The journey to smarter cities and communities has gained momentum in recent years, as a recent BBC article highlights. I’d like to offer a few points from my experiences over the last five years exploring this territory:

• First, the critical issue is how to move beyond visions and prototypes, to scaling and adoption.
• Second, the whole notion of smart cities should also be reappraised.
• And third, the Internet of Everything Economy will fuel a transformation across communities, industries, and social interactions.

We are looking at a dynamic concept to which bounded definitions — whether physical, digital, organizational, or technological — seem increasingly inadequate.

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Tags: economic development, IBSG, Internet of Everything, IoE, IoE Economy, Smart Cities, value at stake

Kiss your old running shoes good-bye. Change is constant. And technology has always been about change and convergence. But the massive, global-scale change occurring now is happening at rates faster than anyone ever predicted.

And this is disruptive change. It’s change that requires you to act, adapt, and move quickly to take advantage of the opportunities that come with it.

Cisco has a long history of showcasing disruption and convergence at Enterprise Connect since the early days of VoiceCon. TDM to voice over IP; the convergence of voice, video, and data; unified communications: In each case we saw how converging technology and collaborative behavior has helped disrupt the traditional way of doing things and created more value for businesses and users.

Today technology is creating disruption in unexpected places.

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Tags: cloud, collaboration, data center, Internet of Everything, IoE, networking, security, virtualization

Reports of the physical retail store’s death have been greatly exaggerated. As a recent survey from the Cisco^® Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) found, 93 percent of products sold in the United States are still bought in brick-and-mortar locations. And while technology has upended many product categories and more than a few individual retailers, it simultaneously creates opportunities for retailers to continue to make the store shopping experience both relevant and compelling. Big Data in the store is key to achieving this.

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Tags: Big Data, business intelligence, Cisco, data in motion, IBSG, Internet of Everything, IoE, machine learning, Machine to Machine, machine-to-human, mobility, online shopping, retail, social media, video

Since Cisco began discussing the Internet of Everything (IoE) last year, two questions have arisen consistently:

1) What is the difference between IoE and the Internet of Things (IoT)?
According to Cisco, IoE brings together people (humans), process (manages the way people, data, and things work together), data (rich information), and things (inanimate objects and devices) to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before—turning information into actions that create new capabilities, richer experiences, and unprecedented economic opportunity for businesses, individuals, and countries.

To better understand this definition, it is helpful to take a quick look at the evolution of the Internet. In the early 1990s, devices connected to the Internet were essentially “fixed.” For example, you went to your desk to use your PC, dumb terminal, or other device. At its peak, this first wave reached about 200 million devices by the late 1990s.

Around the year 2000, devices started to come with you. Remember lugging around your first “brick” mobile phone? As the number of both fixed and mobile devices (including machines) ballooned, the number of things connected to the Internet increased, reaching about 10 billion this year. This wave of Internet growth ushered in IoT, or as I sometimes call it, the “Age of the Device.”

Cisco believes the third wave of Internet growth has already begun. As the things connected to the Internet are joined by people and more intelligent data (as Cisco’s definition describes), IoE could potentially connect 50 billion people, data, and things by 2020.

So, what is the difference between IoT and IoE? Read More »

Tags: Internet of Everything, internet of things, IoE, IoT, personal data stores, privacy, privacy bill of rights, security

Energetic debates of what SDN is and the expanding scope of what it can do for our customers continue to race along in a chaotic frenzy. In addition, the overall SDN market is somewhat fragmented in terms of both vendor positioning and marketing.  Collectively, the conversation really comes down to improving business agility and the efficiencies gained in bringing new services to market. Essentially, the goal is to enable operators to make their networks and services go much faster.

While software defined networking (SDN) technologies continue to drive significant entropy in our industry, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) recently rose up and became a key focus of many discussions at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last month. Read More »

Tags: Automation Standards barcelona, Cisco ONE, cisco quantum, data in motion, internet, Internet of Everything, IoE, mobile, mobile world congress, mobility, mwc, NFV, orchestration, padmasree warrior, quantum, Sanjeev Mervana, SDN, Service Provider, visual networking index, vni