LAS VEGAS – While businesses continue to recognize the importance of Internet of Things (IoT) and connectivity, 60 per cent of IoT initiatives stall at the proof of concept stage.
To help businesses better overcome these obstacles, Cisco Jasper has announced a new expanded model of its IoT connectivity platform, Control Center.
The new Control Center 7.0 is a multi-tier IoT management platform that provides businesses with greater flexibility by giving them options to meet specific needs, regardless of where they are in IoT implementation, including advanced security, automation, and analytics.
It also comes with two new customizable Premium Services that address previously unmet needs in the industry: Threat Protection and Smart Security, which is built on Cisco Umbrella and provides IoT-specific malware and cyber security protection; and Traffic Segmentation, a solution that supports different types of revenue generation models.
Additionally, Control Center 7.0’s capabilities are now extended to low power devices through its new support for multiple LPWAN technologies, including NB-IoT and LTE-M.
First introduced to the market over 10 years ago, Control Center is “the largest IoT platform with over 43 million devices being managed today, and more than one and a half million new devices being added per month,” Jahangir Mohammed, general manager of IoT at Cisco, says in a company press release. “What we’ve learned from enabling IoT success for our 11,000 customers is that companies have different needs at different stages of their IoT journey. So today we’re introducing the biggest evolution of our Control Center IoT platform ever, providing a flexible model and new Premium Services that help meet the needs of customers at any phase.”
Control Center provides an “easy path for growth” for businesses looking to expand their IoT capabilities, and is the first version to integrate multiple Cisco technologies. It comes with multi-layered security controls, such as two-factor authentication, whitelisting abilities, and the capacity to create closed user groups, and boasts easy integration with Cisco Spark, the company’s team collaboration platform, in an effort to minimize problem resolution time and reduce costs.
Control Center 7.0 also comes with enhanced analytics capabilities so customers can view reports on historical trends of device behaviour and take action on issues that could significantly impact performance, cost, and security.
Cisco acquired cloud-based IoT service platform Jasper in March 2016, and in a year, has seen its customer base grow from 3,500 to 11,000 enterprises
“When we acquired Jasper, we made a promise to the industry that Cisco and Jasper would be more than the sum of our separate parts – that we would create something better together,” says Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager of IoT and Applications at Cisco. “This is the realization of that promise. And what we’ve built in the past year has surpassed even our lofty expectations.”
Cisco adds that Control Center 7.0 “addresses the needs of both information technology and operation technology professionals.”
Available today, the platform is also compatible with Cisco’s broader IoT Operations Platform, which bundles its Connection Management, Data Delivery, and Fog Computing into one complete end-to-end solution.
Cisco Kinetic
Cisco has also unveiled Cisco Kinetic, its IoT operations platform that streamlines the process of bringing IoT initiatives to market. Developed with the company’s IoT Operations Platform in mind, Kinetics will help businesses accelerate the path from proof of concept to implementation, and give partners a foundation to build additional services upon.
