Who Doesn’t Have a Developer Outreach Program?

I am amazed how many companies have a developer outreach program. We used to think that only the technology, software and hardware companies had a developer relations program. To be competitive today, every company, regardless of which industry segment they belong to, sees that it is essential to attract and support developers. How do you know if a company has a developer program? I use a simple algorithm: replace the “www.” in  a company’s web site with the text “developer.”, “developers.” or “api.” and see if you get to their developer portal. Another way is to use a search engine and put their company name and the words “developer and program” and see what shows up in the search results. You can also check out API sites like Mashery and Programmable Web to gain insights into companies/competitors that have developer portals.

Another way to find some of the industry leading companies that have developer relations programs is to go to the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference web page and see the list of sponsoring companies. Since I am also a developer, the final trick I use to find developer outreach programs is to take the Fortune 500, Forbes Global 2000 and other lists and write a program to find which of these leading companies have a developer relations program. Here is a list of a few (of the many) companies with developer outreach programs:

 

  • Apple
  • Walmart (Walmark Labs)
  • General Motors
  • Ford Motor
  • AT&T
  • Verizon Communications
  • Hewlett-Packard
  • IBM
  • Home Depot
  • Microsoft
  • Amazon.com
  • Target
  • Walgreen Co.
  • Google
  • Intel
  • Cisco Systems, Inc.
  • Best Buy Co., Inc.
  • FedEx
  • Humana
  • Honeywell
  • Deere & Company
  • Oracle Corporation
  • American Express Company
  • Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co.
  • The Allstate Corporation
  • Qualcomm Incorporated
  • Visa
  • MasterCard
  • Facebook
  • Philips
  • Uber
  • DocuSign
  • SAP
  • Blackberry
  • Hitachi Data Systems
  • Adobe
  • Autodesk
  • VMWare
  • Twitter
  • ebay
  • Thomson Reuters
  • PayPal

 

Developer OutReach Program – How to Find Your Peers

To interact with other leading developer relations professionals you can:

  • Join the DevRelate Online Community and Academy for Developer Relations Professionals
  • Attend the 2017 conference in Spring 2017 (additional details coming soon)

 

If you want to find out additonal ways to help your company reach out to developers, send me an email and I will help you and your company.

David I – davidi@evansdata.com

Developer Outreach - DevRelate

 

 

IBM DeveloperWorks and the IBM DataFirst event

IBM’s DeveloperWorks developer program sets a high standard for helping developers grow their skills with great content, tools, SDKs, how-to tutorials and courses that cover a wide range of IBM tools and open standards technologies across the development life cycle. I had the honor and privilege of representing Evans Data Corporation this week at IBM’s New York City cool launch of their new DataFirst method. As IBM describes their DataFirst method “It’s simple. The more you put data to work in your organization, the better the outcome”.

The personas defined for DataFirst include (but are not limited to): Citizen Analyst, Data Engineer, Data Scientist, App Developer and Chief Data Officer. You can find more about the IBM DataFirst method and resources on their page at http://www-01.ibm.com/software/analytics/services_overview/datafirst.html. The replay of the Tuesday night public launch at the Hudson Merchantile, presented by Bob Picciano (SVP IBM Analytics) and other presenters, is available on YouTube at https://youtu.be/S6UOHFlNvr0. Bob talked about “Make Data Simple in the Cognitive Era” and the insight economy.

Articles about IBM DataFirst and the launch event

Here are a few of the many news, insights and information articles that have appeared following Tuesday’s launch event.

Evans Data – We’ll help you start and enhance your developer program

If you want your company to have a great developer relations program, check out our Evans Data Program Advisory workshops and assessments offerings and join the DevRelate community for developer relations professionals.

 

Developer Programs and APIs in the News – Volume 1, Number 1

In today’s interconnected world, companies in all industries need to publish APIs and cultivate a developer community to access and use them. To be competitive today, attracting and supporting developers is essential. The key to cultivating a vibrant developer community that uses your APIs and supports your platform is a good developer relations program. “Developer Programs and APIs in the News” is a series of news items from developer programs around the world.

Developer Programs and APIs in the News

Yelp – September 20, 2016 – Calling All Developers: New Yelp Fusion Developer Program Provides Access To More Yelp API Content & Data. “Consumer demand for local content is only increasing, so to answer that need, we’ve decided to double down on our developer program and give developers more tools and rich Yelp data to work with,” Chad Richard, Yelp SVP of Business and Corporate Development said in his Yelp blog post.

Twilio – September 20, 2016 – Announcing Voice Insights for WebRTC. Voice Insights gives you detailed metrics on all the changing network and device conditions that can affect WebRTC call quality. And because it’s API accessible, your application can use this data to actually improve the experience of live calls within desktop and mobile browsers.

Evans Data – September 14, 2016 – Press Release: New Evans Data Analytics Console Delivers 43 Billion Developer Data Points. The console takes over 160 raw data points (questions) provides for 4 different crosstabs for each one and allows for 26 different filters to be applied. Multiple filters can be selected and multiple combinations of filters can be implemented at the same time. To count the number of combinations, we compute the number of permutations 26 filters can be arrayed, while accounting for the fact that a user can choose one filter, two filters, three filters, anywhere up to 26 filters at the same time, this allows for 42,949,672,320 total possible charts.

Visa – September 13, 2016 – National Australia Bank (NAB) taps Visa Developer Program to Revitalize their Mobile App. Global head of Visa Developer, Mark Jamison, said: “By directly connecting Visa and NAB developers through the Visa Developer program, the NAB team was able to save around six months of development time.”

GoDaddy.com – September 13, 2016 – GoDaddy Launches Domain Connect Initiative To Make It Easier For Customers To Get The Most Out Of Their Domain Names. “We’re always looking for ways to make things easier for our customers,” said GoDaddy Senior Vice President Charles Beadnall. “We noticed how happy our customers were when we developed an earlier system to make DNS changes easier, and the Domain Connect APIs are an extension of that. We wanted to bring the same simplicity we give GoDaddy customers to the entire domain and web services industry.”

Affectiva – September 12, 2016 – The Emotion Behind Facial Expressions. We use something called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), developed by Paul Ekman, to label facial expressions. There are 24 core facial actions that occur independently on a human face. Affectiva can now detect 21 human facial expressions that map to six basic emotions: disgust, fear, joy, surprise, anger and sadness. The Affectiva Emotion SDK (Affdex) is available on the Affectiva developer program site.

Google – September 8, 2016 – Google to acquire Apigee. Diane Greene, Google’s senior vice president in charge of enterprise cloud computing, said in her blog post, “Today, we’re excited to announce that Google has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Apigee, a provider of application programming interface (API) management. APIs — the mechanism developers use to interface and integrate with outside apps and services — are vital for how business gets done today in the fast-growing digital and mobile marketplace.” She goes on to say that “Walgreens, for example, uses Apigee to manage the APIs that enable an ecosystem of partners and developers building apps using Walgreens APIs, including the Photo Prints API (enabling mobile app developers to include the ability for their app users to print photos at any Walgreens store), and the Prescription API (enabling users to quickly order refills of prescriptions right from their mobile app).”

Parrot – September 7, 2016 – Press Release: Parrot S.L.A.M.dunk: Turn a drone into a smart robot. Parrot, the pioneer in consumer and professional civil drones, announces an open development kit for the design of advanced applications for autonomous navigation, obstacle avoidance, indoor navigation and 3D mapping for drones and other robotic platforms in environments with multiple barriers and where GPS signals are not available. Parrot Developer Program.

Send me your Developer Programs News!

If you have news about your Developer Relations Program, send me an email about the news. Send to davidi@evansdata.com

Evans Data Developer Relations Conference 2016 – Interviews

Several of the Developer Relations Conference 2016 presenters were recorded discussing the importance of developer programs and outreach. You can find links to the short interview videos on the DevRelate site. The interviews and other videos are also available on the DevRelate YouTube channel.

DevRelate DRC 2016 Interviews

Those interviewed include:

  • Scott Burnell, Ford – Global Lead, Business Development & Partner Management
  • Marc Naddell, MediaTek – Vice President of Ecosystems
  • Larry McDonough, VMware – Director Product Management
  • Gina Poole, IBM – Vice President, Worldwide Developer Digital Engagement
  • David Intersimone “David I”, Embarcardero – VP, Developer Relations and Chief Evangelist (before I joined Evans Data)

Scott Burnell - Ford - Interview Marc Naddell - MediaTek - Interview Larry McDonough - VMWare - Interview Gina Poole - IBM - Interview David Intersimone - Embarcadero - Interview

What we talk about in the Videos

Each of us talked about background, our path to developer relations, developer marketing, and evangelism.
During the discussion, we talked about the fun, opportunities and challenges in creating and growing a developer program. It is important to stay on top of the latest developer technology trends and requirements. We each stressed the importance of gaining developer program buy in with the stakeholders inside their companies. One of the effective best practices for cultivating a thriving developer ecosystem is leveraging the technology experts inside your company. Engage the technical teams inside your company to take part in the continuing conversation with developers.

Share your Developer Program Stories

I’d love to hear from fellow developer program professionals. Contact me and share your stories, best practices, words of wisdom, what works and what doesn’t. If you want to take part in a future DevRelate webinar series talking about the real world of developer relations, your stories will be a great starting point.

Register for the 2017 Developer Relations Conference

David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
Santa Cruz, CA, USA
Phone: +1.831.425.8451
Email: davidi at evansdata.com
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99

David I joins Evans Data as VP of Developer Communities

Hello fellow Developer Relations Program Directors, Managers and Evangelists! I’m David Intersimone, better known in worldwide developer communities as “David I”. I have joined Evans Data Corporation as Vice President of Developer Communities. At Evans Data, I will help your programs succeed with consulting, workshops, assessments, webinars, articles, videos, etc.

My responsibilities at Evans Data include the DevRelate Developer Relations Professionals Community. On DevRelate you will find online video courses for best practices in building your developer program. These best practices are supported by research data from Evans Data Corporation. Evans Data is the world leader in developer research. On our site you will also find interviews with developer program leaders, developer program resourced links and more.

About David I

I have spent the last 43+ years in software development and 25+ years of developer evangelism. Supporting the needs of developers, I have created thousands of developer focused articles, webinars, videos and demos. In traveling the world, I have had the honor and privilege of meeting with great companies and awesome developers. I have spoken at many developer conferences, including the annual Evans Data Developer Relations Conference. Think of me as a cheerleader for software developers. I enjoy helping companies that deliver tools, open up APIs and provide services for developers. Years ago only a few hardware, operating system platform and software tool companies reached out to developers. Today I can’t think of an industry segment or leading company that doesn’t have some type of developer outreach. In today’s connected world, successful companies are allowing developers to build complementary applications, tools and services.

My DevRelate Blog

On my DevRelate blog I will focus on developer programs, best practices, industry and development news. I’ll write about developer community success stories. Finally, I’ll cover everything else to help you amp up your company’s developer offerings.

Here to help every Developer Program Success

We will work together to enhance your developer programs. I am very interested in hearing about what you are doing for developer outreach. I want to share your developer program news. Send me an email or Skype connect with me.

David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
Santa Cruz, CA, USA
Phone: +1.831.425.8451
Email: davidi at evansdata.com
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99
David I, Evans Data, VP of Developer Communities

About Evans Data Corporation

Evans Data Corporation provides regularly updated IT industry market intelligence based on in-depth surveys of the global developer population. Evans’ syndicated research includes surveys focused on developers in a wide variety of subjects.