Published on the 30/06/2015 | Written by Donovan Jackson

Knowing a good thing when it sees it, Cisco has announced a broad portfolio of products and solutions to get more things on the internet…

UPDATED
It’s Internet of Things (IoT) System, Cisco said in a statement, ‘addresses the complexity of digitisation with an infrastructure designed to manage large scale systems of diverse endpoints and platforms, and the data deluge they create’. It also advanced the case for a new form of network edge cloud computing, called ‘Fog’.

The ‘deluge’, of course, is anticipated to be a tiny fraction of internet traffic by Cisco’s own estimate, at least in New Zealand. With the release of its VNI Research last week, country manager Geoff Lawrie said machine to machine communications will account for just half of one percent of internet traffic by 2019. However, M2M will account for some 60 percent of connections.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Gartner shifted big data from the Peak Of Inflated Expectations into the murky depths of the Trough of Disillusionment. Taking its place at the Peak? The IoT. As noted yesterday, and as is typical of the tech industry, there is no shortage of effort to capitalise on the latest ‘next big thing’.

Where Gartner puts its estimate of connected things at around 25 billion by 2020, Cisco goes all out and doubles that with an approximation of 50 billion devices online.

Interviewed by iStart, Lawrie said Cisco’s platform intends to bring IoT to reality a bit quicker. “Right now, IoT is happening in quite specialised and focused vertical markets. Our view is that in order to gain traction and relevance, there needs to be a platform initiative and standards which will allow for the development of integrations and creation of applications.”

He agreed that IoT is something of a new frontier. “It’s challenging for every part of the ecosystem; we have most of the technology building blocks, but not necessarily in the right form, so what Cisco has done [with IoT System] is take existing technology and repackaged it in a way that works for the IoT environment.”

By taking care of the nuts and bolts, Lawrie said a platform is provided on top of which the applications – or the ‘real’ IoT – can be built.

Contacted by iStart to provide a perspective on the status of the IoT in New Zealand, technology commentator Ben Kepes hosed down the excitement levels. “While almost everyone agrees that IoT is an incredibly important trend, what it really means, and how it will be applied within traditional sectors and organisations, isn’t really understood. While IoT is certainly reality, its adoption in this country isn’t yet. It’s not so much hype as it is very, very nascent.”

The new Cisco IoT System comprises six pillars, backed by a further 15 IoT products. Those pillars span from the obvious to the intriguing:

1. Network Connectivity.
2. Fog Computing: A distributed computing infrastructure for the IoT. It extends computing (and analytics) network edges to derive immediate insights from connections.
3. Security.
4. Data Analytics (Cisco’s own, or third party).
5. Management and Automation.
6. Application Enablement Platform: Offers a set of APIs.

Sharp-eyed readers would have spotted Fog Computing as the unanticipated element. ‘Fog’, said Cisco, is a distributed computing infrastructure for the IoT. As noted, it extends computing to the edge, enabling local data analysis to derive immediate insights from connections. Fog, of course, is a form of cloud (computing), a concept Cisco extends by predicting that 40% of IoT-created data will be processed ‘in the fog’ by 2018.

More information is available on the IoT System.