Cisco completed its acquisition of Jasper in 2016 and never looked back. It was a move that manifested out of Cisco’s strategy to start expanding further into IoT. Just today Cisco announced that it had rebranded the Cisco Jasper Control Center into the “Cisco IoT Control Center.” While describing the Cisco IoT Control Center, James Brehm recently said that it would be “the leading connectivity management platform, helping service providers on multiple fronts.”
Managing IoT cellular connections at scale is the challenge Cisco plans to address with the Cisco IoT Control Center. Cisco expects—as we all do—that both 5G and IoT are poised on the edge of experiencing exponential growth in the years to come. This kind of explosive growth will compound the already pressing urgency to figure out how to effectively manage cellular IoT connectivity at scale.
5G and IoT growth aside, SIM portability is another factor that makes the challenge of managing cellular IoT connectivity at scale even more difficult. Transferring SIM management to other carriers is often expensive and difficult because it involves managing a large number of expensive integrations. Additionally, merely preparing and upgrading networks for 5G will not enough for companies to succeed in this space. Bringing high-value use cases to market at scale will also be necessary.
The Cisco Jasper Control Center had a history of acting as a market leader in connectivity management platforms, and Cisco plans to build on this history by introducing machine learning, smart billing, and eSIM (as a service). Machine learning will allow companies to quickly identify anomalies and address issues before they impact operations. Smart billing will boost customer satisfaction by auto-optimizing rates and auto-alerting customers of usage changes and rate plan updates. And, lastly, eSIM is a turnkey SIM portability solution that will smooth over SIM handoffs between service providers, making the process quicker, more efficient, and smoother.
To encourage successful introduction of high-value use cases to the market, Cisco is currently investing in connectivity management, IoT networking, IoT security, and edge computing to accelerate IoT use case adoption. Cisco is already currently working with several different companies to make their use cases successful—KPN, Spark New Zealand, and Astus, to name a few. With KPN, Cisco is working to bring to market Ex-Robotics, autonomously guided robots that perform jobs in oil and gas which are too dangerous for humans to do. Cisco’s work with Spark New Zealand is helping the company implement proactive alerts that warn the company of IoT network anomalies before they become real issues that could disrupt business processes. And with Astus, the adaptive telemetry and fleet management company, Cisco is helping to create automatic visibility of assets which, in turn, will boost company efficiency by allowing Astus personnel to focus on other tasks which cannot be automated.