As part of its mantra of innovating at a much faster rate under new CEO Chuck Robbins, Cisco threw the doors open on DevNet Labs on Tuesday.

DevNet Labs is the new wrinkle to the DevNet developer program that Cisco launched about a year and a half ago. While DevNet’s goal is to make the Internet an innovation platform for developers, DevNet Labs is the place for external developers to share their ideas with each other and with Cisco “technology evangelists.”

Developers in DevNet Labs can share software and code to show each other how they use different APIs, as well as solicit ideas from other developers in the community forums.

In order to help get the DevNet Labs party started, Cisco seeded it with four of its own projects:

  • DevIoT, a developer environment for writing IoT apps. For example, DevIoT can let developers drag and drop sensor tools on a canvas to see how they’ll perform in different environments, said Susie Wee, Cisco's vice president and CTO of networked experiences.
  • Glance, a cloud application that uses indoor location information to track devices and assets. It is built on Cisco’s CMX platform, which finds indoor location information through APIs on Cisco’s 802.11 access points.
  • NeXt, an HTML/JavaScript user interface toolkit that allows developers to visualize network topologies in network web applications. The NeXt software development kit (SDK) was released on DevNet last spring and will be released as an open source project in OpenDaylight.
  • Source code for a number of OpenDaylight BGP apps that Cisco built. The apps draw topologies using NeXt and BGP-LS topology information, and they program MPLS traffic-engineering paths by using the Path Computation Element Communication Protocol (PCEP).

“What we found is that the community is hungry,” Wee says of DevNet’s efforts, noting that DevNet has 315,000 members and has created 6,000 apps in one year.

DevNet started under the auspices of Cisco’s CTO office with David Ward, CTO of engineering and chief architect at Cisco, at the helm, but now Rowan Trollope, senior vice president of collaboration technology, is in charge.