An entrepreneurial mindset is important in technology companies because there are many innovations and use cases to wrestle through industry-wide. Cisco Systems Inc. has taken this search for innovation to the next level through opening up a DNA Center platform — which is offered through Cisco DevNet, Cisco’s developer framework.

“This is basically opening up Cisco to industry-wide innovation,” said Ronnie Ray (pictured, left), vice president of product management for the DNA Center at Cisco. “We are now getting to a point where with DevNet, now with 500,000 developers registered, we have the critical mass to basically say, ‘The industry can come and develop on top of Cisco platforms.'”

Ray and Prakash Rajamani (pictured, right), director of product management at Cisco, spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed the innovative possibilities with launching the DNA Center platform for DevNet. (* Disclosure below.)

Cisco’s DNA Center mission

The DNA Center is a product that Cisco launched for its customers a year ago, but the DNA Center platform available through DevNet takes it one step further by opening up and exposing all of APIs so that customers, partners, and developers can work on them.

“It is for everybody,” Ray said. “All of you can now use DNA Center platform to create new value.”

The DNA Center’s target audiences are two-fold, according to Rajamani. One market is the network engineer who understands everything network-centric and is then being enabled to achieve those tasks through a programmable API. The other target is the software engineers who want to be able to prioritize custom-built apps for their networks.

“When it comes to API, we make it much, much, much richer and granular so that people can create any workflow that they want,” Rajamani described. “So as a user, based on what level of granular they need, you can go to the lowest-level task or you can go all the way up to the intent based on your skillset and then use them and customize them as it fits your needs.”

This will bring an entrepreneurial spirit where innovations will come much more easily, according to Ray. “This is a huge deal, because we’re making it simpler,” Ray said. “It can come from any quarters — it doesn’t have to be an established company. It can be an individual person that can solve any use case.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Live event. (*Disclosure: Cisco Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE