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Cisco’s first big developers conference to zero in on IoT, cloud

Cisco initially scheduled its inaugural DevNet Create developers’ conference in San Francisco for what turned out to be the same week in May as Google’s wildly popular I/O event in Mountain View (that coy old Google didn’t reveal its show dates until late January). So Cisco wound up bumping its new event to the following week “to make sure we don’t take audience away from Google I/O. Okay okay — maybe it’s the other way around…” quipped Susie Wee, VP & CTO of Cisco DevNet Innovations in a recent blogpost.

But who knows? Give Cisco DevNet Create (May 23-24) a few years and maybe it too will be packing in thousands like Google I/O, Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference and Microsoft Build.

For starters though, Cisco is purposely keeping DevNet Create small, at about 450 attendees tops, better ensuring that developers who go can get plenty of hands-on experience and have the opportunity to speak directly with presenters and peers.

(A separate developers’ event for Cisco’s internal engineers is in the works for the fall. It stemmed from a Cisco ideation session that I wrote about last year.)

DevNet Create is also a relative bargain, at $100 for the two-day event until April 13, and $200 after that, vs. say, $1,150  for general admission or $375 for academic admission for the three-day Google I/O extravaganza.

Cisco boasts that more than 400,000 developers have taken advantage of the APIs and SDKs accessible to members of the DevNet community it launched in 2014. DevNet Create has grown out of that community as well as out of DevNet workshop zones at Cisco Live events and DevNet Express programs run around the world by Cisco system engineers and Cisco partners. Read more…