You may already have seen the announcement of the Cisco Industrial Operations kit(if not you can read about it here: New Cisco Offerings Help Unlock the Industrial Value of the Internet of Things).

As organizations such as utilities, oil, gas and energy companies, and municipalities, look to leverage new IoT applications, demand is growing for a quick and simple way to deploy Field Area Network (FAN) pilots, as well as reduce the cost of deploying a secure network infrastructure for medium and small size deployments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_y0_g49GFc&index=2&list=PLC9B77E2CF83FB00D

Gaurav Agarwal, Technical Marketing Engineer, Vertical Solutions, Cisco, provides a short introduction to the Cisco Industrial Operations Kit and how it virtualizes deployment to reduce setup time to days for Field Area Networks and Industrial Networks.

It's all about Cisco helping customers start to deploy multi-service FAN solutions quickly and more cost-effectively. By actually virtualizing secure network services on a single Cisco Unified Computing Server, the Industrial Operations Kit can now be deployed in a matter of days, instead of weeks (or, in some cases, saving months!).

It's based on the Connected Grid Network Management System and plays a critical role in creating efficient, secure and affordable industrial architectures for small to midsize organizations and large field area network pilots.

Here's what Kip Compton,  vice president of IoT Systems and Software, Cisco, had to say at the launch "The IE 4000 and Industrial Operations Kit demonstrate how Cisco is taking the lead in bringing IoT capabilities to customers of all sizes. The market is demanding new infrastructure capabilities, and Cisco's leadership in Gigabit switching technologies and comprehensive, end-to-end field network deployment offerings puts us in a unique position to help organizations build out long term strategies that address the challenges of an IoT environment. We have developed these offerings to give customers the ability to accelerate their IoT innovations."

For the technical amongst you, The kit includes a single headend router, bundled with Cisco PRIME Access Registrar software for authentication, authorization and accounting, and the Connected Grid Network Management System with Cisco Embedded Services Routers for zero-touch deployment, managing up to 300 industrial routers and 250,000 RF Mesh endpoints with a single server.

Jeff Carkhuff, vice president of global solutions marketing for electricity, Itron was quoted as saying:"...With the Cisco Industrial Operations Kit, we are able to offer our customers more choices to match their specific needs, giving them an easy path to more IoT-friendly environments."

There are quite a few related customer case studies out there on the subject of FAN and the 'SmartGrid' as many have known it (BC Hydro which I blogged about before: BC Hydro, Cisco and Itron -a Powerhouse in Canada, and also  BKK which you can read about here: Cisco helps Norway Utility Modernize Power Grid, along with Western Power Distribution creating the Blueprint for Grid Modernization with Cisco). Check them out!

The great thing is that theCisco Industrial Operations kit makes the whole exercise of deploying FAN and updating critical utility infrastructure a whole lot easier! That means safety,  reliability and lower costs are easier to achieve.

Let me know if you'd like to know more.