Infrastructure technology gurus are the go-to guys of modern business, leading the charge toward an intelligent future in every sector, from manufacturing to technology itself. But even as infrastructure becomes programmable, the IT community itself is on a learning journey. So, where do a company’s IT experts go to keep up with the latest technology?

“We take the community of networkers, IT infrastructure folks, app developers and get them to understand the programmability of the infrastructure,” said Susie Wee (pictured), senior vice president and chief technology officer of DevNet at Cisco Systems Inc. “These classes are packed; they’re very deep; they’re very technical.”

Wee spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in Barcelona, Spain. They discussed the growth of Cisco’s DevNet community and how Cisco is innovating its infrastructure to make intelligent edge a possibility. (* Disclosure below.)

Predicting the future

Five years ago, Wee asked the question: “Are [IT guys] going to stay in the old world, [or] are they really going to be the ones that can work in the new world?” The answer was the creation of the Cisco DevNet community, giving IT professionals across industries the tools to learn software and become developers.

“We’re not going to water down how you have to learn software,” Wee said. “You’re going to get in there; you’re going to use Rest APIs. You’re going to use Postman; you’re going to use GitHub.”

Getting a grasp on programming opens IT employees to the possibilities for modernization within their company. From small changes such as automating daily tasks, all the way to implementing cloud services.

“IT can sit there and keep its old infrastructure and say, ‘I have all this responsibility. I’m running this machinery. I have this customer database.” Or you can modernize, right? And so, you can either hold your business back or you can make it programmable. Then [you] allow cloud native, public, private cloud, deploy new applications and services and suddenly become an innovative platform for the company,” Wee said.

Intelligent edge becomes a reality

Cisco has taken its own advice to heart, transforming connectivity by adding intelligence and automation to the company’s infrastructure and network. Intent-based networking allows administrators to define what the network does, bringing value through data analysis and predictive insights.

“Now practically every [Cisco] product is programmable, every product has APIs, so now you have a really rich fabric of security, data center, enterprises, and campus and branch networks,” Wee stated.

This opens even more opportunities for innovation for the DevNet community, and it goes both ways: “Our developers are not only the infrastructure folks, but now, all of a sudden, our independent service vendors, app developers, who are out there writing apps are able to actually put stuff into the infrastructure,” Wee explained.

As the DevNet community learns to develop for the internet of things and Cisco’s intent-based network, an unexpected side effect is that independent software vendors are using the tools to demonstrate the capabilities of the intelligent edge to their customers.

“They’re using the [DevNet] sandbox to actually train their partners and the end customer about what this model is like,” Wee said.

She quoted a theoretical ISV saying to a customer: “‘Let me show you how this edge processing thing works. Go use the DevNet sandbox. You can spin up your instance; you can see it working. Oh look, there’s these APIs, let me show you.’ And then these guys are adopting it, and they’re getting paying customers through this,” she said.

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