Cisco Says New IoT Platform Will Take Projects to Success

In a recent story, we reported that a new Cisco study indicated that the majority of IoT initiatives fail before completion and even those that are finished usually aren’t deemed successful. Now the company has released a new IoT platform designed to help customers get over the proof-of-concept hurdle and release successful IoT products, solutions and systems.

The survey reportedly identified two main holdups for success:

1. IoT projects are very complex because they need to integrate existing networking platforms, data-gathering tools, and computing resources in new ways with new products and services in order to derive actionable data.

2. There isn’t enough internal expertise to overcome those challenges, because IT and TO teams need skills that they haven’t ever needed before. IoT projects today are complex and there aren’t a lot of experienced people around to support them. Events like the upcoming IoT Evolution Expo can help, but there’s a need for more experts.

Cisco has set itself the goal of helping businesses build more intelligence into the network by releasing tools that pull technology components and business processes together. That’s reportedly what the new Cisco IoT Operations Platform is all about. The company announced the initiative at its IoT World Forum event in London.

There are three components to the new platform, which will hit wide distribution later in 2017.

First, it is building a platform to manage the number of IoT devices coming online. Working with several industry partners, Cisco said it will develop new tools to make it easier to spin-up and maintain huge fleets of connected devices from unified applications. Second, it will leverage Fog Computing to make sure that data processing and device control happens at the right place for each job, especially as the needs of jobs change in real-time. Third, Cisco plans to help customers and partners collect, collate, and act on the data these systems are generating by offering scalable tools for filtering and distribution.

All of this is designed to make sure that the right systems get implemented in the correct ways so that the right data streams go to the right networks, applications, data stores, and people.

I suppose all that’s left is Step 2: Profit.