Anyone who starts a new organization would likely be quite happy to grow by 100,000 members a year. Since Cisco Systems Inc.’s DevNet developer program was launched in 2014, it has since exceeded 500,000 participants, testimony to the company’s cultivation of both the developer community and a new business model focused on application development.

“These are network engineers, learning new skills; they’re learning how to be developers,” Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, said at the Cisco Live event in Barcelona, Spain. “Cisco has come up with the idea that the network is a data platform, and it’s now also become an application development platform. This is the blueprint that infrastructure companies should be following.”

Vellante spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, on the final day of the conference. They discussed Cisco’s success in building its developer network, its business application strategy and the impact of recent acquisitions in the company’s transformation. (* Disclosure below.)

New territory with APIs

As Cisco has cultivated the developer community, it has also positioned its DNA Center as a centralized process for managing enterprise networks. The company’s DNA Center team can leverage application programming interfaces to solve customer problems, a significant new feature for the networking firm.

“This is a radical change for the Cisco of the past,” Furrier said. “If Cisco can execute on the DNA Center and bring in APIs and a real supporting community behind every product, I think the programmable network will be a reality.”

Cisco’s transformation is also being driven by key acquisitions over the past two years. Companies such as AppDynamics Inc., a cloud application and business monitoring platform, and Duo Security Inc., a provider of authentication technology in the cloud, have strengthened Cisco’s profile with both developers and customers.

“We’ve talked to a number of companies that were acquired by Cisco over the last few years, and I think those are helping drive some of the change,” Miniman said. “These are companies born in the cloud and helping to move that change. It’s a challenging time, but Cisco is moving in the right direction.”

Here’s the complete video analysis, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Live event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a media partner of Cisco Live. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on SiliconANGLE or theCUBE.)

Photo: Cisco