Cisco has upgraded the Cisco IoT Control Center — formerly the Cisco Jasper Control Center renamed from the Jasper Control Center when Cisco acquired Jasper — with machine learning capabilities that it says will enable telco users of the service to offer their customers better management, billing and security of cellular IoT environments.
Machine Learning has been added to improve management. Cisco says that, with visibility into three billion events every day, its machine learning models area able to quickly identify anomalies and address issues before they impact a customer, and enable service providers to identify and alert customers of errant devices.
Cisco also says the ML capabilities will also help service providers improve customer satisfaction by enabling smart billing that will automatically optimise rate plans, and that will proactively send customer notifications should usage changes or rate plans need to be updated.
eSIM as a service
Cisco IoT Control Center also now provides eSIM as a service, enabling “cost-effective SIM handoffs between service providers”.
Ken Davidson, director, SaaS in Cisco’s cloud security business unit, in a Cisco blog post said: “Today, when service providers transfer SIM management to other carriers, they must manage multiple costly integrations. The process is difficult and error prone and will only intensify as global supply chains become the norm.”
Cisco acquired Jasper in 2016 and according to Davidson has grown the number of connected devices eightfold. “We have more than 160 million cellular devices connected, including 60 million connected cars. Our monthly growth is up to four new devices and accelerating,” he said.
Increased demand driven by 5G
Cisco is anticipating greatly increased demand for the former Jasper services as 5G ramps up and Davidson said the company was partnering with service providers and their customers “to incubate and codify common 5G use cases that will drive industry value.”
Cisco is working with Dutch service provider KPN and machine builder ExRobotics to explore using autonomously guided robots to perform jobs that are too dangerous for humans in fields like oil & gas.
“ExRobotics, is building robots that will be able to do much more sophisticated tasks when the ultra-low latency of 5G becomes widely available,” Davidson said.“KPN and Cisco are working to help translate this use case into clear protocol for implementing robot-aided safety checks in dangerous industries.”
