He also pointed to acquisitions major tech firms have made recently for smaller IoT-focused companies, including Samsung's $200 million deal for SmartThings, Amazon's $1 billion Twitch deal and Cisco's own $3.2 billion purchase of Nest Labs. Overall, companies have spent $5.3 billion in 18 IoT-related deals this year, and about 190 IoT-related startups have formed this year, with venture capital investments coming in around $3 billion since 2012.
Cisco's Chambers has said the economic opportunity to businesses worldwide will be $19 trillion by 2020.
It is numbers like these that are convincing Cisco and other tech companies about the growth opportunities in the IoT, and why the networking vendor is innovating so quickly.
In the latest phase of its IOx platform, Cisco is adding support to 16 other product lines, including 819, 88x and 89x series routers. In addition, company officials unveiled the IOx Application Management Module, enabling customers to centrally manage fog computing applications running on Cisco's IOx platform, which will help businesses make managing and monitoring millions of endpoints and applications easier and less expensive.
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Cisco officials also talked about the vendor's IoE Software and Services Suite, a combination of software and services aimed at helping business derive usable information from all the data being collected. They pointed to the company's announcement in September of Cisco's Video Surveillance Manager 7.6 that makes it easier for customers to manage edge-based video applications running on distributed endpoints.
The IoT has a number of particular requirements that need to be met, according to Kip Compton, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Internet of Things Systems and Software Group.
"How do we make sure that the right critical information is being processed while conserving bandwidth and having a resilient network?" Compton said in a post on the Cisco blog. "Here at Cisco, 'fog computing' is a clear technology vision, with the means to provide greater visibility and control [and] having the network and applications process the critical data in concert with the cloud."
