Cisco Exec Speaks to Communications Developer Community

The second day of the Communications Developer conference began with a keynote presentation delivered by Louis Marascio of Cisco (News - Alert). Marascio is Director of Engineering for Cisco’s Unified Application Environment which is the developer run time platform for Cisco Unified Communications solutions.

 

In his presentation, “The Network is the Platform,” Marascio laid out Cisco’s vision for developers, which is essentially the desire to enable developers to leverage the platform that Cisco is building around UC to develop applications around UC.

 

He outlined five steps or phases for UC:

--Migrate (Make the move from TDM to IP)
--Accelerate (Extend UC across businesses) 
--Transform (Gain competitive advantage with UC) 
--Include (Extend UC to customers, partners) 
--Transcend (achieve boundary-free communications)

Marascio told the audience that business transformation doesn’t come about “just because you deploy a product but because developers create innovative applications that address market needs.”

 

He pointed out that in the consumer space development happens rapidly, while enterprise application development seems to move at a slower pace.

 

As an example speaking to the speed of innovation, he provided a statistic from Facebook (News - Alert), that once they opened their platform to developers, over 5,000 custom apps were built by 90,000 developers in the first seven weeks.

 

Meanwhile in the enterprise environment, the more utilitarian parts of the platform (security reliability, scalability…) take longer to develop.

 

Cisco’s vision is to marry the best of both worlds: To maintain the pace of consumer innovation but leverage the network to maintain security, reliability, and the like.

 

According to Marascio, “We want to enable developers to customize the common workspaces in order to quickly, easily and effectively build applications that can reach down into the guts of the platform to enable those applications.”

 

Speaking to the openness that enables innovation and transformation, Marascio turned to showcase several elements of Cisco’s own developer program, and discussed the company’s application extension platform, which is designed to enable developers to write applications that can live on a Cisco router, enabling applications to be highly distributed, survivable, and redundant.

 

He talked about Cisco’s unified application environment, which is an end to end developer platform that provides everything developers need to develop deploy and manage applications. The three parts of Cisco’s application environment comprise a Unified Application Server, a Unified Media Engine, and a Unified Application Designer, which is the visual development environment or service creation environment.

 

“Our vision is to enable developers to leverage the services of the Cisco UC platform by exposing those capabilities in a consistent easy to consume manner,” Marascio said.

 

Marascio spoke about how developers can leverage the Cisco UC development environment, and the delved in to cover specific features of the Cisco unified application environment release 2.5. He also referenced the relatively new Cisco developer community which launched in July.

 

The community can be found at developer.cisco.com and offers the development community a series of streamlined APIs and tools, partner program enhancements, a developer services department to help support developers with testing, wikis, and other resources.

 

As Marascio explained it, the whole idea is to make available the development platforms and open APIs and marry them to the development community. If done properly, the result should yield infinite possibilities for the development community.