@plburris) (pictured, right), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

“It’s musical chairs, and if the music stops and you’re a big player like Cisco and you don’t have a big play in cloud or data, you’re screwed,” Furrier said at the Cisco DevNet Create event in San Francisco, California, today.

Networking leader Cisco’s abrupt foray into DevOps may strike some as a hand-waving “me too” from another legacy company grasping for cloud relevance, Furrier said. However, Internet of Things applications are deeply network-involved, which obviously may give Cisco the inside track there.

“You’ve got the collision between AppDynamics and classic Cisco DNA into a melting pot,” he said, adding that there is big potential bubbling there.

IoT data streams and data in general do have a close relationship to the network, Burris agreed. “I like to say that the edge is not a place — the edge is a time, that at the end of the day what’s most important is, can you process something in the time envelope required? And the place is just a way of measuring that,” he said.

Data is North Star to three horsemen: storage, network, compute

Data, network, cloud — all of these are a means to an end … or to end-to-end in Burris’s view. “This notion of end-to-end is going to be really crucial to a business, really crucial to architects and really crucial to development. And how you handle that end-to-end is something that has to start emerging,” he said.

On that list, data is paramount — cloud, DevOps and the network must allow distributed data to move in the manner that end-to-end demands, he added.

“In many respects, it’s time to start thinking of data-defined infrastructure,” Burris stated, noting that the Wikibon research team he leads is currently playing with that term.

The silver lining to the huge complexity of distributed data is that it may create jobs to replace those lost to automation. “We are going to have an enormous need for people that can handle and deal with distributed data,” Burris concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Cisco DevNet Create 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Cisco DevNet Create. Neither Cisco DevNet nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE