Just over a year ago Cisco announced the general availability of APIC-EM (#APICEM), a software defined networking (SDN) platform for the enterprise branch, campus and WAN. In just over 12 months, we have seen over 1400 enterprise customers deploy APIC-EM in their production environments managing over 600,000 network devices and connecting over 1.5 million hosts! APIC-EM went on to win TechTarget's Network Innovation Award and was a finalist for the Best of Interop SDN category.

Five months later in March 2016, Cisco launched its Digital Network Architecture (DNA) a strategy for enterprises looking to win against the competition by using new innovative technologies to transform their business. Cisco has aligned its Enterprise Networks product portfolio around the key pillars of DNA -Virtualization, Analytics, Automation and Management -the central component being Cisco APIC-EM.

Driven by the demand we are seeing in the market for SDN solutions, we have added a number of new applications and features that have enhanced customer value when using APIC-EM. Last month, Cisco released Version 1.3 of APIC-EM and while there is a long list of exciting new features some of the key highlights are:

• General availability for EasyQoS, an end-to-end QoS management application.
• Enhanced certificate authority management for greater security.
• Faster branch deployments with the IWAN App that now supports ISRG2 routers.
• Improved network assurance capabilities with Path Trace.
• Expanded automation capabilities with Plug and Play (PnP).

Openness is a key mantra of DNA. In this latest release, we have also enhanced our API support. The APIC-EM APIs are published for anyone to use. If you would like a deeper dive into API support for release 1.3 you can learn more in this blog series from my co-worker Adam Radford a Cisco Distinguished Systems Engineer.

As IT moves faster to meet business demands, Cisco is moving as fast with an agile development process that enables us to deliver customer driven features faster than ever. Don't believe us? Brian McEvoy, Sr. Network Engineer at Symantec has seen the following benefit of APIC-EM,

"QoS rollouts were once 6-month projects costing over$200K. With Cisco APIC-EM EasyQoS, we will go from months to minutes with nominal costs."

Get started on your digital journey today by downloading APIC-EM free of charge from here and start laying the foundation to your digital transformation today.