What a 9-year-old Teaches Us about PX

From Platform Experience to Customer Experience

“Hey papa, what is this silver disk on your desk?”

“Well honey, it’s something called a DVD. It’s how we used to get movies to watch at home.”

“Why did you need that, aren’t movies just on the TV?”

Not only did this discussion make me feel old, it made me think of how a change in the platform has changed the experience my 9-year-old daughter has consuming content.

This business model of streaming with everything on-demand hit me as well. My DirectTV Now streaming service offered season 1 of HBO’s Ballers for free. I was hooked and in one click subscribed to HBO to watch the next 3 seasons 30 seconds later. Why is that significant? For one, it increased my monthly spend by 33% because I valued the content the platform enabled. The Platform Experience (PX) made it easy for HBO to integrate and provide an amazing Customer Experience (CX).

On August 8th, Forbes released an article The Billionaires Behind The Secret Tech Mecca In America’s Heartland discussing how one of Cisco’s largest partners, World Wide Technology (WWT) has changed the game of IT and become an $11 billion dollar global powerhouse. Acccording to WWT CEO Jim Kavanaugh, one of the keys to the next wave of the company’s growth is their focus on DevOps.

WWT has built applications for Jersey Mike’s, Panera, and Enterprise Rent-A-Car (to name just a few). These companies have become dominant in part by offering platforms that their customers can use to extend services to entire ecosystems of end users, third parties, and others—platforms designed around the principles of interoperability and modularity.

Cisco sees the same future in DevOps and created DevNet to focus on helping developers understand what they can do across Cisco’s entire product portfolio with our open APIs.

This concept of a PX is what allows  software developers and network programmers to not only solve immediate business problems, but also leverage the platform as a launch pad for future growth. As an example, we just announced our latest repository on the DevNet Automation Exchange, a place for keen developers to upload their code that automates the network and highlight their capabilities.

In the Forbes article, Jim noted that while WWT makes between 5% and 15% on hardware they are making between 35% to 50% margins on services. The 50% side comes mostly from their DevOps practice. This is why I am so passionate about DevOps and how Cisco’s platform experience is changing networking … like streaming services changed DVD players.