This week’s Cisco DevNet Create event in San Francisco, California, represents the company’s outreach to a new community of developers; namely, an audience that may not have thought about Cisco Systems Inc. in the past. They may have believed that Cisco was just a hardware company that does routers and switching and not one that supports software development.

DevNet Create is a way to reach out to those developers, helping them understand that Cisco has a platform on which they can create. It is also an opportunity to work with Cisco.

“[Developers] weren’t even aware that the network had APIs [application program interface] that they can use, especially in the area of [Internet of Things], so educating the developers on what the technology is, is extremely important,” said Rick Tywoniak (pictured), senior director of DevNet at Cisco.

To discuss more about DevNet Create and how software developers and network folks can work together, Tywoniak recently spoke to John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during Cisco DevNet Create. (* Disclosure below.)

Networks are critical to API design

Applications developed inside the enterprise have to run on the network; all the devices within an enterprise and in an area of Internet of Things have to run on the network. Therefore, it starts with the core network functionality that Cisco provides, and then adding APIs to the mix, as all the intelligence that works in the network components is now as exposed in an API layer, Tywoniak explained.

“If you’re a software developer inside an enterprise taking advantage of those APIs to have your application run more efficiently, it is the key sort of ‘sauce’ that Cisco provides through DevNet,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Cisco DevNet Create 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Cisco DevNet Create. Neither Cisco DevNet nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE