From Local to Global: Extending Our IoE Innovation Strategy with openBerlin and TTTech

There are people all over the world doing truly innovative acts to move the technology needle, but without proper support, many of these ideas fail to come to true fruition. We at Cisco are committed to doing our part by guiding these creators towards a path of success. With both internal and external programs to feed innovation – including the Cisco Internet of Things (IoT) Innovation Grand Challenge and the Technology Fund – we aim to nurture disruptive ideas.

In this light, we were pleased to announce in September the establishment of an IoE Innovation Center in Berlin, Germany – openBerlin. Scheduled to open the summer of 2015, openBerlin will focus on the rapid prototyping of solutions in the transportation and manufacturing verticals. openBerlin marks the sixth Innovation Center in Cisco’s portfolio and joins its successors in Rio, Brazil; Toronto, Canada; Songdo, South Korea; Barcelona, Spain; and London, UK.

To further bolster this development, Cisco is teaming up with TTTech as a leading partner for the openBerlin Innovation Center. A strong technology partner with unique Deterministic Ethernet and safety know-how, on top of far-reaching relationships with some of the world’s leading industrial and transportation companies, TTTech will serve as a key enabler in ushering in the Internet of Things, in real-time. TTTech customers are already deploying Deterministic Ethernet solutions in a broad range of upcoming applications including space vehicles (NASA), piloted cars (Audi), and wind turbines (Vestas).

Did you know that manufacturers historically generate more Big Data than any other sector, yet only four percent of devices on the manufacturing floor are actually connected to some kind of network? In a recent article for ISA’s InTech Magazine, Cisco mentioned that most manufacturers are currently considering gigabit Ethernet on the plant floor, linking previously dark devices to the Internet of Things. As this number increases and more connections are made, bandwidth must be considered.

So where will Cisco and TTTech go together? Deterministic Ethernet and beyond! Regarded as reliable and consistent, healthy Deterministic Networks produce predictable response time between devices. And as IoT adoption in the industrial ecosystem continues to grow, we jointly see Deterministic Networks as critical in terms of controlling loops and plotting event sequences. As such, these Deterministic Networks will aim to:

Guarantee the performance and delivery of critical control traffic

Secure the control traffic

Make it easy for Control Engineers to implement

Cisco’s IoE Innovation Centers are key cornerstones of our innovation strategy. We see momentum building locally while the impact on innovation grows globally. I am excited to see that IoE Innovation Centers are rapidly becoming hubs of co-innovation with customers, research institutions, startups, partners, and, most recently, TTTech.

As always, let us know what you think in the comments section below. In which city would you like to see the next IoE Innovation Center? How do you see Deterministic Networks aiding transportation and manufacturing?