Cisco rides high on IoT

Networking solutions provider sets up incubation centre for connected devices

It's almost a month ago, a handful of techies working with networking solutions provider Cisco, came to the company with a proposal. The proposal was to get some support for setting up an infrastructure to work on cultivating their hobbies in area of Internet of Things (IoT), a technology which enables exchange of communications, data between objects or devices without requiring any human intervention.

The Cisco globalisation centre in Bengaluru is now fully functional with a team of 30 engineers of varied experience. Techies throng this space, after finishing their day's job, and indulge in R&D on how they can solve some of the most common issues either in business or in daily life using IoT technologies.

Take the case of Anandghan Waghmare, a techie who joined Cisco in 2013 as a software engineer. Waghmare, an alumnus of IIT-Patna has now developed smart 'sticky switches' using sticky notes affixing those with RFID tags and making it NFC enabled with phones. The sticky notes when configured with the home appliances such as refrigerators, air-conditioner or television can control those devices as switches and can be used by pasting them any place of one's choice.

There are engineers who are working on to develop smart shopping cart, which fitted with sensors, cameras which can read bar codes that can be used by the shoppers to self-bill and pay using their smart phones. A team of techies are developing an automated system, which can help in watering plants either in home garden or in farm environment based on the soil condition, humidity and temperature among others, without human intervention.

Cisco's focus on incubating ideas or technologies around smart connected devices is seen as a response towards the larger shift that is happening in the technology landscape around the world. The company is leveraging its strength in networking space to develop a larger ecosystem so as to prepare itself to participate in some of the opportunities like smart cities that the government of India is seen pushing.

"When we talk about smart cities, they have to be smart at something. What we are saying is that there is a huge industry that is evolving, called the globalising urban services. This is going to be enabled because of IoT. This would cover things like managing traffic, pollution, water, monitoring crime and disaster recovery. For doing all these, one doesn't need to be located in the same city, but it can be monitored remotely using sensors, open data and analytics," said Anil Menon, deputy chief globalisation officer, Cisco.

"Increasingly you will find that multiple cities can be managed by one integrated operation centre and there the size of the market is at least $3 trillion globally. I believe that is going the next big opportunities for India," added Menon who is also the president for Smart+Connected Communities for Cisco.

Last year, Cisco had announced allocating an additional $40 million to fund early-stage firms in India under the 'India innovation Theme'. Part of its $250-million global allocation, the fund focuses on investing in next generation technologies, including big data and analytics, IoT, connected mobility, storage, silicon, and content technology ecosystem.