Cisco: Building an IoE Business from the Gulf

Caspar Herzberg, Cisco Consulting Services’ Global Vice-President, in Dubai, UAE.

Fluent in many languages including Arabic, he has worked extensively in this region. Based on his experience, he relates the wealth of opportunities awaiting Mideast innovators in the connected world.

Caspar Herzberg, Cisco Consulting Services’ Global Vice-President

In less than a decade, the use of the word “smart” has evolved considerably, first being applied to phones, then general devices and, more recently, to watches and cars. The technology industry refers to this new paradigm as the Internet of Things (IoT), but Cisco, a major leader in this area, has spent the past few years urging governments and enterprises to consider a wider concept.

IoT is just part of the story, the keystone in a bridge connecting people with technology and data, in what Cisco calls the Mother of All Market Transitions: the Internet of Everything (IoE).

Caspar Herzberg, Vice President of Cisco Consulting Services, explains, IoE differs from IoT, in that, because real people are part of the model, more data is created. The subsequent benefits for business are wide-reaching.

“In Dubai, we did a study for the Executive Office on how much value [the emirate] could generate out of applying IoE for a limited number of use cases,” says Herzberg. “For example, smart transportation, city management or healthcare digitisation. The value was around AED$1 billion just from these segments, over the next five years.”

The UAE’s smart city ambitions are reflected across the Gulf region and the wider Middle East, where governments have initiated a number of projects to ease citizens’ interactions with public services. This heightened engagement in IoE led Cisco to hold its two-day Cisco Connect forum in Dubai in February.

An unprecedented 1,451 delegates turned out to hear what the technology leader had to say on a number of topics, all of which feed into the IoE: data centre and cloud, security, enterprise networks, mobility and collaboration.

Gadgets, gizmos and connections

As connections worldwide mushroom, along with the number of device categories eligible for connection, Cisco has also played a prominent role in keeping the industry up to date on the jaw-dropping statistics associated with IoT and IoE.

“I think we now expect 50 billion devices to be connected by 2020,” says Herzberg. “A couple of years ago, we thought it was going to be 10 billion.”

The IoE, he explains, “forms the basis for unprecedented analyses” because of the dizzying volumes of data created.

Connected devices may be growing in number, but so are connected people. As device makers compete for consumers and China’s emergent vendors make cheaper devices, market rivalry is pushing down prices for the end user.

“Generally, most technological products such as computers and smartphone devices have reduced in cost in the past four years by about 10%,” says Herzberg. “Right now we have about 1.5 billion smartphones, each of which has more computing power than the cockpit of a Tornado fighter jet. But 3 billion people will have this power by 2020.”

As more people get connected to the IoE, Cisco is concerned that some may be left behind. The company firmly believes in connectivity for all, and is heartened at the strides being made to this end by Gulf governments.

“Very often, especially in the technology space, innovation happens in the West and then it comes here,” he says. “But smart city innovation started here, in the Middle East in countries such as UAE the (Dubai) and Saudi Arabia. We have been lucky to partner with real estate developers and governments here and export our knowledge, from the consulting and technology point of view, to create the digital world of tomorrow.”