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IBM, Cisco aim to collaborate on Internet of things deployments

The two tech giants both see IoT as a growth market. Now they are aiming to couple Watson IoT with Cisco's network edge infrastructure.
Written by Larry Dignan, Contributor

Cisco and IBM said the companies will collaborate on analytics for Internet of things deployment with the aim of melding Watson with the networking giant's knowledge of edge devices and end points.

Both companies are seeing the Internet of things (IoT) as one of the big growth markets in the years ahead. Cisco has argued that IoT resembles the networking market decades ago. IBM sees Watson IoT analytics as well as services revenue.

Under the collaboration pact, IBM and Cisco said they will forge an approach that provides insight as data is collected. Initial industries targeted will be from the oil & gas, manufacturing, shipping and mining companies. These enterprises have a bevy of end points, but limited bandwidth.

Here's the high level pitch.

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While technical details were sparse, the general theme from the announcement from Cisco and IBM was that IBM's streaming analytics tools would be embedded with Cisco's networking gear.

The companies cited Bell Canada, which is using IoT technologies from Cisco and IBM to maintain network health, Port of Cartagena and SilverHook Powerboats as early customers.

Separately, IBM said it has launched Watson Ads, an effort to "humanize" the ad experience with The Weather Company. IBM also rolled out software defined infrastructure tools to better enable analytics.

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