Cisco Pipeline: The last survivor of the Innovate Everywhere Challenge
Last year there was an internal competition in Cisco called the “Innovate Everywhere Challenge”. Cisco had a public blog about it here. There were 1,100 ideas submitted and my idea to build a serverless cloud service reached the semi-finals along with 15 other lucky people.
Following the semi-finals each team was asked to videos and further refine the pitch. This was then blasted out to the Cisco-verse again. From here, 6 teams were selected to the finals round. Our team again made the cut. This time we were to refine the pitch and go before a live internal broadcast and convince a panel of judges in 5 minutes that our project was worth investing in.
There were 3 winners selected of the six finalists. We were not one of them. In hindsight I can see why we didn’t win. Our idea was still vague and while we presented with passion it didn’t quite captivate nor convince.
You lost , but it doesn’t mean you have to like it.
In the opening scene of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” young Indiana Jones tries to steal back the cross of Coronado. He fails and has to return it to a man who tells him: “You lost this time kid, but that doesn’t mean you have to like it”
Not liking to lose can create fuels for motivation. In the months that followed our loss, most of the other teams disbanded. Even some of the 3 finalist teams fell apart with some team members leaving Cisco. Our team suffered losses too as some people stopped working on the project all together. Through it all, however, I kept on plowing through. I didn’t like losing and I didn’t like a panel of judges telling me they thought something else was more worthwhile. I kept developing and working at it on and off company time learning skills I didn’t think I’d have to know before starting this including Kubernetes and Functional programming.
Just Keep Shipping.
In January of this year, right before Cisco Live in Berlin, I finally shipped an alpha, with the help of some of the people on my team. We released https://ciscopipeline.io to the public and narrowed the idea all the way down to the ability to create Cisco Sparkbots.
While there are other platforms out there for creating bots in chat services, for doing it in Cisco Spark, nothing is easier. And why wouldn’t Cisco want to offer a service to help users of its own product? Pipeline was built on Kubernetes, Golang, and Clojurescript with React (reagent and re-frame). Perhaps the most shocking thing about our solution was that it was built on top of all Cisco products. It uses Cisco Metacloud under the covers (No AWS, no Azure, no GCE) and that Metacloud runs on Cisco UCS with Cisco switches.
Now the sparkbot market isn’t necessarily the hugest market opportunity in tech right now. Cisco has a lot of competition in this market from Slack, HipChat, and other messaging platforms as well as other companies that offer bot services across different platforms. Focusing just on Spark limits our user base quite a bit, but still gives us experience in running a real service.
Since we’ve released we’ve added support for code editing within the system using Python in the backend with code samples and better documentation. The Cisco Pipeline Business Unit today is an unsanctioned Business Unit comprised of one person. So we are agile, but slow.
Keep Revving like everyone is watching you
Pipeline is the only project from the Innovate Everywhere Challenge that has shipped. The other projects have either been absorbed by the Cisco universe in other projects, or are still being evaluated.
I would argue that if a project doesn’t ship in 6 months after 6 months of refinement and planning then it should be considered dead. Pipeline was late and could be considered dead as well. The contest ended in April 19th 2016 and Pipeline didn’t ship until January 2017. The reason for this is that the world moves too fast and something designed and then released a year later has probably already been disrupted.
I will say however, that in the end: It did ship.
What I’ve learned is that I can innovate even if no one is watching. While Pipeline may not be the hugest hit, it is still something that I created from beginning to end. Something I am proud of and will show off at the drop of a hat. And if I have to shut it down, or no one uses it, or someone else takes credit, I have no problem. It’s not the golden egg that matters. Its the goose. Be the goose, and keep laying golden eggs.
