Building an ecosystem of innovation: Cisco’s UK CEO talks IoE, cloud & security at Interop

The IoE will foster a new wave of partnerships across the world, with collaboration between companies essential to the success of an IoE connected ecosystem, according to Phil Smith, Cisco’s CEO for the UK and Ireland.

Smith said: "It is incredible important that we work throughout the industry. The world of partnerships is probably going to multiply itself over and over in the next years.

"Cisco will have to partner with smaller companies to build an ecosystem of innovation. We are supporting smaller companies because we understand what takes to build this ecosystem."

The CEO added that "the need for standards is going to be huge over the next years" mentioning Hypercat as an effort to create standards for the internet in the UK.

Smith added that security needs more focus from all peripherals in the industry. "We believe there is really a necessity to approach security.

"We have to build security right into the heart of everything we do."

Challenges lie with lack of skilled generation

To build the IoE ecosystem of tomorrow, there will be challenges the sector needs to address. Smith put at the heart of the problem the lack of people with the necessary skills to do the job. The IoT workforce needs curiosity, creativity, innovation and collaboration assets for the industry to evolve.

The CEO added that business models are another challenge to the ecosystem, together with costs, scalability, integrity and authentication.

Cisco is also aware that data security, regulation and legislation, privacy and trust within these services needs to be addressed.

He said: "We need skills. Skills that are tiny today will become massive skills tomorrow. We need people from all backgrounds.

"We need to work on the generation gap to make sure future generations don’t have to do it."

Together for the cloud

The surge in big data will force the industry to question "how are we going to scale the internet".

Smith said: "It’s going to build different networks from today. We are going to be looking at new concepts like cloud to handle real time operation."

And it is this "cloud" that will make the whole difference. Data is going to be stored in data centres, which will house the cloud.

The CEO called the connection between the cloud and devices FOG to address the transmission of data between the data centre/cloud to the device itself.