Cisco has big plans for the Internet of Things (IoT) – except it doesn’t call it that. It prefers the moniker of Internet of Everything (IoE), but why does it make such a distinction and is it more than a mere marketing term?
At the Cisco Live event in Milan earlier this week, the company sought to establish the difference between the two terms. It says the IoT just connects objects, but this IoE uses a network to correlate people, process, data and things to become “intelligent”.
“In the IoE era, we are surrounded by things becoming intelligent,” said David Bevilacqua, vice president of southern Europe at Cisco. “I’m not sure if smart is intelligent. My TV is smart but it does nothing except be connected. I do not believe just being connected means intelligent.
“Intelligence is the network and the network is the platform when you can correlate the events.”
Cisco uses examples of smart lighting and parking systems saving the city of Barcelona millions of dollars and the firm is partnering with the Expo 2015 in Milan to create a smart city at the venue site.
Bradley said the key difference between the IoT and IoE is that the former is just an idea whereas the latter has a positive financial impact on the business.
“A great idea is a great idea, but it needs to generate value for the enterprise and the citizen,” he explained. “The technology has been there for a while, but the innovation is the business model.
“We think IoT is very important – connecting a ‘dark asset’ – as it starts the initiation of the discussion, but in order for an enterprise to extract value, you actually have to think about how you’re going to make that data usable and how you’re going to change decision making.”
“Big data is great, but it is worth nothing without big judgement. Presenting information at the end of the day is great, but if I do the exact same thing I did before I was presented with it – it’s nothing. The process, people and how you communicate that is so, so important and that’s why we emphasise it so much.”
Carlos Dominguez, senior vice president at Cisco, urged those attending to the conference to become “gurus” for the IoE and said technology was now assuming greater importance at boardroom level having previously been seen as a necessary evil.
“In the last 25 years, we’ve had the birth of the Internet, social media and mobile. None of these things existed then and we’re so dependent on them,” he said. “Before these technologies, we lived in a very local world. Today in a global world, when anything happens anywhere at all, we’re immediately notified.
“What we’re beginning to see is that technology and connectivity are the enablers.”
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IoE is in fact a phnomenon which has been predictable for quite a while.
The issue is seldom viewed from the wider evolutionary perspective now provides by the "big picture" provided by the sciences as a whole. Seemingly unrelated disciplines such as geology, biology and "big history" actually have much to tell us about the machinery of nature (of which technology is necessarily a part) and the outcome that is to be expected from the evolution of the Internet.
This much broader approach, freed from the anthropocentric notions usually portrayed by the cult of the "Singularity" provides a more objective vision that is consistent with the pattern of autonomous evolution of technology that is so evident today.
Very real evidence indicates the rather imminent implementation of the next, (non-biological) phase of the on-going evolutionary “life” process from what we at present call the Internet.It is effectively evolving by a process of self-assembly.
The "Internet of Things" is proceeding apace and pervading all aspects of our lives. We are increasingly, in a sense, “enslaved” by our PCs, mobile phones, their apps and many other trappings of the increasingly cloudy net.
We are already largely dependent upon it for our commerce and industry and there is no turning back. What we perceive as a tool is well on its way to becoming an agent.
Consider this:
There are at present an estimated 2 Billion Internet users. There are an estimated 13 Billion neurons in the human brain. On this basis for approximation the Internet is even now only one order of magnitude below the human brain and its growth is exponential.
That is a simplification, of course. For example: Not all users have their own computer. So perhaps we could reduce that, say, tenfold. The number of switching units, transistors, if you wish, contained by all the computers connecting to the Internet and which are more analogous to individual neurons is many orders of magnitude greater than 2 Billion. Then again, this is compensated for to some extent by the fact that neurons do not appear to be binary switching devices but can adopt multiple states.
Without even crunching the numbers, we see that we must take seriously the possibility that even the present Internet may well be comparable to a human brain in processing power.
And, of course, the degree of interconnection and cross-linking of networks within networks is also growing rapidly.The culmination of this exponential growth corresponds to the event that transhumanists inappropriately call “The Singularity” but is more properly regarded as a phase transition of the on-going “life” process.
The emergence of a new and predominant cognitive entity that is a logical consequence of the evolutionary continuum that can be traced back at least as far as the formation of the chemical elements in stars.
This is the main theme of my latest book "The Intricacy Generator: Pushing Chemistry and Geometry Uphill" which is now available from Amazon, etc. It is wide-ranging and calls upon many disciplines as befits a study of this kind.