It Takes a Village: Cisco and IBM Break Down Barriers to IoT Success

IoT is a very hot topic and many enterprises have started their IoT journey. But a majority of those initiatives never make it past the proof of concept stage.  In a recent survey of 1,845 business leaders, Cisco found that 60 percent of IoT projects stall out at proof of concept and are never deployed.

Why? Because doing IoT right is hard. Customers have to deal with a plethora of issues from how to connect devices to the network, how to deal with the massive amounts of data coming from these devices, how to secure the both devices and data, how to automate the management of devices, how to drive actionable business insights from their data, how to scale and grow with their business, and most importantly – how to realize business value from their IoT investments.

Here at Cisco Jasper, we’ve been working for over a decade to enable IoT success for our 11,000 customers. And one of the biggest lessons we’ve learned is that enabling IoT success takes a village.

Successful IoT projects usually require the technology and expertise of more than one vendor.  Which is why Cisco and IBM brought our respective experiences together in an IoT partnership that was announced last June. Today, the two parties are expanding that partnership to meet the next wave of customer engagements in a variety of use cases.

This is great news for customers.  When tackling the myriad of challenges facing a nascent IoT project, having two of the most experienced IoT vendors working together with the stakeholders inside these businesses to solve their unique problems helps accelerate the success of these projects. Cisco and IBM are making it easier to develop, deploy and manage both the pilot phase of the project as well as the eventual production deployment. Cisco’s IoT operations platform, Cisco Kinetic, together with the IBM Watson IoT Platform, provides customers with the ability to quickly get up and running with device connectivity, device provisioning, secure data transmission, data cleansing, data analytics, machine learning, model training and the full lifecycle management of applications.  Add on to this IBM’s industry specific analytics solutions that compliment Cisco’s fog infrastructure and customers will have an edge to cloud IoT solution. Together with Cisco and IBM’s professional services and world class hardware and software support, customers are able to trust their projects to a best of breed partnership that creates the foundation of success for their projects.

With this increasing depth of experience and rock solid technology platforms, Cisco and IBM are pursuing projects with customers in a variety of IoT markets like Manufacturing, Retail, and – most recently – Smart Cities.  Building on successes like the Port of Cartagena, Cisco and IBM have begun exploring how to help cities and municipal governments around the world implement Smart City technologies that can leverage the Cisco Connected Digital Platform  and the IBM Watson IoT portfolio and  Smarter Cities product suite to accelerate the connection of parking systems, traffic management, street lighting and a host of other services to a powerful cognitive computing solution like Watson IoT.  The complementary nature of Cisco’s Fog computing software and IBM’s Watson Cognitive Computing platform gives a complete end-to-end solution for cities around the world and builds a total package that is greater than the sum of its parts.

So if your IoT project is stalled, or if you’re looking for a partner ecosystem that can accelerate your IoT success, you’ve come to the right place.