Cisco has made an unspecified investment in Australian agricultural IoT company Titan Class with which it has co-developed an IoT decision support platform for farmers, eXtensible Decision Platform (xDP) incorporating Streambed, an open source event-first microservice toolkit for IoT services, also co-developed by Titan Class and Cisco.
According to Cisco, XDP enables farmers to easily instrument their farms with thousands of readily available low-powered, third-party sensors and consolidate their insights into a single application on any smartphone, tablet or personal computer.
“This burgeoning ecosystem of quality sensors can monitor water levels and flow rate, electric fence voltage, weather, the location and movements of livestock and hundreds of other farm functions,” Cisco says.
The sensors communicate over LoRaWAN. According to Cisco, “With a single Titan Class deployment, farmers can use up to a thousand sensors without restriction. These sensors have been proven on operating farms to reliably communicate over several kilometres from a simple on-farm communications tower and each sensor has inexpensive commodity batteries that can last for years.”
Aim: to give farmers data for decision-making
Titan Class says Cisco commissioned it to develop xDP “to assist Australian farmers by furnishing them with the data they need to make decisions, thereby enhancing the farmer’s productivity.”
It describes xDP as a hardware/software platform hosted on the farm with the distinguishing feature that it “can use internet connectivity opportunistically or even not at all …[because] many farms have poor connectivity.”
It says xDP provides an environment where third-party application and sensor developers are able to deploy their applications and sensors and have them integrate their data, enabling a farmer to visualise the farm operation holistically.
Third party developers wanted
Cisco held a networking event in Sydney in June to promote xDP to third party developers. In the invite to that event it said: “It is neither Titan Class nor Cisco’s intention to build apps or sensors, on the contrary, we want to encourage the industry to do this, which is why this community event is vital in building partnerships and a focused AgTech ecosystem.”
Titan Class describes itself as the ‘caretaker’ of Streambed, which it says, “approaches micro-services in a contemporary manner and leverages existing open source projects and communities,” that is “destined to become open source.”
First installs: farm and Antarctica
Titan Class says it has installed xDP on Delatite Station, a 6,500 acre property near Mansfield, Victoria and will shortly install equipment on a remote sub-Antarctic island in conjunction with UNSW and Cisco in a project to provide CO2, weather and tree growth data that will be used to determine the ability of the southern ocean to absorb CO2.
About Streambed
Streambed has its own Cisco-branded dedicated website (streambed.io) where it is described as “an open source event-first microservice toolkit for IoT services … developed by Cisco as a component of its eXtensible Decision Platform (xDP), which is an open platform for sensors and actuators …[that] does not rely on potentially unreliable and expensive internet connections thereby permitting decision making at the edge.”
The website is a technical document “specifically designed for operators who are installing or are operating the xDP.” It says these applications will be orchestrated by Cisco IOx, [an application environment combining Cisco IOS and the Linux OS for highly secure networking] and have their data potentially managed and routed by Cisco Kinetic, [Cisco’s IoT platform].”
“Substantial” investment
The announcement does not specify the date of the investment but says Cisco has invested substantially in Titan Class to create the software platform, development of which commenced in 2015 with the announcement of the Australian Cisco Innovation Central investment with a focus on agriculture.
Cisco announced plans for what were then known as its “IoT Innovation Centres” at Cisco Live in 2015 when it was pushing the “Internet of Everything”. The first was in Perth and the second, with a focus on agriculture, smart cities, transport opened in Sydney in February 2016, by which time the name ‘Innovation Central’ had been adopted.
