Thanks Jeff, for posting this blog. As an (almost) 20 year R/S CCIE, I was pondering this exact question. I realized that although my responsibilities have grown along with (I hope) my technical competence, I do indeed fall right into your definition of a CONE. So the question for me is, do I ride out the rest of my career (getting longer as the stock market goes down) as a router wizard or do I expand the scope of my experience by trying something new. I have miles of programming experience (Assembler and plain old C) but they are also old and crusty and not really relevant in these days of Agile and Object Oriented Development environments. I too have talked in presentations all around the wonder of SDN (while still thinking in my heart that command line is and always will be the most efficient way of configuring and managing a network.) The new certifications provide a great path and a wide open future for us CONEs - always better when there's a challenge, right? I applaud your group's focus and the goal you have set for certification in 1Q/20 and thank you for answering the question for me. I set up a DevNet account and started working on it myself today.