API Insights for DevNet Specialized Partners

With the API Economy rapidly expanding, ensuring Cisco partners can successfully deliver software solutions to customers is critical in becoming leaders in this new market. To meet this growing demand for partner organizations with demonstrated software skills and business practices that leverage API capabilities of Cisco products and services, Cisco introduced a new DevNet Specialization to its partners in May of 2020.

There are several program benefits to becoming a DevNet Specialized Partner, including

Pre-sales consulting
Ecosystem Exchange placement to co-market with Cisco
Discounts on Cisco products (for partner internal use only)
Access to exclusive webinar events offered only to DevNet Specialized Partners

API Insights webinar series

Our most recent webinar series is API Insights, available exclusively to DevNet Specialized Partners. API Insights provides the latest information on Cisco API releases, industry trends, best practices, and technical deep dives on API-related topics. The goal of these webinars is to provide DevNet Specialized Partners with a competitive advantage for software development on Cisco’s platforms.

Each API Insights webinar features a different topics of interest. This quarter’s event covered DevNet sandboxes and Cisco security. Chuck Stickney, Business Development Manager for DevNet, kicked off the event providing a brief overview about the API Insights webinar, and set the stage for the first topic of the series: DevNet Sandboxes.

DevNet Sandboxes

Tom Davies, Senior Manager for DevNet Sandboxes, provided a great overview on the latest sandbox offerings from DevNet. This included information on the new Multi-Domain Sandbox, which was designed for developers to build applications and operational tools with Cisco ACI, Cisco UCS, Cisco HyperFlex, Cisco SD-WAN, and Cisco Action Orchestrator. Since the focus of this quarter’s webinar was security, the latest security sandboxes were also covered, including the PxGrid 2.0 on ISE 2.7 Sandbox for hands-on learning with Cisco Platform Exchange Grid (PxGrid) with Cisco Identity Services Engine.

After an overview of the latest sandbox offerings, Tom then looked at the future of DevNet’s sandbox capabilities. First, he gave a sneak preview of the next soon-to-be released sandbox, providing a quick overview of its various components and use cases that surround it.

Then, in a somewhat unprecedented move, Tom revealed to attendees his team’s roadmap for the next 12 months, which contained a plethora of new sandbox environments that are planned. This was the first time anybody outside of Cisco had been given this level of detail into the sandbox team’s roadmap.

Providing this insight into the next year of DevNet sandboxes means that the attendees have plenty of time to prepare their technical base-knowledge before getting hands-on with these technologies in a sandbox. It also means they can be one of the first to reserve these sandboxes when they go live.

Firepower APIs

Once the update from the Sandbox Team was complete, Tom handed the floor over to Jared Smith, Principal Engineer in Security, and Ted Bedwell, Distinguished Engineer in Security. Both Jared and Ted are industry leaders for security, with deep technical knowledge and advanced programming expertise. The topic of their section was Cisco Firepower, Cisco’s premier next-generation firewall solution.

Jared gave a quick overview of the solution and its various components and deployment models. He then did a quick deep-dive into the various API capabilities that exist on the various Firepower appliances, covering the APIs for Firepower Management Center and Firepower Threat Defense.

This set the stage nicely for what Jared had planned next… instead of just talking about these APIs, Jared jumped right into examining some of the most valuable use cases for these APIs. This is where the true value of API Insights became clear to attendees. Having an industry leader with years of experience show the attendees the most valuable use cases helps them understand where and how to focus their software development practice around these technologies. It shows what Cisco’s users are asking for the most, and how these APIs can help accomplish these use cases.

After teaching attendees why to use these APIs through various use cases, Jared then switched screens and jumped right into his development environment for a live demonstration of how to use these APIs. This hands-on demo provided a solid guide for those unfamiliar with these APIs, allowing them to view these capabilities implementing a use case in-action. Having these foremost experts on-hand, teaching attendees how to use these APIs ensures they learn the best practices and workflows from the start, charting them on a path for success.

Interested in API Insights?

While this quarter’s API Insights event has already concluded, I am already looking forward to what the API experts have in-store for next quarter.

As a reminder, this webinar is available exclusively to partners that have achieved their DevNet Specialization. I invite you to learn more about the DevNet Specialization. Not only to get access to these future exclusive webinars, but also to see how it can benefit your business.

Also, I encourage you to check out this conversation on the future of programmability and software development, led by Susie Wee, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco DevNet and CX Ecosystem Success.