Cisco Getting Serious About Developers

I’m at Cisco’s Collaboration Summit in Miami’s once again (and prior) palace – The Fontainebleau – along with several hundred of the industry’s players. Early Wednesday morning, Cisco held an interesting panel discussion about its Cisco Developer Network followed by a session about the development of its collaboration software strategy in a group that now includes Quad and WebEx. And, it appears that the application development community – ISVs, SIs and independent developers – are now high on Cisco’s list of growing its collaboration applications platforms with the aid of third parties. Cisco said that over 100,000 developers (many probably independent developers) representing some 700 partners are now registered with the program. Cisco has also developed its app store (termed AppHQ) where certified/tested applications for Cius are/will be available. Individual enterprises will also be able enter their own applications in a “private” AppHQ. Cisco is also opening up APIs and SDKs for third party development for Cius, Jabber, WebEx and Quad.

Support for third party software developers is a shift in strategy for Cisco, acknowledging that the collaboration space is becoming more and more software driven and that third parties can only help to grow adoption by enabling and integrating their content, horizontal and vertical software based applications to run as part of Cisco’s platforms for collaboration. The Cisco Developer network is evolving and provides third parties with sample code and instructional videos and an online discussion community – all to facilitate rapid development, adoption, selling and deployment.

An interesting development worth tracking to see how this program will stackup versus others like Avaya’s DevConnect.

Also on UCStrategies.com on this topic:

• Cisco Collaboration Summit – What’s UC?, (UCStrategies Views article) by Jon Arnold
• Cisco Continues to Help Customers Transform Their Business, (UCStrategies Views article) by Blair Pleasant
• Cisco Helps Companies Transform Business, (video podcast) by Blair Pleasant
• Clouds and Sun in Miami – Cisco Collaboration Summit 2011, (blog) by Nancy Jamison
• UCStrategies Experts Discuss the Cisco Collaboration Summit, (Industry Buzz podcast) by Blair Pleasant

1 Responses to "Cisco Getting Serious About Developers" - Add Yours

Art Rosenberg 11/21/2011 1:04:05 PM

Now that Cisco is acknowledging the shift of technology emphasis to business software applications and its app store (AppHQ), rather than network hardware management, I will be curious to see how they do with BYOD, CEBP, and hosted services for internal staff, business partners, and, last but, not least, mobile customers.