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You may or may not remember a year-and-a-half ago when Cisco Systems shelled out $1.4 billion for relatively unknown Jasper Technologies, a small private company that built an IoT platform that makes it easier for enterprises to connect their products through the cloud.
That was a serious investment, even in these days of multi-billion-dollar serious investments. Now that deal is blossoming into actual products.
At the Cisco Live conference in Las Vegas June 27, the host company introduced a new, expanded version of the Jasper platform, simply called Control Center, to what it sees as a wider potential-buyer audience. Telling 20,000 conference attendees at one time isn’t a bad start; Cisco said that it has been partnering with service providers to expand its customer base, which has grown from 3,500 to 11,000 enterprises in the past year alone.
It’s All About Updating Management, Security
Control Center 7.0 addresses business’ needs for improved management flexibility with a new multi-tiered IoT platform that gives enterprises various options to meet their specific needs–regardless of their stage of IoT implementation. This new platform is also paired with a new set of premium services that address previously unmet needs in the industry related to IoT monetization and security.
While the number of businesses investing in IoT across all markets continues to grow, recent research shows that 60 percent of IoT initiatives stall at the proof-of-concept stage. This indicates that enterprises are still struggling with the key challenges of IoT, including the need for more flexibility, greater security, and the ability to address new use cases.
Key business features in Control Center 7.0 include:
- Advanced capabilities: A new tier of the platform–Control Center Advanced–caters to customers with more sophisticated deployments that need greater capabilities, including advanced security solutions, automation and analytics.
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Premium services: The introduction of Cisco’s first two premium services, compatible with Control Center, enables customers to solve for previously unmet IoT business needs. The Threat Protection & Smart Security (TPSS) service provides an IoT-specific fix to protect against malware and phishing attacks, and is built on Cisco Umbrella. The second service, Traffic Segmentation, supports different types of revenue generation models. Cisco Jasper service providers can customize premium services to meet their customers’ specific needs.
- LPWAN Support: Control Center 7.0 extends the platform’s capabilities, including the platform’s global reach and scale via support for cellular networks, to low power devices via support for multiple LPWAN technologies, including NB-IoT and LTE-M.
AT&T, already a Cisco Jasper service provider, is integrating these additional capabilities to meet IoT needs for a wide range of industries. The platform will be called AT&T Control Center-Advanced.
Control Center 7.0 is the first version of the IoT platform to integrate multiple Cisco technologies. As a result, Control Center 7.0 solves the biggest challenges companies currently face in IoT with:
- Multi-layer security: Expanding upon Control Center’s existing security capabilities, users now get multi-layered security controls, including closed user groups, two-factor authentication, white-listing capabilities and others to identify and solve known issues.
- Collaboration: Integration with Cisco Spark gives users the ability to collaborate on issues with connected devices, enabling them to lower resolution time and manage costs.
- Enhanced analytics: New reports on historical trends of device behavior and usage enable users to take action on issues that impact performance, costs and security.
- Support for Low Power Devices: Control Center 7.0 is the first commercially available IoT platform that supports the management of IoT devices across cellular, NB-IoT and LTE-M networks to accommodate a high number of use cases.
Control Center 7.0 is now compatible with Cisco’s broader IoT Operations Platform, which integrates Connection Management, Data Delivery and Fog Computing for a complete end-to-end solution.
Cisco Jasper Control Center 7.0 is available now. Go here for more information.