Cisco Innovates Cellular IoT Connectivity Management with 5G Readiness and Machine Learning

SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 20, 2020 /CNW/ --

News Summary:

• Cisco IoT Control Center introduces new machine learning capabilities for improved cellular IoT connection management, control, and increased security
• Service provider partners increase customer satisfaction with optimized billing
• Cisco works with service provider partners and customers to develop 5G use cases

Today, Cisco announced advancements to its IoT portfolio that enable service provider partners to offer optimized management of cellular IoT environments and new 5G use-cases. New wireless technologies – such as 5G, Wi-Fi 6 – will lead to more devices and new advanced Industrial IoT (IIoT) use cases and will give service providers the tools to create competitive cellular IoT offerings for their customers. Machine-to-machine connections are expected to rise 19% and account for 50% of all connections by 2023, according to Cisco's 2020 Annual Internet Report.

"Cellular IoT deployments are accelerating across connected cars, utilities and transportation industries and with 5G and Wi-Fi 6 on the horizon IoT adoption will grow even faster. Cisco is investing in connectivity management, IoT networking, IoT security, and edge computing to accelerate the adoption of IoT use-cases," said Vikas Butaney, vice president product management IoT, Cisco. "With today's advancements, Cisco is further enabling our service provider partners with machine learning to simplify and accelerate cellular IoT services while creating new bundled services to grow their revenues."

Advancing Cellular IoT
Cisco IoT Control Center (formerly Jasper Control Center), the market leader in connectivity management platforms, is introducing new innovations to improve management and reduce deployment complexity. These include:

• Using Machine Learning (ML) to improve management: With visibility into 3 billion events every day, Cisco IoT Control Center uses the industry's broadest visibility to enable machine learning models to quickly identify anomalies and address issues before they impact a customer. Service providers can also identify and alert customers of errant devices, allowing for greater endpoint security and control.
• Smart billing to optimize rate plans: Service providers can improve customer satisfaction by enabling Smart billing to automatically optimize rate plans.  Policies can also be created to proactively send customer notifications should usage changes or rate plans need to be updated to help save enterprises money.  
• Support for global supply chains: SIM portability is an enterprise requirement to support complex supply chains spanning multiple service providers and geographies. It is time-consuming and requires integrations between many different service providers and vendors, driving up costs for both. Cisco IoT Control Center now provides eSIM as a service, enabling a true turnkey SIM portability solution to deliver fast, reliable, cost-effective SIM handoffs between service providers.

Cisco IoT Control Center provides the visibility and simplicity necessary to address today's IoT challenges. Cisco service provider partners and customers are already taking advantage of the new machine-learning capabilities.

The Journey Towards 5G
With the introduction of 5G, use cases from low-power to the most demanding requirements will become possible.  Industrial environments can benefit from the advanced IoT capabilities presented by 5G, with use cases such as flexible manufacturing, higher throughput, and autonomous vehicles. Cisco IoT Control Center has taken steps towards 5G readiness to incubate and promote high value 5G business use cases that customers can easily adopt.

• KPN:
  "We recognize that the diversity and complexity of 5G use cases can overwhelm organizations already competing in rapidly evolving and increasingly digitized industries. That is why KPN and Cisco support customers like ExRobotics to launch on 4G today and at the same time prepare for 5G tomorrow. With our 5G Field labs we help incubate clear use cases that demonstrate how to unleash the potential of 5G and create meaningful business outcomes. KPN and Cisco are committed to providing strategic thought leadership to help customers leverage cellular IoT and drive their digital transformation forward."
• ExRobotics: 
  "Robots often do jobs that are too dangerous for humans. 5G and its promise of low latency will allow robots to react faster and better to the operator's commands. They will be capable of dealing with complex unscripted problems and making decisions in real time in the field. We are committed in this partnership with KPN to helping our customers turn the technical advancement of 5G into real value in the area of human safety, reliability and cost savings."
• Astus:
  "Our business is fleet management, which means we need to know where our assets are at all times. The human capital required to manufacture that level of visibility is demanding.  But by building the power of machine learning into our connectivity management, Control Center is effectively giving us automatic visibility and the freed resources to be proactive.  Instead of crunching data, our staff is free to do the high value work of chasing down security threats or malfunctions that we've been alerted to and resolving them before they do damage."
• Spark New Zealand:
  "The Machine Learning capability in Control Centre helps us to provide our customers with solutions that save them time and resources. Using machine learning, our customers can be sent proactive alerts when anomalies are detected in their IoT network. This allows our customers to resolve issues quickly before it causes any detrimental effects to their business processes, supply chain or end customers. Surfacing these insights within Control Centre via enhanced views and simple dashboards makes it easy and provides immediate value for our customers who might not have a data scientist or time to undertake detailed data analysis."

Additional Resources:

• For more information about Cisco IoT click here
• IoT Blog click here
• 2020 Cisco Annual Internet Report here.

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