IoT at Cisco Live 2017

DR. SETRAG KHOSHAFIAN
The IOT Magazine
Published in
6 min readJul 13, 2017

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Couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of attending Cisco Live in Las Vegas. It was very well organized, with inspiring keynotes, many engaging sessions, and a vibrant show floor of interesting exhibits.

Pega had a booth there and we were featuring the integration of Pega Customer Service and Field Service with Cisco’s Spark and Tropo technologies. This seamless integration is a tremendous value proposition for enterprises embarked upon digital transformation initiatives through digital collaboration via multiple channels.

Customer Service and Marketing are evolving from omni-channel to omni-device. The illustration above shows an end-to-end digitized value stream that is initiated by a connected device (aka IoT) — detecting for instance a problem at the edge, in the Fog or even triaged subsequently in the cloud. The value stream can involve service triage — for instance updating the on-board software of the connected device or provisioning a part that has caused similar issues. When the closest (geolocation) and most capable field service technician is dispatched, she/he can also involve at any point collaboration and communication with Cisco Spark or Tropo: for instance to collaborate with customer service representatives or engineering experts at the enterprise to resolve the issue. It illustrates the orchestration of connected devices as well as human participants with decisioning for triage, automated supply chain and collaboration in Field Service.

Cisco Kinetic: I was quite impressed by the business value focus on IoT at Cisco Live. There were two major announcements and a plethora of solutions by both Cisco and their partners ecosystem. The most important announcement was the launch of Cisco Kinetic (aka Cisco IoT Operations Platform). Cisco is very much business focused when it comes to IoT. They highlighted a number of examples with demonstrable business value.

The value stream of successful IoT projects — according to Cisco — culminates at “Analyze and Act.” The “Act” is exactly where the business value can be achieved — through Digitized Value Streams and Process of Everything.

Though IoT/IIoT is relatively immature, it is gaining traction and several concrete business value results were highlighted. Here are some of the areas with demonstrable business value for digital business transformation:

They had some impressive demos, especially the one they illustrated with the Tennessee Department of Transportation, with road-side sensors, large gates and signs connected as IoT devices — all monitored and controlled via Cisco switches and the Ciso Kinetic web interfaces and portals. The monitoring of the connected devices provides complete visibility of the various thresholds and potential troubleshooting in the context of the connected device exceptions.

The following illustrates the Cisco Kinetic IoT Operations platform in a technology stack. IoT generates enormous amounts of information or data (Big Data is really becoming Thing Data). In addition to device and gateway management features, the Cisco Kinetic solutions can aggregate, transform, and filter the Thing Data to optimize what gets propagated upstream for further analytics or application implementations. That is essentially the focus of Cisco’s IoT Operations Platform — to convert the potential of the Thing Data into a “kinetic” energy for applications focusing on business value. Cisco Kinetic runs on various switching technologies, including the Cisco Catalyst 9000 switches.

Cisco Jasper Command Center 7: Cisco had completed the acquisition of Jasper in March of 2016. Jasper is leveraged with cellular networks, cellular connected devices (e.g. connected cars) and devices with SIM cards. Jasper is complimentary to Cisco Kinetic. Command Center 7 was a major upgrade of Jasper. Launched at Cisco Live 2017 the major upgrade featured advanced capabilities especially in security, automation, and analytics. Besides support for cellular networks, Command Center 7 supports low power devices through, for instance, NB-IoT and LTE-M networking.

Here also, Cisco highlighted the core business value propositions and the advantages of Jasper for security, cost reduction, scale, and reliability among others.

Automotive and Connected Cars are one of the major application areas for Jasper. Many of the networking carrier partners (like AT&T) and automotive brands that leverage Jasper also leverage Pega to optimize the customer experience. Here again the underlying IoT technologies (Switches, Jasper, and Networking) are the foundation. Furthermore the connectivity of the vehicles in conjunction with the connectivity of the customer is providing tremendous opportunities for optimizing the customer as well as the connected vehicle experience.

This was brought home at the recent PegaWORLD 2017. General Motor’s David Mingle — who spearheads GM’s Global Customer Experience Execution — indicated how vehicle and customer connectivity has changed everything. When a customer in a connected car presses the OnStar button, Pega AI is used in the intelligent routing of the call to the appropriate adviser as well as the intelligent preparation of that adviser with a next-best-action based on what we know about that customer and what we know about their connected car. Pega is helping GM make decisions for the customer 1 million times an hour! This is real AI (which, like IoT is also suffering from a lot of hype). Once again, enabling technologies for IoT — in this case Jasper and AT&T with increasing support of 4G and LTE networking — together with Pega’s digital transformation platform provides the ultimate customer experience optimization with concrete business value.

Cisco IoT Partners: There were many other presentations case studies and demos focusing on IoT value propositions — both from Cisco and Cisco partners. In fact there was a separate exhibit area dedicated to Cisco IoT Partners. One of those partners was Capgemini. The overall theme of Capgemini’s value proposition was the Smart Factory. They demonstrated an elegant POC solution leveraging Pega for business outcomes — especially through automated processes and next-best-action decisioning.

Connectivity as well as AI decisioning and business processes for the end-to-end digitization of value streams are essential enablers for achieving concrete business value. The components of a digital transformation solution include the devices, the machines, the network and the Fog computing — which are the realms of the robust Cisco IoT platforms. The solution architecture that was demonstrated combined IoT layers with Pega decisioning (Pega AI) and process automation for optimized business outcomes.

In conclusion, Cisco’s vision and commitment to IoT is contagious. Yes, there are challenges especially in achieving concrete ROI as well as technology challenges such as security, edge analytics and networking that are being addressed. However, with the scope and types of partnerships as well as concrete case studies that I saw at Cisco Live 2017, the promise of intelligent and automated end-to-end value streams orchestrating people and Things for optimizing the customer experience is becoming a reality!

The blog was originally posted on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/iot-cisco-live-2017-setrag-khoshafian

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Principal and Chief Scientist at Khosh Consulting — passionate about innovation & entrepreneurship with IoT, Blockchain, AI, and Automation