Cisco Offers New Pre-Packaged Analytics Software for the IoE

In a move aimed at customers mining value from Internet of Everything (IoE)-generated data, Cisco (CSCO) is offering a set of pre-packaged software solutions, collectively dubbed Cisco Connected Analytics, to enable organizations to ascribe analytics to data no matter its location.

Cisco’s Connected Analytics for the Internet of Everything portfolio is designed to provide businesses with vertical industry-specific access to near real-time information, predictions and trends that could have an immediate impact on their business. The solutions build on Cisco’s IOx platform for customers and solution providers to develop, manage and run software applications directly on Cisco industrial hardened routers and switches.

The networking giant said the Connected Analytics portfolio is available now. Cisco’s channel partners will receive access to the portfolio through a special program, the vendor said.

Cisco reasons, as do others, that with the number of connected devices expected to increase five-fold to 50 billion by 2020, the volume of resulting data–much of it unstructured–is challenging to imagine let alone harness.

“Traditionally most organizations created data inside their own four walls and saved it in a centralized repository,” wrote Mala Anand, Cisco Services Platforms Group senior vice president, in a blog post. “This made it easy to analyze the data and extract valuable information to make better business decisions,” she said.

“But the arrival of the Internet of Everything, the hyper-connection of people, process, data, and things, is quickly changing all that,” she wrote, as organizations scuffle to find “useful business nuggets from this mountain of data.”

It’s not enough to conclude that analytics by itself is the answer, Anand said.

“Organizations need new strategies for analyzing these massive data sets,” she said. “Data and analytics will be the means by which value is extracted from the Internet of Everything. This explains why Cisco has entered the business of data and analytics in a big way with the introduction of Connected Analytics, pre-packaged analytics software ready for integration into existing Cisco infrastructures to enable powerful industry solutions.”

The Connected Analytics portfolio includes:

“There is a massive shift in the market where the remote device at the edge is quickly becoming an incredibly strategic tool to share and collect data, enable more informed decision making, and deliver the best customer experience possible,” said Edzard Overbeek, Cisco Services senior vice president.

“But, if customers don’t have the right analytics solutions in place to make sense of it, that data is useless,” he said.