Cisco Systems Inc. is announcing today that it will open up DNA Center, its centralized network control and management dashboard for the Cisco DNA intent-based networking system.

Intent-based networking is an approach to network management that uses machine learning to configure networks automatically to match a set of policies defined by administrators as well as to troubleshoot problems without human intervention.

Data traffic between thousands of devices on a network can be aggregated to enable the network to learn and to provide services in a smarter way. Launched about a year ago, DNA Center is the linchpin of Cisco’s evolving software-defined networking strategy.

Cisco today will announce that DNA Center can now be extended by customers and business partners and will also manage networking equipment from non-Cisco sources. The company is hoping to make DNA Center “the management platform for third-party devices,” said Prashanth Shenoy, vice president of enterprise networks and developer marketing.

“DNA Center makes it possible for network operators to react to business needs and security threats at machine speed, across their entire network,” Scott Harrell, senior vice president and general manager of the company’s enterprise networking business, wrote in a blog post published this morning. “It means they don’t have to rely on time-consuming human powered workflows to make changes for each piece of infrastructure.”

Removing the human element

For example, Shenoy said, the task of configuring hardware that has fallen out of compliance can take about 20 hours of staff time for each device. Using new published application program interfaces, “DNA Center can automatically probe network infrastructure and detect out-of-compliance devices, send that information to ServiceNow [Inc.’s IT automation platform], which figures out changes required.” he said. “IT can get approval and send it back to DNA Center, which pushes the software updates and prompts ServiceNow to close the ticket.”

ServiceNow is one of a host of Cisco partners that are expected to announce integration with DNA Center today. Others include Accenture LLP for software image updates, Presidio Inc. for power management, Italtel S.p.A. for admission control and HCL America Inc. for third-party device provisioning.

Cisco is exposing more than 100 intent-based APIs in such areas as policy management, inventory and device management. “DNA Center makes it possible for partners to build device packs for any kind of device,” Shenoy said. Juniper Networks Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. are among the makers of competitive networking equipment that have committed to making their devices manageable through DNA Center. Update, Sept. 4, 2018: A Juniper Networks spokeswoman said the company has made no commitment to Cisco’s DNA Center. “Rather, Juniper has Contrail Enterprise Multicloud to manage not only its own underlay and overlay, but also multi-vendor environments,” she said. 

“The capabilities and intelligence to program devices will be given to our customers and channel partners so it’s straightforward to use,” Shenoy said. “They can easily leverage publicly available documentation to build device packs.”

The move knocks another brick out of the once-proprietary wall that was Cisco’s product portfolio, a process that began in 2014 with the launch of the DevNet online developer community. An initial stable of 80,000 developers has since grown to a half-million on the way to Cisco’s goal of attracting 1 million DevNet members by 2020.

The company this week is extended DevNet along two lines, giving developers a simple way to share code through the DevNet Code Exchange and providing app store functionality with DevNet Ecosystem Exchange. The latter enables channel partners to post and promote their creations, although it has no e-commerce capabilities. More than 1,600 extensions will be available at launch, Shenoy said.

“We can’t anticipate all the innovations that people will build on DNA Center,” Harrell wrote. “We’ve already been surprised by what some of our earliest partners have done.”

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