With DevNet reaching critical mass, Cisco adds new features

ORLANDO, Fla.—Cisco announced at Cisco Live Tuesday that it has expanded its developer program, DevNet, with three new programs.

During a keynote presentation at Cisco Live, DevNet CTO and vice president Susie Wee said—to applause from her team members in the audience—that the DevNet program had reached the milestone of 500,000 registered members since its inception in 2014.

"That’s a pretty cool milestone, but what does it mean? It means that we've hit critical mass with a developer community who can program the network," Wee said during the presentation. "Our 500,000 strong community is writing code that can be leveraged and shared by others. DevNet is creating a network innovation ecosystem that will be the hub of the next generation of applications and the next generation of business."

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins and David Goeckeler, senior vice president and general manager of the security business group, each spoke about the importance of the company's open architecture, intent-based networking platform during their keynote addresses. The new developer capabilities were designed to support Cisco's intent-based networking platform.

Meanwhile, Wee announced the three new additions to DevNet. DevNet Ecosystem Exchange is a web portal that lets developers seek out partner solutions across all of Cisco's platforms.

"It's easy to build an app for mobile devices but for infrastructure or work flow integration it's more complex," Wee said. "DevNet Ecosystem Exchange lists the partners systems that integrators are developing on a platform."

As the name implies, DevNet Code Exchange lets developers share software to build new applications and workflows at a faster rate. Code Exchange, which includes SDK, sample code and tools, is available on GitHub.

"It's a curated list of the software that is out there to let you know what software works with what software," Wee explained.

With the DNA Center now including the company's open APIs, Cisco's DevNet Developer Center provides insight to developers on how to build their solutions.

"The DevNet DNA Developer Center gives you everything that a developer needs to understand how to use these APIs to build these solutions," Wee said. "They can look at solutions and use cases that have been innovated. "

According to Cisco, 15 partners have already used the  utilized the DNA Center platform and are demonstrating them at Cisco Live.