The California-based company has revealed eight different software solutions targeting various industries in its Connected Analytics platform, designed to analyse data from across all areas of the network.
Of particular interest to the telecoms industry will be its Connected Analytics for network deployment, which is designed to help telecoms operators plan network deployments and optimisation based on operational data, as well as enable them to deliver more customer-tailored services, based on subscriber usage patterns. In addition, it will also help service providers improve Wifi networks by proactively planning for capacity based on customer usage, improving business operations and uncovering potential new revenue opportunities, such as how to tailor pricing plans based on customer usage.
Cisco’s differentiator is said to lie in the company’s ability to offer software that runs not only on servers in corporate or commercial data centres but on its own networking equipment. Ian Foddering, Cisco’s CTO, told Capacitythat the company is able to “use its infrastructure reach from the data centre to the edge of the network”, near the devices and sensors that are generating data, giving clients faster access to the information they need.
“By taking analytics to the data and running analytics at the edge of the intelligent network, we help clients make sense of the millions of data points they can sense every moment,” Foddering said.
The vendor believes the global Internet of Everything (IoE) market – the phrase it has coined to describe the next evolution of the Internet of things (IoT) – will be worth $19 trillion by 2020, in terms of profits and cost saving. Its CEO John Chambers predicts that $7.3 trillion of that $19 trillion will be generated through data from sensors and devices.
Cisco also used 2014 to enhance its cloud offering to the telecoms community.
Last September, Cisco announced that it was working with 30 mobile operators and data centre players – including BT, Deutsche Telekom, Equinix and NTT Data – to allow enterprises to run their internal applications on its Intercloud cloud computing platform.
The company has again sunk major investment into the initiative, committing $1 billion towards cloud financing in the next two years.