This year Cisco sponsored the OSIsoft User Conference in San Francisco. Customers across the manufacturing, energy, and utility industries came to learn about our new fog computing capabilities that let analytics run at the edge of the network.

The biggest challenge these customers have is that much of the data in their sensors, engines, machines, and tools goes to waste or isn't captured in time to be useful. Now they see a solution by putting intelligence at the edge of the network through analytics and backhauling only the important data back to the control room and data center.

A lot of the data is a device saying, "I'm fine, nothing to worry about." Yet customers need to know when there's a problem, where it is, how serious it is, if anyone is in danger, and how quickly can it be fixed. Danger is reduced and things get fixed quickly when the network gets real-time data and sends the information to the right users at the right time.

It's the Fog Computing platform that makes it all possible. And it comes with critical-infrastructure level security and IT-level management and authentication.

One manufacturer of large construction and earth-moving equipment said a common theme from the show:

"I think it's great that Cisco has these newer products available that really save us cost and time. We would need several pieces of equipment to do what the Cisco Integrated Service Routers do, and they will even run 3^rdparty guest software on the IOx platform and that saves us another appliance."

At the event we had both a booth and a meeting room -both almost overwhelmed at times! My colleagues and I saw hundreds of visitors at our booth, and arranged many one-on-ones with several major household name customers and prospects. As a result, Cisco was asked to follow up with several Proof-of-Concepts so that customers can measure the benefits for themselves.

One customer already stated they:

"Would save thousands on rationalizing the network -i.e. less appliances and individual pieces of equipment needed -and save significant cost in terms of installation, provisioning, and support."

I'll follow up with you soon on the customer stories as they start coming through this summer!

And for the techies amongst you (you know who you are), here is some info on Cisco IOx, the IR809, and the IR829 that we had on display -the newest portfolio additions.

See how we can help you get control of your data by exploring our industry pages. More information on OSIsoft is available here if you are curious about our partnership.