Next Steps for DevNet
Now that the community has hit 500,000 developers -- a "critical mass," Wee said -- it's time for Cisco to facilitate interaction among them. Developers and engineers have great ideas of "what's possible" and should be able to share their code for others to leverage.
At Cisco Live, the company announced a one-stop shop, called DevNet Ecosystem Exchange, that gives partners a place to share applications and solutions built for Cisco platforms. The portal launched with more than 1,300 solutions, Cisco said. In addition, it launched the
DevNet Code Exchange, a similar portal but focused on developers rather than partners. It contains a curated set of sample code, adapters, tools, and SDKs created by Cisco and the DevNet community.
Had Cisco rolled out these portals at program launch, or even last year, it's unlikely that they would have had any impact -- the community was too small. At 500,000, that's enough members to create the critical mass required to make the community work, as Wee had pointed out. The 1,300 solutions in the DevNet Ecosystem Exchange is a good proof point of that.
Cisco also said it's added APIs to its DNA Center network monitoring dashboard so partners and developers can build applications and solutions that sit on top of or interoperate with it. This is a critically important step for Cisco, as DNA Center has become the management console for all of its products. I believe, over time, DNA Center will be as important to Cisco as vCenter is to VMware. Any company that wants to work with VMware knows that vCenter integration is a must. Similarly, DNA Center will be that for Cisco.
Worth noting is that the DevNet team was instrumental in developing the DNA Center APIs. This might seem like a "no kidding" statement, but even though Cisco had talked the talk of software, it previously hadn't walked the walk -- meaning, it hadn't had its developer team create the APIs for its products.
The DevNet area at Cisco Live was packed, like it was at Cisco Live EMEA earlier this year and like it was at Cisco Live last year. It seems that the people who work hands-on with Cisco equipment every day finally understand it's time to reskill, and DevNet gives them the tools to make this happen.
DevNet is here, and this time the developer community is real.
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