Cisco Wins Developer Satisfaction Award

How do you build a developer program that is focused on what developers truly want? It’s a question we ask ourselves here at Cisco DevNet every day. So last week DevNet Senior Director Rick Tywoniak attended SlashData’s annual Future Developer Summit, with the goal of continuing our search for answers and ideas on how we can continuously improve how we serve the Cisco developer community.

Four years ago, when DevNet was just getting started, the vision was to engage both application developers and networking professionals, as part of a broad and well supported community to utilize Cisco networking platform APIs. We knew from the start that education and training would be critical components to building the community. So we focused our efforts on building learning labs, sandboxes, support forums, quality documentation, and usable sample code – tools that would allow developers to get hands-on with the APIs. We felt this would be the best way to help developers optimize their applications to take full advantage of enterprise networks, and introduce networkers to coding principles so that they could take advantage of Cisco APIs to automate network functions and management.

A big task. So you can imagine the thrill when it was announced at the SlashData Future Developer Summit that Cisco DevNet had received the customer satisfaction award in the category “Satisfaction with Training in Developer Programs.” This from a survey that is based on the independent and unbiased opinions of over 40,000 developers from around the world, combined with SlashData’s own research!

In presenting the award, SlashData CEO and Founder Andreas Constantinou said, “Going beyond tutorials to provide full training courses is difficult to scale and very few companies do it well (even at all). We commend Cisco for leadership in an area where most competitors have negative satisfaction scores.”

As networks become programmable and applications become the central vehicle transforming literally all aspects of our work and lives, Cisco will continue to deliver quality education, training, and support for our rapidly growing developer community. We look for ways to make it easily accessible to developers through learning events and shows, and through training partners such as Cisco Networking Academy and Learning at Cisco.

I thank our DevNet community for your feedback and support on our journey, and the SlashData team for this recognition.