WHY I'M SO EXCITED ABOUT API'S

When I was on the regular propeller plane from Dublin to Glasgow for work a few weeks ago, I spotted an article on the in-flight magazine. It was all about "Digital Transformation". It was based on an IDC report and it talked about how enterprises are set to invest more than $7 Trillion in new technologies such as AI, Cloud Computing and IOT. It called this the "Fourth Industrial Revolution". The great thing about this article was the positive spin it put on the future. There was no doom and gloom like "the robots are going to take our jobs", instead it talked about how automation will ultimately be a good thing because it will free up people from mundane tasks and let them focus on using their creativity to excel and solve new problems.

I couldn't help but notice the similarities of this with our mission statement at Cisco Meraki:

"Simplifying powerful technology to free passionate people to focus on their mission."

Cisco Meraki is the leading cloud managed IT network platform today. We have 10+ years experience scaling cloud infrastructure, 460k customers served globally and we are proven in 20,000+ location deployments. One of the most impressive stats however, is that we have 45million+ API requests per day (as of October 2019). And this has only been happening over the past couple of years and its got a lot of us excited about what the future will bring. Cisco have an API first strategy (more on that later!).

Our platform principles have evolved as customers needs and problems have changed over the past couple of years.

Above you will see our Meraki platform principles today. In the words of our CTO Brett Hull, "Simplicity has always been core to the Meraki mission and it is as relevant today as it was 13 years ago. However, how we deliver simplicity has dramatically changed as we pivoted towards the enterprise."

Today we deliver simplicity through "Intelligence" using analytics, machine learning and AI. We will continue to imbue our products with deep intelligence and the Meraki Platform will aim to become a self driving network.

Our biggest asset is the data around how networks are being used and how the physical spaces are being used.

So how can we use this data to drive business value? Lets get into APIs.

So what is an API? It stands for Application Programmable Interface and the below video sums it up perfectly:

In the words of one of our engineers, Dimitrie Sandu, "it's a way to exchange data between systems, in order to create meaningful and bespoke solutions, tailored for every type of business."

Dimitrie also uses a simple analogy of a power socket to describe API's. "It is a standardised way to consume a resource (in this case energy), so that every electronics vendor can now start building devices/solutions on top of it."

The Meraki dashboard (i.e. the power socket) is our one stop shop, full-featured, out of the box, auto-provisioning, simple-to-use interface for managing our cloud IT products. 

A lot of our customers are being tasked with more such as integrating more, automating more, reporting more, surfacing more and they are turning to APIs to solve significant business needs.

Meraki APIs make it possible to rapidly deploy and manage networks at scale, build on a platform of intelligent, cloud-connected IT products, and engage with users in powerful new ways.

Some people refer to API as the new "CLI" (we like to refer to it as the "second dashboard").

In other words, the dashboard API is the analog to the Cisco Meraki dashboard.

The top use cases for API's are below (credit the Meraki API team for this):

We are seeing customers with thousands of sites being able to rapidly and fully automate network setup and provisioning with the Meraki dashboard API's!

APIs can be used across all our products from access points to switches and all the way to our cameras. Our cameras in particularly are fascinating when it comes to APIs. Over the past few weeks, I have been involved in daily conversations relating to our cameras and how through interconnecting different systems, businesses now have an opportunity to solve problems in ways that wouldn’t previously have been possible.

Lets take MV Sense (our open API) as an example. It is intentionally designed to be open-ended. This is a new way for customers to interact with and build on top of the person detection data* that comes out of MV12, MV22, and MV72 cameras.

Each MV Sense license allows users to access person detection data produced by a camera (including location, time, and count) via a set of both RESTful and MQTT-based APIs.

What business values can be derived from this?

Business Values = Make Money/Save Money/Mitigate Risk

1. Education: Do more to keep students safe: push an alert directly to security guards or law enforcement if a person is detected loitering on school grounds after hours
2. Retail: Enrich the in-store experience by triggering media when more than 10 people arrive or quickly understand wait times for grocery queues at every branch location around the world.
3. Manufacturing: Keep employees out of harm’s way. Shut off dangerous equipment automatically if a person enters a restricted area or set off an alarm if the person count drops below the safe minimum number of operators.

*All MV analytics functionalities are anonymized to ensure privacy while still providing intelligence. You’ll know that a customer entered your store at 3:38, but not that her name is Sarah.

Check out the below 2 minute video from our Cisco Canada Customer Experience Center and how they solve problems with the Meraki Cameras (and MV Sense):

We give our customers access to a complete ecosystem and they can either build (Meraki Developer Portal) or buy (Meraki Marketplace) the APIs.

An example of an eco system partner for our Cameras are Everyangle who have an all in one smart camera solution built on the Meraki Camera Platform. Watch below to learn more:

Remember I mentioned that Cisco have an API first strategy. Devnet is Cisco's new breed of certification tracks.

Cisco created DevNet five years ago to help network engineers and application developers alike take full advantage of the revolutionary changes shaping our industry.

Cisco have been told by our customers and partners that network automation is one of their biggest problems.

Advances in networking are forcing businesses to have both networking and software skills on their teams to meet the demands of clients and partners wanting to take advantage of all the capabilities the new network provides.

And, Cisco Meraki is part of the new Cisco DevNet Associate and Professional Certifications.

We just launched our new Cellular Gateway product - Meraki MG21. The MG21 is the first Meraki product to be 100% API controlled. This is a testament to our API-first development strategy

It is exciting to see where this all goes and personally my partner is starting to study programming at the moment and in Ireland I can see a lot of interest in this area with programming/coding courses in Universities in demand at the moment!

If you still feel you need to learn more about API's we have a webinar below for beginners: API for beginners webinar

And if you are a bit more advanced and familiar with programming language like Python, we have a couple of webinars coming up in the new year.

So there you have it, API's are the gateway to driving business value and solving problems in 2020 and beyond.

If you got value from this, please share this on LinkedIn!

Warmest regards,

GD

Cisco Meraki reduces the skills and overhead needed to manage your IT network through one dashboard. Our networks simply work. Are you working on a networking project? Need to run a proof of concept? Want to see all this in action? Visit https://meraki.cisco.com/form/trial