Microsoft-Cisco Collaboration: Leveraging IoT Data to Drive Better Business Value

The pace of technological change is relentless across all markets. Edge computing continues to play an essential role in allowing data to be managed closer to its source, where workloads can range from basic services like data filtering and de-duplication to advanced capabilities like event-driven processing. Gartner estimates that by 2025 75 percent of Enterprise data will be generated at the Edge. As computing resources and IoT networking devices become more powerful, the ability to manage vast amounts of data near the edge will mean infrastructure and operations teams are required to manage more advanced data workloads, while keeping pace with business needs.

To enable this Microsoft has partnered with CISCO.

With both Azure IoT and Cisco IoT being known as leaders in the industrial IoT market, they have decided to team up to share the availability of an integrated Azure IoT solution, that provides the necessary software, hardware, and cloud services that businesses need to rapidly launch IoT initiatives and quickly realize business value.

Significance of Collaboration

Using software-based intelligence pre-loaded onto Cisco IoT network devices, telemetry data pipelines from industry-standard protocols like OPC-Unified Architecture (OPC-UA) and Modbus can be easily established using a friendly UI directly into Azure IoT Hub. Services like Microsoft Azure Stream Analytics, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, and Microsoft Azure Notification Hub services can be used to quickly build IoT applications for the enterprise.

Additional telemetry processing is also supported by Cisco through local scripts developed in Microsoft Visual Studio, where filtered data can also be uploaded directly into Azure IoT Hub. This collaboration provides customers with a fully integrated solution that will give access to powerful design tools, global connectivity, advance analytics, and cognitive services for analyzing IoT data.

These capabilities will help to illuminate business opportunities across many industries. Using Cisco Edge Intelligence software to connect to Azure IoT Hub and Device Provisioning Services enable simple device provisioning and management at scale, without the headache of a complex setup.

Customers across industries want to leverage IoT data to deliver new use-cases and solve business problems.

Leadership Quotes

"This partnership between Cisco and Azure IoT will significantly simplify customer deployments. Customers can now securely connect their assets, and simply ingest and send IoT data to the cloud. Our IoT Gateways will now be pre-integrated to take advantage of the latest in cloud technology from Azure. Cisco and Microsoft are happy to help our customers realize the value of their IoT projects faster than ever before. Our early field customer, voestalpine, is benefiting from this integration as they digitize their operations to improve production planning and operational efficiencies."—Vikas Butaney, Cisco IoT VP of Product Management

"At voestalpine, we are going through a digital journey to rethink and innovate manufacturing processes to bring increased operational efficiency. We face challenges to consistently and securely extract data from these machines and deliver the right data to our analytics applications. We are validating Cisco's next-generation edge data software, Cisco Edge Intelligence along with Azure IoT services for our cloud software development. Cisco's out-of-the-box edge solution with Azure IoT services helps us accelerate our digital journey."—Stefan Pöchtrager, Enterprise Architect, voestalpine AG

Bottom Line

By enabling Azure IoT with Cisco IoT network devices infrastructure, IT, and operations teams can quickly take advantage of a wide variety of hardware and easily scalable telemetry collection from connected assets, to kickstart their Azure IoT application development. Microsoft's customers can now augment their existing Cisco networks with Azure IoT ready gateways across multiple industries and use cases, without compromising the ability to implement data control and security that both Microsoft and Cisco are known for.