Disrupt or Die: Developers and IT Hold the Keys to Business Success

Getting a big idea to market used to be hard and take time. Today, big ideas that change the technology landscape are the norm. Most CEOs worry about ongoing disruption from digital competitors or new market entrants. We see this across multiple industries, from retail to manufacturing to transportation and cities. Disruption is a way of modern business life. That means IT must be more than just the keepers of a company’s technology systems. They are strategic partners in business success. IT either holds a company back with legacy systems, or it propels it forward by modernizing infrastructure and skill-sets. Dare I say, developers and IT are the drivers of today’s business innovation and cultural change.

Using the programmable infrastructure to solve business problems

IT and developers are using the programmable infrastructure to solve business problems and create new experiences for customers, such as combined online and in-store shopping and scan-and-go shopping in retail. These applications maximize intelligence and data captured on premises and at the edge of the network as well as in the cloud with online experiences. And it all starts with the programmable infrastructure where new ideas can be created and deployed.

Over the past month, I met with partners and developers who are driving disruption in their industries, and it’s exciting! At NRF in New York, I met retailers that are reinventing the shopping experience. Shops are no longer just brick and mortar stores, but through the programmable infrastructure, retailers are making the store a destination experience. Whether its walking groceries ordered online to your car, or delivering them directly to your home after you shop in the store, or blending online and in-store inventory in real time, all of this is possible with applications on the network and the edge.

Susie Wee talks about how today’s programmable infrastructure gives developers a powerful platform for innovation during her Innovation Showcase talk at Cisco Live in Barcelona.

At Cisco Live in Barcelona, I got to hear first-hand the disruption taking place across the world. Software and solutions vendors are helping their customers embrace the digital transformation by offering the latest technology solutions and applications. Cisco Partners are building solutions for IoT, AI and machine learning, so customers can modernize their infrastructure without having to master new technology expertise. And Cisco customers are turning their networkers into programmers so they can skill-up for the digital transformation.

For example, I spent time with Italian Cisco partner Alleantia. Alleantia is activating digital disruption in manufacturing plants, transportation and other industries with heavy machinery. Alleantia used Cisco IOx and new IoT boxes to create plug and play edge applications and solutions for the “industrial Internet of Things.”

I also met Eximprod, a Romanian Cisco partner who is modernizing utility substations. Updating utility hardware is difficult. But Eximprod built an edge application with modern security features that can be enabled across applications and locations. The edge applications can be efficiently managed and upgraded in an automated way.

Cisco DevNet is supporting partner’s innovation

It’s exciting to see all this change happening. At DevNet, we’re here to help. We want to make innovation easy. To help our partners, ISVs, and customers modernize their infrastructure, we are offering several new programs on DevNet, starting with new developer centers. The new IoT, ACI, Retail, and SD-WAN developer centers feature new learning labs, videos, and sandboxes for testing applications in live environments. In addition to our new developer centers, you’ll find updated content and tools in our current developer centers, including Meraki, Security, and Design Thinking.

Companies like Eximprod are using the IoT sandboxes because it’s otherwise impossible to test a new application across an entire utility infrastructure. Or a retail company can test a new Meraki camera solution when assessing deployment across multiple store environments by using our Meraki Sandbox, without disrupting ongoing store operations.

Whether you’re new to programming, or looking to take your skills to the
next level, DevNet helps you find your best starting point and learning path.

To help your IT developers and team get skilled-up, we are also creating new DevNet Learning Paths. The Learning Paths offer hands-on instruction on new technologies. We also just updated your DevNet profile … just login to your account when you visit developer.cisco.com and click on your icon in the upper right – you will see the learning paths, the learning labs we recommend for you, the badges you earned, and the code you submitted to DevNet Code Exchange. We also have a beta release of our new DevNet Team Dashboards (available to Cisco Partners for now), so leaders can offer training and see the progress of their employees on DevNet. Managers can get insight on who is trained on new technologies so they can start deploying applications as soon as their developers are ready. Plus, managers can assign Learning Paths that are critical for the IT strategy and view employee results.

And finally, we have combined Code Exchange and Ecosystem Exchange into a single site, the new DevNet Exchange. Developers can still find curated code and ready-made partner solutions for use in specific environments. But now it’s all found at a single site. Check out developer.cisco.com/exchange.

DevNet’s presence at Cisco Live in Barcelona represents Cisco’s own transformation over the past five years. Networking has gone through a paradigm shift. Networks are now software systems that are solving real-world business problems, like the examples above. Networkers are becoming developers. Infrastructure developers and application developers are now working together. This year, the DevNet Zone claimed a significant portion of one of the Cisco Live halls, and we were crowded with enthusiastic attendees all day, every day.

Hands-on workshops in coding skills, network programmability, and
application development are hugely popular with Cisco Live attendees.

Want to replay a session of particular interest, or get the presentation from a workshop you couldn’t attend? We’ve got you covered. Replays and presentations are now available for all the DevNet Zone CLEUR sessions.

And if you missed NRF or Cisco Live in Barcelona, join us for DevNet Create April 24-25, 2019 in Mt. View, California. You can get hands-on with sandboxes, APIs and hear from technical leaders about how they’re disrupting with the programmable infrastructure.

Five years ago when we started DevNet, who could have predicted that software development would be such a large part of a Cisco Live event. So, thank you. You are the heroes who made all these changes happen across industries and networking itself. We wouldn’t be here without you. And this is only the beginning. There are so many more exciting changes to come. You can count on Cisco DevNet to be your partner in using the programmable infrastructure to maximize intelligence through deployed applications and create new experiences. Together, we will deliver big ideas for solving business problems.