I am working hard to make sense of the programmability of the companies, organizations, institutions, and government agencies I profile at scale, and that work gets expressed through my APIs.io search engine. One new dimension I added with last night’s build is the concept of an estate. I needed something that would help tame the sprawl of large enterprises and the work they have done across the years, across lines of business, across teams, and across acquisitions. I am just getting started, but the estate is already helping me ground the relationship between a parent company, its many differing offerings, and how programmable and agent-ready each surface area is — as well as the estate as a whole.
One company that has come up consistently as part of this challenge is Cisco. Cisco spans 28 provider profiles and 910 APIs, with 2 exemplar, 6 strong, 7 developing, 8 thin, 2 emerging, and 3 minimal product surface areas. The highest-rated of those are ThousandEyes, the Cisco Identity Services Engine, Cisco Catalyst Center, Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, and Cisco Umbrella. It isn’t a perfect snapshot of the Cisco API estate, but it is better than what you can find at any single domain Cisco operates. My goal is to understand the programmability of each of these lines of business, and to keep bringing them together into a single estate of programmable resources and tools that agents can put to work across the operations of Cisco customers.
I find it endlessly fascinating to consider how the API surface area of large enterprises has evolved over this century. I do not wish to diminish that work or shame the people behind it. To the contrary — I want to showcase and elevate it, providing an outside-in perspective, and more importantly an agentic perspective on how we see your hard work and where you can refine it to help human and agentic consumers be more successful. I fully understand what it is like to try to align domains, lines of business, and teams within a sprawling enterprise so that they present as a single API portal and presence. It isn’t easy. I understand how companies evolve over the years, and how much of this sprawl is the residue of real decisions made by real people under real constraints. With this work I am looking to provide a road map for companies to consider when it comes to their next round of investment into the foundation of their agentic strategy.
My APIs.io estate work is just beginning. I am wrestling with Cisco, Bloomberg, and a handful of other large enterprises that my army of agents keep stumbling across while iterating on the catalog and the Kin Score. I am still working out what an acquisition means as part of an estate — whether a company bought in 2017 and long since folded into a product line should read the same way as one bought last year that still runs its own developer portal. Like with my VC portfolio profiling, I am rolling up the individual Kin Scores for the lines of business and products present across an enterprise estate to provide a meaningful representation of how programmable the surface area is, and what advice I can offer on top of it. My goal is to keep making this information available via the API Evangelist and APIs.io websites, but I think more importantly via the APIs.io API and MCP server — so that I can use Claude to keep making sense of things, and so that Cisco and its consumers can use the AI agent or copilot of their choice to make sense of the Cisco surface area that matters to them.
