Cisco Systems Inc. announced this week that its DevNet developer community had grown to over 585,000 participants, many of whom are attending DevNet Create in Mountain View, California, this week. That community is fueling an important new wave of innovation, not just within Cisco, but in other corners of the technology ecosystem.

“The thing with DevNet Create is it’s bringing in the community who install infrastructure, knowing that this infrastructure is becoming programmable and having that host the applications and the innovation that are coming from the developers,” said Susie Wee (pictured), senior vice president and chief technology officer of Cisco DevNet. “It unlocks entirely new business models.”

Wee spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the DevNet Create event. They discussed how important advances in wireless, edge processing and GPUs are empowering the developer community (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Time to ‘geek out’ again

On the wireless side, the introduction of the new Wi-Fi 6 connectivity standard has the potential to unlock higher capacity, greater network efficiency, and device power savings.

“With Wi-Fi 6, we can really geek out again,” Wee said. “You can have a sensor that is out there one year, five years, 10 years doing its thing. That takes all of those internet of things applications you always wanted to build and makes them real.”

Similarly, advances in edge computing are allowing data scientists and developers to focus more significantly on real-time data, a process that will also be enabled by the implementation of Wi-Fi 6.

“Now what becomes real is the edge — edge computing,” Wee stated. “As you connect up these environments, that’s when data is coming in. You can connect up transportation systems, like supervisory control and data acquisition, like utilities.”

Enabling much of this innovation are GPUs that have become ubiquitous, thanks in large part to the power of the mobile platform.

“This is just getting wrapped up so developers can use it,” Wee said. “You can have a TensorFlow.js library that will just sit on your mobile device. You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in machine learning; developers can just use this capability.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE