Why should resellers care about the Internet of Things?

Cisco talks about the Internet of Things as a $19 trillion opportunity, but for its small and mid-sized Australian resellers, the most concrete and immediate upside could be to use IoT as a door-opener to refresh customers' networks.

Jason Brouwers, director of Cisco Australia's partner business group, said the channel was looking for the next reason for customers to upgrade their networks.

"We still do a great deal of our business in the traditional switching and routing, but the important thing is how do you move the customer and give them a compelling reason to change?

"In the past, it might have been to have power over ethernet, that might have been the last driver to refresh the network. What we are looking at now is a conversation around IoE [the Internet of Everything]," said Brouwers.

"We can solve a business problem for you [the customer] by connecting the unconnected in your environment. What that leads to is a full network refresh. The underlying goals are still the same in terms of refreshing everything, but the clever thing is it gives us a new conversation to have with the customer," he added.

The vendor estimates that of the $7.3 billion of Cisco refresh opportunity in the Asia-Pacific & Japan region, about $6 billion is in enterprise networking.

Rather than pre-judging the Internet of Things as hype and jargon, customers are warming to the opportunities to connect disparate parts of the organisation, which brings performance improvements and cost savings, said Cisco Australia managing director Ken Boal.

"On the customer side, [IoE] is alive and well. Two or three years ago you would get a few raised eyebrows – classic Australian scepticism, 'That will never happen'. Now it is absolutely flipped."

In terms of enterprise networking kit, Cisco is doing solid business with its Nexus 9000 series of switches, which are designed for Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) - essentially a way to simplify and automate configuring the device and setting policies.

At the summit, Cisco revealed it now has more than 2,655 Nexus 9000 and ACI customers globally.

Cost saving is a message to sell the SDN dream to clients: Brouwers pointed out that whereas, say, a bank may require 50 staff to manage a traditional corporate network, ACI and automation could reduce this headcount dramatically.

Cisco has seen strong, 88 percent growth within its IoT portfolio of gear, such as ruggedised switches and routers for 'edge computing'.

Edge computing, which Cisco also calls 'fog' computing, pushes computing power out to the device, so that data can be analysed at the edge and hence avoid clogging up the network by sending useless information back to a central data warehouse.

Nick Earle, Cisco's senior vice president, global cloud and managed services sales, summed it up: "Don't bring the data to the query, bring the query to the data."

For instance, an IP video camera in a carpark could monitor vehicles and only send information back to the operations centre over the network in the event of a parking violation.

IoT projects are gathering pace in Australia. Cisco execs pointed to Telstra's stadium rollouts for the likes of the Sydney Cricket Ground and both Allianz and ANZ Stadium, as well as iiNet's work deploying public wi-fi in capital cities.

Scott Brown, vice president of enterprise segment for Asia-Pacific & Japan, said the iiNet wireless rollout in Adelaide was a particular standout in terms of edge computing and analytics.

Steven Kiernan is a guest of Cisco in Montreal.