Turning on the Smart Lights of Innovation

At the Cisco Toronto Innovation Center, we’re always looking to the future, including how the Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming virtually every industry. We see this firsthand as our Center provides a “home” for Cisco Canada to partner with customers, academia, and start-ups. Together, teams rely on our Toronto Center, and other Innovation Centers around the world, to co-develop scalable solutions with significant business outcomes they can take to a broader global market. Sometimes we get really excited about new technologies we find, especially when we have the ability to partner with great companies, doing disruptive things. This is exactly what we saw in Deltavation, maker of the first power-over-Ethernet (PoE) and color tunable tube lamps in the world.

We often come across some compelling or disruptive technologies that require us to examine how we can integrate new solutions into our existing offerings.  Customers are looking for new business outcomes and often these solutions do just that. When we came across Deltavation, we knew that this was going to be a fantastic opportunity. Deltavation offers a compelling replacement solution for the more than 60 billion fluorescent lamps operating in office buildings and industrial settings around the world today.

The solution we’re developing with Deltavation combines an advanced PoE LED lamp that uses patented technology from Deltavation along with Cisco’s Catalyst Digital Building Switch, IoT Intelligence Platform and Smart Lighting Platform. The solution aims to deliver a better experience to building occupants by providing a more advanced lighting device that embeds new capabilities for the occupant, but also drives cost savings for business and property owners.

With this Smart Lighting solution, the lamp is not just a source of light, but a full-fledged IoT device. Specifically, the lamps are fitted with a full complement of environmental sensors that automatically adapt the lighting to the needs of occupants in real time. This flexibility is possible because the lamps are controlled and monitored through Cisco networks and software.

The lamps offer Bluetooth connectivity and can be controlled through a mobile application as well as through the wired network. Moreover, the lamps can fit inside the fixtures used for existing fluorescent tubes (a patented Deltavation capability), simplifying their deployment.

Millions of existing buildings worldwide are currently fitted with fluorescent tubes. While cost effective, those tubes provide a lower quality light than competing technologies, and typically cannot modulate their intensity or light temperature. Tens of thousands of those buildings are renovated each year—creating a huge opportunity to replace traditional lighting systems. The Smart Lighting solution can also be used in the design of new buildings as a component of Cisco’s Connected Building offering.

Smart Lighting provides optimized light output using Cisco and Deltavation’s technologies, along with significant energy savings and lower greenhouse emissions made possible by LED and PoE. Finally, and perhaps most critically, it lowers both CapEx and OpEx for businesses that convert to this technology.

We are very excited to be involved in this project with Deltavation, and will continue working with them to bring this solution to market in the coming months.

Next time you’re in Toronto, come into the Innovation Center to get a demo and learn more about this and other exciting solutions we are working on.