Cisco at the recent MWC 2018, rolled out a new networking and device management platform for Internet of Things (IoT) practitioners. The new platform is known as Cisco Jasper Control Center for NB-IoT. It enables the creation of extremely large-scale deployments without breaking the bank.
The platform optimises device communications over low-power wide area networks. IoT at scale can be expensive in terms of delivering basic device inter-connectivity and management costs. Therefore IT buyers seeking to build an IoT solution at scale, need to tick a number of boxes when researching an IoT platform partner shares GlobalData a leading data and analytics company.
Brad Shimmin, Service Director, Global IT Technology and Software, at GlobalData commented, ‘‘This is especially true for companies seeking to optimise operations and explore data-driven business opportunities across an existing, sizable base of customer products like toasters, refrigerators, or mobile phones. However, bandwidth is not cheap, nor is the back end processing power required to support a huge number of devices”.
IT buyers need to carefully consider the language spoken across an IoT network, selecting a platform partner capable of tackling the task at hand in the most efficient manner. Cisco Jasper Control Center software has already garnered the interest of some sizable telecom operators with more than 15,000 end customers. One operator in particular, China Unicom, intends to use Cisco’s new platform to eventually scale to support over 100 million new IoT devices over the next 24 months.
Shimmin continued, ‘‘That sort of scale will be crucial for market opportunities like smart cities and agriculture, where transformational business insights depend upon a real-time, holistic view of all instrumented devices. Solutions like Jasper Control Center for NB-IoT serve as a reminder that the best solution to the performance / cost equation lies in controlling both network bandwidth usage as well as device power requirements. IoT practitioners need to consider not only the medium (the network) but also the protocol, which is the language spoken between devices and back end services.’’
