Susie Wee knows how to tie business and technology with software services, and more importantly she knows how to bring these applications to the market. Her job as vice president and chief technology officer of DevNet at Cisco Systems Inc. isn’t easy — Wee is the bridge between the software code written by developers and the networking hardware delivered to Cisco’s distribution partners around the world.

“… It’s really interesting to see the hunger and the desire now for people to use applications in all different ways, and we’re trying to really package it up for them,” Wee said.  “Everyone in the world wants to digitize, right? So people want to take their manufacturing lines, they want to digitize them. People who have cities want to offer newer experiences that are still … leveraging the old [infrastructure], but then providing a top-notch experience for that.”

Wee spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Lauren Cooney (@lcooney), at the DevNet Create event in Mountain View, California. They discussed the ties between technical and business ecosystems with Cisco’s partners. (*Disclosure below.)

The tagline for DevNet Create is “Connect to Create,” which is fitting for an event that offered hands-on coding and eight parallel workshops.  The theme illustrates how data is connecting to machine learning and artificial intelligence with world-leading cloud companies, Wee explained.

Coupling APIs

Wee explained how the world of infrastructure is changing. Those developers writing software for cloud environments are discovering new sets of applications and new ways to do business, looking to meet market demands for interesting solutions where data intersects with the physical world — for example, smart cities.

“In terms of what we’re doing with [smart cities], as someone writes this kind of an app, it’s not easy, just like download it onto my phone. It’s actually, how do I couple that with the location-based infrastructure? How do I couple that with enterprise and hybrid cloud?” Wee explained.

Cisco stitches the applications together and bundles them up for customers around the world. Wee’s job is to keep the ecosystem alive. She does this by fortifying a collaboration with industry giants like Google Cloud on security and cloud-native development at DevNet. She also focuses on both on-premises and cloud-based solutions, keenly aware of what developers need for their own career growth while attending DevNet Create.

“What we saw is that when you’re dealing with enterprise data, confidential data, customer data, and then public cloud data and everything there, there’s a lot of thinking about how to write a cloud app that is a hybrid cloud app that uses on-prem and public cloud, and the best of both worlds,” Wee explained.

Cisco also has grown its developer community in the four years since launching DevNet — today it boasts 485,000 registered developers in the total ecosystem, with some 60,000 active monthly users.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the DevNet Create 2018 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for DevNet Create. Neither Cisco Systems Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE