In these times, announcement related to the Internet of Things are a dime a dozen. At first blush, one recently made by IBM and Cisco doesn't appear to be a huge standout, but it nonetheless points up how crucial analytics are to deriving business value from IoT. Here are the details of the new IBM-Cisco partnership, as reported by V3:
Cisco and IBM have unveiled a collaboration aimed at bringing better analytics to projects involving the Internet of Things (IoT) by enabling analysis capabilities at the edge of the network rather than at the data centre.
The partnership will combine IBM's Watson technology and Cisco's edge analytics capabilities to let customers act more swiftly on critical data gathered at the network edge, according to the two firms.
Organisations are trying to make better use of data as devices become more intelligent and get connected to corporate networks, and one of the problems is the process of actually gathering the data.
"Today, in a typical industrial deployment, only one per cent of IoT data is actually analysed. Legacy processes and drawbacks in current IoT platforms make it too expensive and slow to analyse the other 99 per cent of data," said Chris O'Connor, general manager for IoT at IBM, on the firm's blog.
Analysis: IoT Insights Into the Obvious
The source of IBM's 1% figure wasn't immediately clear, but even if the real total is several times that, the lost potential for IoT and analytics is startling.
While the partnership is fairly obvious given the companies respective capabilities, it nonetheless has some interesting and less obvious aspects that are worth commenting on, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Andy Mulholland.
"Cisco has spent a lot of time pushing the concept of ‘fog computing,' or using small edge-based network and computational models to lessen the need for, and impact of, moving large amounts of consolidated data into centralized cloud-based processing," Mulholland says. "Conversely IBM has favoured the use of large-scale cloud based resources to be able to provide a new generation of computational analysis by means of it’s Watson Cognitive Reasoning approach."
"Now it appears that the two opposite points of view about where and how IoT data should be handled have formed an attraction for each other," Mulholland adds. "In reality, it is probably just that: A pragmatic recognition of market demands that require players such as IBM and Cisco to work together to answer their customers broader requirements rather than support a single, particular approach."
"Current figures suggest that very very small amounts of the potentially available data are being harvested through the network to be made available for any form of analytics, yet it is analytics that delivers the business value," Mulholland says. "A Cisco and IBM partnership has the potential to do something about this."
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