It has been a crazy past three weeks with IoT and IoE for myself and also Cisco.  We recently hosted Cisco Live where we had over 25,000 attendees onsite and over 200,000 more attend virtually.  By the end of that week, I felt I had met each and every one and had at least a 15 minute conversation with them.  The buzz is there and our customers are telling us we are aligned to tackle this market and make IoT  in manufacturing take off.  Aside from our customers, I also had the pleasure to talk with leading industry and manufacturing analysts on our vision of IoT as well as various customer projects.  Here's what one leading analyst blogged about right after CiscoLive:

"...current plant networks are like spangled spaghetti, which Cisco is attempting to untangle it based on its powerful networking routers and switches in a secure, simple and an effective way. The converged platform approach solves flexibility, scalability and responsiveness challenges of end-users. At a juncture, wherein customers across industry verticals are looking at standardization and standards-driven manufacturing, Cisco clearly has cracked the code with this platform approach."  -

-Muthuraman Ramasamy, Frost & Sullivan

Many industrial companies are evolving to leverage this converged network approach.  Watch this highlight reel from John Chamber's keynote at Cisco Live 2014, particularly at minute 2:04 where he invites the CIO of Shell, Alan Matula, to share their approach:

After Cisco Live, I was able to visit with a few of our manufacturing customers face to face and get a clearer understanding of what they are doing right now and how Cisco is helping them solve real world issues to drive value right now.  A few of these meetings were around brainstorming new areas where customers have issues, and possible approaches to solutions.  We have come up with some very interesting projects with them that we will talk about in future blogs.

Additionally, last week, two other interesting events happened:

• SAPPHIRE in Orlando Florida -at this event we demonstrated a solution with SAP and SK where we were using SAP Hana running on Cisco servers over our Infrastructure to do real time crane controls to effectively control scheduling and start to drive value with collision avoidance.  You can see the video and also some more information here.  We are working with SAP to take this concept (no longer a concept but a real project) to a few other markets.
• Internal IoT technical training -Cisco had over 350 of our best and brightest sales engineers and consultants together for the week to understand where Cisco is in the IoT market and how they can take the experiences that we have had to their customers and start to help solve business issues and drive value.  While this was 'technical' training, a lot of the time was spent on best practices and understanding what we did and how, so we can start to quickly scale these to more customers.

IoT will continue to transform the industrial sector, and deliver real business outcomes for customers as well. While it is still early days, there have been many great successes that we can share with you and we are truly starting to understand what your business is doing and how we can add value.  What are some initiatives you are undertaking today where IoT can make an impact?