As the Internet of Everything continues to progress and more people, process, data and things begin to connect to each other, it’s getting easier to see how the future will fit together. The pieces of the IoE puzzle will no longer be disparate things, but a single, connected unit with technology at the core.
A great way to demonstrate this connection is to think of everyday situations. A child’s big game is important to any parent, and the CFO of a Fortune 500 company is no exception. But when the CFO is double booked with a meeting and his son’s big soccer game, he might worry how to balance his life at home with his life at work. Thanks to IoE, he doesn’t have to choose.
The Internet of Everything connects the CFO’s phone and car, which communicate to keep him on a conference call with his sales team while he travels to the field. He knows that when home phones become work phones – thanks in part to technology like Cisco Connected Mobile Experience – work can fit in anywhere. At the field, his connected tablet provides updates on the real-time sales data of products sold nationwide. Instead of having to step aside from the game to check in with the office, the CFO can watch his company break the all-time sales record as it happens, virtually with his sales team via Cisco WebEx, while celebrating his son’s win, in person on the sidelines.
And that is just the beginning. Imagine that the soccer ball is instrumented to provide feedback to individual children, helping them to improve their game, while at the same time providing the coach with play-by-play replays on his tablet. Video feeds of the game can be sent to grandmothers in other states so they can watch their grandchildren play. And as the play clock ticks down, uniforms monitor the kids’ vitals to ensure no one gets dehydrated, sending alerts to the parent volunteers when a child needs an extra water break.
This is the kind of experience the Internet of Everything is making possible. Explore the interactive image above to learn more. No longer must people choose between things such as work and play. IoE is integrating the two, creating opportunities for flexibility, security and real-time success.
Tell me, how can you see IoE making a difference in your world? Leave a comment here or join the conversation on Twitter to add your thoughts.
Internet of Everything is amazing…
Certainly this is going to influence business process automation, favourably. On top of this, IoE can make education accessible to all, make healthcare affordable for underdeveloped countries and make emerging technologies like precision farming, much more popular.
impatiently awaiting, while contributing to IoE.
I’m really scared – nowhere in any of these blogs has anyone discussed the fact that an IoE will be a massive target for data collection / monitoring, disruption and all other forms of attack, by criminal elements, “hacktivists” and even nation states! IPSec WAS to be MANDATORY but now is just advisory! DNSSEC has hardly gained any foothold outside some mandatory public sector requirements. SSL is too big to fail – so they say – but it has (see DOCOMO, etc.)
We need more CISCO blogs on just how this “brave new world” of IoE will be fully protected and to quote that NSF “Grand Challenges” summit 10 years ago how will users be given privacy and security they can understand and easily manage?
Perhaps that IoE will bring closer that warning by the great US leader, Senator Sam Nunn, who put it so well in the mid-1990s roughly as follows – America will only wake up when it has an electronic Pearl Harbor!
With IPv6 and little enforcement of security technologies at the legislative level that day seems much, much closer.
Bill, thank you for your comments and insight. I will add this topic to a future blog to address some of these concerns.
Great idea Dave – that NSF “Grand Challenges” was sponsored by the CRA (Computing Research Association) in 2002 and CISCO was a strong participant there in Northern Virginia. I was one of three international invitees.
( http://archive.cra.org/Activities/grand.challenges/security/ )
IoE also presents major security problems since in many cases simple “patching” will simply NOT be feasible as many of the “devices” will be based around firmware implementations, e.g. recent analysis of the open TELNET ports in major equipment such as routers, etc let alone many IoE type devices!. Incorporating crypto is also interesting, e.g. AES-256 for data encryption, ECC/RSA for key management, etc. but in many cases IoE may have little to no perfomance capacity to provide such crypto services even if TPM 1.2 chips are inserted – and that is NOT happening in many IoE type devices I have examined.
IoE can only succeed if citizens have full confidence and trust in any such structure. Remember “Unsafe at Any Speed” and Ralph Nader! The future relies and lives on the past!