Smart, Connected Vehicles Courtesy of the #IoE

As connections on the Internet of Everything (IoE) continue to grow, we’ve asked our employees to tell us how and what they’re connecting.

Cisco Fellow Flavio Bonomi describes how one team is helping to bring a collection of smart, connected vehicles online. What does that mean for us? Vehicles that can provide dynamic collision-avoidance systems, better fuel efficiency, and help decrease pollution and gridlock. And that’s just for starters. Here’s the entire story:

Three visionary engineers who all have strong ties to Europe, a thing for fast cars, and a passion for information technology (IT) are driving a daring effort to put Cisco out in front on roads, rails, and in the air. When they succeed, what once seemed like a strictly sci-fi vision of intelligent navigation will finally have arrived.

Resolving the technical challenges of the Smart Connected Vehicle (SCV) could also put Cisco ahead in the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT is a rapidly growing part of the Internet of Everything, and an area where Cisco plans to lead as objects as diverse as vehicles, water leak sensors, and lighting become connected.

The technical hurdles are daunting, and the scale would be unprecedented as hundreds of millions of cars and trucks come online. But the benefits to society could be huge, including dynamic collision-avoidance systems, better fuel efficiency and traffic management, more useful in-vehicle navigation and information systems, and less pollution and gridlock.

Cisco stands to win big, too. The SCV initiative’s true multilayer architecture is part of the common Internet of Things architecture across all vertical solution areas, so customers in energy, gas, water, manufacturing, mining, smart cities, and other sectors could all benefit.

“If you can solve these challenges at full speed on the autobahn or along the remote stretches of Route 66, you can solve them anywhere,” says Cisco Fellow Flavio Bonomi, who leads the Advanced Architectures Research team. Flavio was the first at Cisco to realize the immense potential of smart, connected transportation. “This is absolutely an infrastructure play, it is a platform play.”
— by Flavio Bonomi, Cisco employee

This is just one example of how our employees are working to connect the previously unconnected. In just 10 short years, the IoE will change nearly every aspect of our lives. How is your organization connecting on the IoE?