Cisco has announced that it has expanded its IoT portfolio. The update should enable improved management of IoT environments and provide new 5G use cases for partners.
New wireless technologies such as 5G and Wi-Fi 6 will lead to more devices and new industrial IoT use cases, according to Cisco. This will give service providers the tools to create a competitive IoT offering for their customers. Cisco expects connections between machines to increase by 19 percent, and to account for 50 percent of all connections by 2023.
Cisco is responding to these growing opportunities with a number of new features for IoT Control Center. For example, there is the use of machine learning. With a visibility of 3 billion events per day, Cisco IoT Control Center enables machine learning models to quickly identify anomalies and address problems before they hit a customer. Service providers can also identify customers and alert them to anomalous devices, enabling better security and control of endpoints.
Smart billing is also now available to optimise tariff plans. For example, the Smart Billing service can create policies to notify customers of changes in their usage or how tariff plans can be updated to help businesses save money.
Third, support for supply chains has been added. SIM portability is a requirement, according to Cisco, to support complex supply chains that extend across multiple service providers and locations. Cisco IoT Control Center now offers eSIM as-a-service, delivering ready-to-use SIM portability. This should ensure fast, reliable and cost-effective SIM transactions between service providers.
5G
Cisco IoT Control Center has received further updates towards 5G readyness to promote 5G use cases, which customers can easily adopt. According to Cisco this is necessary because with the introduction of 5G use cases with low requirements, but also with high requirements become possible. Industrial environments can take advantage of the possibilities of the IoT that 5G offers, resulting in flexible production, higher throughput and autonomous vehicles.