API World + CloudX + DataWeek 2025

Sid Maestre,  APIMatic, VP Developer Relations

In this talk, we examine why your company may not need SDKs and the signs they could support efforts to drive API adoption through a better developer experience.

For those just getting started or revamping your SDK strategy, we review four ways to build SDKs and best practices to design, implement, and support them. Lastly, we share insights from leading API providers and their approach to SDKs.

How to Leverage Your In-House Technical Teams
Friday, September 5, 2025 · 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM (PT)
Santa Clara Convention Center, CA

Let’s trade strategies on how your marketing team can leverage the expertise and knowledge of your in-house technical teams, so they are actually talk-the-talk when engaging developers.

Panel 1: Marketing among the Engineers
Technical experts are often wary – and can be outright hostile – to members of marketing teams, even within their own organizations. They’ve been burned by the false promises, pushy tactics, and poorly appropriated developer culture promoted by organizations more concerned with hitting sales numbers than delivering value. Successful marketing teams learn to bridge these gaps in order to deliver more authentic messaging and developer experiences that directly address the needs and concerns of this audience. Our panel of experts will share the tactics they have used to reach across the technical chasm to build productive relationships both with their internal teams and their technical customers to better inform their marketing efforts and build trust that delivers long term returns.

Panelists:
Michael Ortega, Head of Marketing @ Predibase
Tal Sacharov, Director of Marketing @ Aurora Labs
James Le, Head of Developer Experience @ Twelve Labs

Panel 2: Thought Leadership - Marketing's Most Powerful Tool 
To be a technical expert is to be an eternal student. Engineers who allow their knowledge to languish see their careers diminish with time. There is a constant need for clearly communicated technical knowledge that helps developers not only move forward in their career, but expand their knowledge of how everything works to satisfy their constant curiosity. Marketers who create a platform for the technical experts within their organizations to share their knowledge with peers see a halo effect around the rest of their marketing efforts that makes everything they do seem more authentic and valuable as a result. In this panel, we’ll hear from experts who have developed thought leadership programs within their organizations to elevate technical experts in their communities as they share the results of their work and best practices for helping you and your team put thought leadership into effective action.

Panelists:
Sheena Singh, Marketing Events Manager @ Dropbox Core

Anil Inamdar, NetApp Instaclustr, Global Head of Data Services

Platform engineering has become one of the hottest topics in software development, and with good reason. It bridges the gap between pie-in-the-sky claims about accelerating application development (and ROI), and the boots-on-the-ground reality of most software teams, which are often already stretched thin while being asked to support increasingly ambitious business goals. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to platform engineering, it’s becoming increasingly clear that open-source software and projects are absolutely vital to its success.

This CloudX session will dig into how open source can fuel platform engineering success, with discussion around:

- How open source gives you the means to start small. You can identify key gaps in your platform and developer experience and look for reliable open-source options to deliver those needs.

- How open source technologies can help you make adoption, testing, experimentation, and exploration easier for developers—a must for a successful platform approach.

- Specific advantages that open source can deliver to platform engineering, including portability, dev talent recruitment security, and pluggability.
 

Sid Maestre,  APIMatic, VP Developer Relations

In this talk, we examine why your company may not need SDKs and the signs they could support efforts to drive API adoption through a better developer experience.

For those just getting started or revamping your SDK strategy, we review four ways to build SDKs and best practices to design, implement, and support them. Lastly, we share insights from leading API providers and their approach to SDKs.