The new data highway your city really needs

data by itself doesn’t make a city smart. What makes a city smart is its ability to act on it immediately. The Internet of Things helps make data in the field a real-time tool, but you still need a strong backbone to carry and process it. That’s why it’s worth taking note of the work of Cisco and SAS, two of our Council Lead Partners.

Not all of the data your sensors collect needs to be sent to a central processing facility. Doing so can unnecessarily eat up your bandwidth and slow your response time. Among other things, the new Cisco SAS Edge-to-Enterprise IoT Analytics Platform can analyze data at the point where it’s collected, making your IoT platform much more responsive and flexible. Read more about the capabilities below. — Kevin Ebi

Whether it’s keeping oil rig workers safe, cardiac patients healthy, or shoppers with smartphones engaged, the Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming essential. The IoT promise is tremendous. But wrangling all the hardware and software required to realize that promise can resemble a daunting science fair project. Cisco and SAS, market leaders in networking and analytics, are lowering this risk by releasing the Cisco SAS Edge-to-Enterprise IoT Analytics Platform.

This is the industry’s first edge-to-enterprise platform for IoT analytics backed by a Cisco Validated Design. Flexible and scalable, the platform helps enterprises apply analytics at various layers of the network based on their volume, velocity and latency requirements. The validated design reduces barriers and risks. Most importantly, it allows organizations to focus on uncovering meaningful results instead of struggling to put together a homegrown IoT platform.

“The value of IoT lies in the data that it provides,” said Alan Webber, IDC Research Director. “But data by itself is not valuable until, using analytics and analysis, it can be turned into information, knowledge and action. That is what makes this partnership between SAS and Cisco so exciting. It brings two world-class companies together to offer truly edge-to-enterprise value in transforming edge data gathered through IoT into unmatched business value through analytics.