Software is eating the world — and it was eating Costa Rica-based Altus Consulting LLC’s customers, according to Chief Innovation Officer Jose Bogarin Solano (pictured).

“People from Cisco call it a racks to riches story,” Solano said of his company’s hybridizing its Cisco Systems Inc. hardware reselling business with software development.

Competing Cisco partners in Altus’ market were increasingly winning business with software offerings, he said. The reason is that a clunk of hardware usually can’t squash specific business problems that customers fret about, according to Solano.

He told John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during this week’s Cisco DevNet Create event in San Francisco, California. (* Disclosure below.) 

“There’s a gap between having the infrastructure and really solving that business need,” he said.

Software targets these pain point much more specifically and builds the bridge to a solution, Solano said. A journey to Cisco’s DevNet event three years ago opened Solano’s eyes to the tools and procedures for software development.

From there, Atlus began using Cisco Spark and Cisco WebEx interactive collaboration tools, Cisco Meraki APIs for cloud-controlled Wi-Fi and security, Cisco APIC-EM software-defined networking and other technologies.

Atlus has integrated these to develop software solutions integrated with its Cisco hardware to solve customers’ business problems, he said.

Software solutions focusing on IoT and ML

While the transformation has paid off, it required hard graft and stern commitment from management, Solano stated. “I don’t want to say it’s easier to sell hardware … but it’s maybe more complicated to develop software,” he said.

Atlus is hoping to develop more software solutions in the future with a focus on Internet of Things, machine learning and programmable networks, he said.

Programmable networks, by the way, are not ready for prime time, Solano stated. “You still need a lot of network background to actually use them, and some of them are not very flexible. So those technologies need to evolve for developers to actually use them,” he said, adding that Cisco’s work here is encouraging.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Cisco DevNet Create 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Cisco DevNet Create. Neither Cisco DevNet nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE