Network infrastructure and software development are separate computing cultures with separate requirements and languages, but application program interfaces are blurring the lines of traditional computing architectures. After all, those gadgets now comprising the “internet of things” still connect through wireless networks. As networking hardware becomes more programmable, software developers have to meet the challenge of creating a new kind of application — one that marries physical assets (like oil and gas pipelines) to virtualized cloud environments.

“Everybody needs a network, everybody has something that exists, but they want to go above it. … They don’t want to just do the same old thing; they want to … unleash the power,” said Susie Wee (pictured), vice president and chief technology officer of DevNet at Cisco Systems Inc.

Wee sat down with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Lauren Cooney (@lcooney), founder and chief executive officer of Spark Labs Consulting LLC, at the DevNet Create event in Mountain View, California. The trio discussed the motives behind her outreach to the developer community and a radical new approach for marketing the resulting applications. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Susie Wee in its Women in Tech feature.

Wee has been on the front lines of technological advance for many years, working on the development of digital television in the 1990s and mobile video and teleconferencing in the 2000s. She recognized early on that the concept of IoT required a connection between software apps and computing infrastructure, but cloud-native developers had their own culture and language and felt little affinity for traditional trade shows, such as Cisco Live, interacting very little overall with the networking hardware community. To bridge the gap between the hardware and software cultures, Wee started DevNet Create as a venue for developers to get hands on with code and learn about the latest advances in the sometimes overlooked infrastructure sector.

“What we present to them is, ‘how can you automate your infrastructure? How can you scale and use the newest tools? How can you get observability and insights from that infrastructure itself?’ And then, ‘here’s the software tools that you need to use, and here’s the APIs you need to know about. Let us understand your problems, and let’s work on this together,’” Wee said.

Cutting-edge tech demands more from network infrastructure

Cisco’s infrastructure connects millions of businesses and homes across the globe, but just because it works unnoticed in the background doesn’t mean this infrastructure isn’t quietly undergoing its own digital transformation. Cisco is expanding its intent-based networking initiative to wide area network, with the ambitious goal of automating the network from data centers to the edge, bringing built-in programmability and analysis, alongside prediction tools to help DevOps teams improve performance and troubleshoot problems.

Use cases for new application sets include contact center communications, healthcare and indoor location navigation. “We have Meraki and CMX where your Wi-Fi infrastructure not only provides wireless connectivity, but gives you indoor location proximity,” said Wee, describing a wayfinding application built on top of Cisco infrastructure to navigate through the Web Summit conference.

Enabling these developments is Cisco’s adoption of container technology, a virtualized method of packaging and moving software within standardized computing environments. It’s an industry trend empowering DevOps teams with more decision-making power, according to a survey by “Container Journal.”

Cisco saw the benefit of adopting these trends for rapidly packaging and deploying software across disparate and hybrid cloud environments, but the new technology exposed risk, as the company realized firsthand the security complications of moving and maintaining software on-premises and in the cloud. “You need to build in that security into the infrastructure itself, and then provide the right abstraction for the developers,” Wee said.

This experience led to Cisco and Google partnering on a secure hybrid cloud-solution based around Cisco’s microservices Istio platform and Google’s Kubernetes container orchestration tool. “There’s a whole new set of problems that we need to deal with, and this partnership is amazing at putting that together,” Wee stated.

Success karma is helping developers, ecosystem grow

“My incentive, my goals, my mission … is that we want to make developers successful. We want to make our partners in that broader ecosystem and our customers successful,” Wee said. In this spirit, her keynote at DevNet Create included the announcement of three new programs to encourage collaboration and innovation within the DevNet community: DevNet Developer Site, DevNet Code Exchange, and DevNet Ecosystem Exchange.

Easy-to-deploy apps that automate processes will help make the IoT a reality, but teaching the developers how to create them would be for nothing if they are not made accessible to the market. “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 data?’” Wee explained.

The DevNet Ecosystem Exchange enables partners to see which applications work together with products and what solutions are available for them to use. “We want to take the applications that our developers are writing and make [them] available to our partners to let them use our go-to-market that we have around the world,” Wee said.

A step above the DevNet ecosystem exchange is DevNet Solutions Plus, where independent software vendors are actually listed on the Cisco price list along with supported products. Network infrastructure is mission critical for many new applications, so customers tend to buy both the hardware and software together. This makes bundling them beneficial for the developer and the customer, according to Wee.

“When [Cisco partners] can actually connect to the world of software developers and this ecosystem in a way that it helps them differentiate their business, it helps bring the app developer money and a business opportunity. It’s a whole new level of scale,” Wee said.

DevOps’ing the future

Bridging the divide between existing infrastructure (such as the electric power grid) and the cloud are the key to enabling futuristic advances, such as smart cities. As the leader in the network infrastructure market, Cisco is determined to pull ahead in the race to provide the “brains” for tomorrow’s city. A $1 billion infrastructure financing fund is a big incentive, and newly announced partnerships with AT&T and analytic data solutions provider Teradata Corp show that Cisco is serious about making digital cities a practical reality.

“Over the next 25 [years], even more things will be connected. … It’s really about the solutions that we can build together as a team,” Wee concluded.

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