Writen by Jon Judson and Scot Wlodarczak
Rain and cold greeted the thousands who attended CiscoLive Berlin this year, but the city’s venues were warm and dry and the locals were always ready with a smile and good German food. And of course, “Einen halben Liter Pilsener, bitte” will get you a nice pint of lager to wash it all down. Prost!
With a wide-ranging campus and World of Solutions to choose from, attendees could visit pavilions for Energy and Manufacturing as well as Smart Cities, Retail, and Financial Services. Industrie 4.0 led the conversations in the industrial hall, where efficiency, productivity, and security reigned supreme as visitors sought ways to integrate their networks from the cloud to the sensor, and everything in between.
On the Energy side, attendees learned how Cisco transforms utility networks from the substation and distribution level, through field integrated asset management and finally to the enterprise, with Teleprotection over MPLS ensuring stable, confident, and secure communications over wide geographic regions.
For a glimpse of the event action from the Cisco Utilities Solutions engagements in Berlin (plus some of the many hot topic areas where customers are leveraging the network and adding new services to the utilities grid), here are a few short demonstration videos recorded at DistribuTECH 2017:
This video demonstrates Cisco’s Smart Street Lighting Solution over a future-ready IPv6 Field Area Network — helping Cities get detailed data and control over their Street lights With this solution, cities are making smarter decisions reducing costs through lower electric bills, better asset management, and leveraging street lights as sensors for huge ROI on their investment.
This video demonstrates Cisco’s Modern 2-Way Demand Response System over a future-ready IPv6 Field Area Network. The solution enables utilities to better manage grid load and meet their System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) and System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI) numbers without incurring huge costs related to expensive power sources such as diesel generators, etc. during peak demand.
This video demonstrates Cisco’s Field Network Director (FND) Management Platform for Cisco Field Area Networks (FAN). FND is enabling utilities to manage millions of endpoints such as smart meters, streetlights as well as gateways such as Cisco CGR1240 ,CGR1120, IR809, IR829 which form a part of Cisco FAN architecture – built with end-to-end embedded Security.
This video demonstrates Cisco’s Distribution Automation (DA) solution in partnership with the EATON (formerly Cooper Power Systems) Form 6 Re-closer. This solution helps utilities to provide reliable and quality power to customers – while also meeting and exceeding System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) and System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI) numbers.
Our manufacturing booth had a variety of innovative solutions for our industrial customers. Customers were excited to see our industrial collaboration solutions, including how Cisco Spark can help drive efficiency in manufacturing with one platform to display alarms, share & store data, and communicate effectively and securely with remote teams.
Our security experts were also in the booth to help explain why manufacturing is the number one targeted industry for cyberattacks and security breaches. We showed how our comprehensive security offering from the enterprise to the shop floor can lower your costs, improve safety & reduce downtime.
We also showed our Connected Factory solution, a network backbone that can handle the demands and unleash the possibilities of digital technology. These tested and validated architectures, including factory wireless will allow your manufacturing processes to securely operate at higher levels of performance, efficiency, and uptime. We also demonstrated how a connected machine solution, leveraging fog computing can take OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) to new levels.
To learn more about Cisco Live and to find out how Cisco can help you with your network transformation, visit our website at:
I hadnt thought about it before but if there are to be 10 of billions of IoT devices then there must be controllers such as Cisco FND & FAN