Cisco Opens Up on Programmable FutureCisco Opens Up on Programmable Future

Cisco's big focus this week at its annual customer and partner conference, Cisco Live, was the enterprise network, with CEO Chuck Robbins (after making a rather dramatic entrance, as shown below) spending most of his opening keynote highlighting the company's message that the network will "power the future" and enable businesses to transform -- and making sure everyone knows that we're on the brink of the "network's next act."

With today's programmable network gear, it turns out that the network's next act has a lot to do with developers (read related No Jitter post, "Cisco's DevNet Comes of Age). Cisco this week announced new developer capabilities and open APIs for Cisco DNA Center, the network automation and assurance dashboard for its intent-based networking platform, Cisco DNA -- both of which were all the buzz at last year's Cisco Live . With a programmable network, developers can do things like:

The new programming capabilities not only open the network to developers, but also to network engineers and roughly 60,000 Cisco partners. In fact, 15 partners have already built solutions on the DNA Center platform, Cisco said. Cisco channel partner Accenture, for example, has integrated ServiceNow, its IT service management software, with the network so the occurrence of a network problem automatically generates a trouble ticket.

DevNet Milestones
Cisco's developer community, DevNet, now has more than 500,000 members, reaching "critical mass," and spurring a new model for networking innovation, Susie Wee, DevNet VP and CTO, shared in a Cisco Blogs post. The DevNet ecosystem "will be the hub of the next generation of applications and the next generation of business," she wrote.

The DevNet community, evenly split between application and infrastructure developers, is working on everything from network automation to Internet of Things (IoT) applications, hybrid cloud applications, and business applications featuring embedded collaboration capabilities (more on that in a minute), Wee said.

To help fuel the growth of its developer ecosystem, Cisco announced three new initiatives, all available today:

Continue to next page: Collaborative Programming with Webex

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Collaborative Programming with Webex
Providing learning opportunities for developers, engineers, and partners is apparently high on Cisco's lists of priorities. In addition to the new developer initiatives, you couldn't go anywhere at Cisco Live without seeing training labs, demos, or developer workshops. And within those workshops, as I discovered, you'd be hard-pressed to come up with a question for which Cisco didn't have online documentation, resources, or even virtual sandboxes to help you get your answer.

For collaboration, all Webex desk and room devices -- except for the Webex Board -- are fully programmable, Stève Sfartz, API evangelist for Cisco DevNet, told me in an interview following one of the workshops he led at the event. (And Webex Board programmability is coming soon.)

Enterprises want customized meeting experiences -- without having to add new capabilities via yet another remote or control system, Sfartz said. And Cisco can help them create those experiences by opening access to its video system APIs, he added.

Developers can use embedded APIs to extend Webex device capabilities in several ways, Sfartz said. They can create user interface buttons enabling users to control IoT devices like lighting and A/C via a Room Kit device controller, for example. They can take this a step further, setting if-this-then-that policies that trigger the IoT systems to lower the blinds and adjust the lighting when a video meeting starts or someone begins sharing a presentation via a projector, for instance.

However, the extent to which a developer can alter a Webex meeting experience is somewhat limited, or controlled, by Cisco, Sfartz told me. For example, Cisco's standard Touch 10 room system control tablet comes configured with two buttons, one for starting meetings and another for sharing content. While developers can add their own buttons, as mentioned, they can only add so many. For one, Cisco fears the addition of too many buttons would negatively impact the user experience. And, Cisco is eying system preservation; it wants to be sure these computers, and the controls on them, still work 10 years from now, he explained.

Developers can leverage these APIs to pull data on meeting room use for analysis and decision making. Because Cisco room systems include technology like facial recognition, they're able to identify the number of people in a meeting room. An enterprise could use that insight to better plan its meeting room estate, perhaps reducing the number of large rooms in favor of smaller spaces optimized for the most meetings -- which, in turn, could lead to increased productivity.

You can take this data analysis even further by tracking things like content sharing and the use of augmented reality during meetings. Enterprises want to know how they can maximize their investments by knowing what happens in meeting rooms, Sfartz said. "Your meeting rooms are talking," he said. "Are you listening?"

As the Cisco Live event showcased, programmability is becoming part and parcel not just of UC&C solutions, but every component of an enterprise's IT infrastructure -- which, as CEO Robbins commented from the keynote stage, means folks can let their imaginations run free and companies can foster "innovation everywhere."

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