IoE and Drones: A Tale of Two Technologies

In September, more than 2,500 drone enthusiasts gathered in Las Vegas for world’s largest commercial drone show, InterDrone. As I touched upon in my previous blog post, people often ask about Cisco’s role in drone ecosystem. During my keynote address the audience was astonished (a big “wow” factor) to learn that drones represent a key element of Cisco’s Internet of Everything (IoE) strategy.

As explained at the Cisco Internet of Everything FAQ page, IoE is powered by four foundational elements:

1. People: Although people are increasingly connecting together through smart devices and social media, IoE emergence is expected to fuel even more accelerated adoption of wearable gadgets, digestible sensor pills, custom body parts, connected apparel and similar technologies.

2. Process: Processes will play a pivotal role in how all the other IoE elements — people, data, and things —interact with one another to deliver societal benefits and economic value. End-to-end automation of technology, business, organizational and other processes delivering right information to right entities at the right time could trigger explosive growth for Internet of Everything.

3. Data: Data is considered new currency if leveraged appropriately in the form of information, knowledge and wisdom. It may not be surprising to see IoE data volumes surpass the traffic generated by today’s most popular social media sites – combined.

4. Things: Things represent the “T” in IoT — devices, sensors, actuators, meters — that connect to the network and to one another to enable smarter decision making at appropriate points in the network.

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If we put (IoE) elements side-by-side with elements of the drone ecosystem, it becomes remarkably noticeable that the drone economy provides almost identical value proposition as the IoE.

Inspired by these amazing parallels between IoE and drone eco systems, Cisco believes drones could be holding keys to unlocking hidden treasure of sensory automation, unmanned operations and end-to-end business intelligence.

The sky is quite literally the limit! What do you think?