Cisco Live UK has begun!

We’ve been busy setting up our booths in preparation for Cisco Live UK. Check out this video of us hard at work setting up shop and getting our demonstrations ready for visitors eager to learn more about Cisco’s Industrial Solutions:

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Tags: #CLEUR, Cisco, Cisco Live UK, Converged Industrial Ethernet, Converged Industrial Wireless, honeywell, Industrial Infrastructure, Industrial Intelligence, Industrial Work Enablement, M2M, Manufacturing, OSI, Panduit, Rockwell Automation

About the ‘Cisco Insiders Series’ -- You won’t find product pre-announcements, insider trading tips or other things we can’t tell you about here! You will find, however, nuggets of information from provoking thought leaders that you would easily miss if we didn’t bring them to you here. Get a competitive blog-edge by reading this series!

I had the pleasure of meeting up with Guy Denis recently.  He has been one of those instrumental in forming Cisco’s approach to Industrial Automation – both inside Cisco and for our customers. He’s been focused on how industrial processes can be improved with emerging technologies, and how the IT and plant-floor systems are converging to provide business and industrial process benefits.

Right now the Internet is abuzz about the Cloud and what it means for customers, suppliers, IT and Service Providers. A lot of buzz too about ‘The Internet of Things’, which talks about billions of devices on the network in a few years time. But you know me -- I wanted to move the conversation more to the factory. What’s clear is that the Cloud is not just for commercial and carpeted areas. It’s moving to the plant floor and beyond. Not just people and computers talking to each other, but machines talking to people and to other machines. So I wanted to learn more about how the network is evolving to cope with industrial automation and embrace the cloud from a machine perspective.

First off, I asked Guy what he thought of as the major trends emerging in industrial automation that he believed would impact the market for the next 10 years. Read More »

Tags: CAD, CAM, Cius, denis, guy denis, Industrial Automation, industrial ethernet, industrial networking, internet protocol, ip, M2M, R&D, Rockwell, Rockwell Chairman's award, royal engineers, Royal School of Military Engineering, supply chain, Tablets, thought leadership, trends

The future is here. To quote William Shatner in the original Star Trek Series “We are going where no man has gone before.”

Dave Evans, Cisco’s Chief Futurist, recently posted an infographic in his blog that detailed the fascinating growth of the “Internet of things” – ATMs, kiosks, vending machines, smart meters, digital signage, refrigerator… And then he posted the question: “With this increase, how will you prepare your network for the future? “

Well… Today, Cisco announced the latest addition to the core routing infrastructure portfolio: the Cisco Integrated Services Router (ISR) 819 Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Gateway as an answer to this question. This is the first step towards getting your network ready to face the barrage of machines that need 3G wireless network connectivity to your enterprise/corporate network.

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Tags: Cisco Integrated Services Router, Cisco ISR 819, Dave Evans, Interop NY, M2M, Machine to Machine, video

As I have blogged on the Internet of Things and Web of things in the past, I would like to focus my forthcoming blogs on Machine-to-Machine communications and its implications to the network, to protocols and security.

Let’s set the foundation:
Imagine a world where billions of objects have sensors to detect, measure, and assess their status, all connected over public or private IP (Internet Protocol) networks.  This world of interconnected objects would have its data regularly collected, analyzed, and used to initiate an action. It would provide a wealth of intelligence for planning, management, policy and decision-making.

Important information is pushed out to machines, to individuals, and to organizations of every type anywhere in the world. The term that characterizes this world of interconnected objects, is the Internet of Things or IoT. Read More »

Tags: internet of things, ip, M2M, machine to machine communications, Networks, Service Provider

Since my last blog posted this past December specifically on the ITU-T Focus Group Cloud Computing activities; the ITU-T Focus Group has had its Fourth Meeting held in Nanjing, PRC Jan 10-13 2011.

Moving to another subject, the Internet of Things (IoT) , has been emerging quite prominently as a pivotal topic in the industry and within several SDOs and Forums.  Recall, that the ITU produced a report on the Internet of Things in 2005 and highlighted so called “always on “technologies”:

The following diagram depicts nicely the IoT eco-system that maps into the appropriate industry sector:

Interestingly, within the ITU-T specifically SG-13 there is quite a bit of discussion on so called Web of Things or WoT.

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Tags: internet of things, itu-t, M2M, semantic web, web of things