The CSIRO looks set to join the Cisco IoE Innovation Centre in Australia, announced in March at Cisco’s partnership event, CiscoLive, and to be located at facilities in Sydney and Perth.
The Premier of Western Australia, Colin Barnett, officially opened Cisco’s IoE Innovation Center hub in Perth, located on the Bentley Campus of Curtin University. Announcing the event Cisco said: “CSIRO’s David Williams, executive director for National Facilities & Collections (which includes responsibility for the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, Pawsey Supercomputing Centre and the delivery of national IT infrastructure and services for research), has also signalled their intent to join Cisco and the centre foundation partners, with details to be completed over the next month.”
Cisco CTO, Kevin Bloch, told IoTAustralia that CSIRO’s expected involved had resulted in the company reviewing its plans for the Sydney Innovation Centre hub.
“We are hoping to get Sydney up this year, but Perth has been a huge effort for us. Subsequent to that a few people put up their hands and said ‘Why are you putting your centre there, why don’t you put it here?’ So because we had a few more options we decided to not be so aggressive.
“CSIRO want to be involved and CSIRO has so much talent, so much relevant technology to IoT. So when they said they wanted to get on board, it made us pause.”
General manager appointed
He said that Cisco had now appointed a general manager for the Innovation Centre. “We have had a team of the best part of 20 people involved from Cisco and we have just hired Mark Blum as the GM of our innovation centres in Australia and we are now moving forward with the staffing.”
Cisco said the Perth centre would include “state-of-the-art laboratory, a technological collaboration area and a dedicated space to show IoE in action,” and would bring together start-up companies, industry experts, developers, researchers and academics in an open collaboration environment to create a ‘connected community focused on cloud, analytics, cyber security and IoT network platforms.
Woodside CEO Peter Coleman said: “We are taking a collaborative approach to enhancing our operations as part of our digital transformation journey. This partnership will create a globally competitive centre for excellence that could be leveraged in our LNG operations, as we progress our remote operations capabilities.”
