What an exciting year for data and analytics! As I think back on our 2015 accomplishments and also think about some of the predictions that were made for the year, I'm confident that Cisco data and analytics is right on track for doing big things in the future. Here are some of the 2015 major highlights I'd like to share.

Cisco Data Preparation

In December 2014, IDC predicted that, "Visual data discovery tools will be growing 2.5x faster than rest of the BI market; investing in this enabler of end-user self service will become a requirement for all enterprises by 2018."Our team was ecstatic to see this prediction, as we were already hard at work on this amazing new product. Driven by business's accelerating demand for analytics, Cisco Data Preparation (Data Prep) makes it easy for non-technical business analysts to gather, explore, cleanse, combine and enrich the data that fuels these analytics, all in a self-service application.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfOCyaWbpmw&list=PLFT-9JpKjRTDSyR4jbCVS5e94fzzhIzWz&index=1

UCSF Partnership

We announced a partnership with UC San Francisco (UCSF) to jointly develop an interoperability platform for sharing health care information among multiple entities. The platform will be designed to enable health systems, providers and application vendors to share and integrate health data from multiple sources, making pertinent patient information accessible when and where it's needed for care through a highly secure process.

ParStream Acquisition

It's estimated that 50 billion devices and objects will be connected to the Internet by 2020. With this massive number of new connections, valuable data will be created at an even faster pace than most companies can manage. The ParStream acquisition will perfectly complement Connected Streaming Analytics by providing the analytics database that allows companies to analyze large amounts of data and store it in near real time anywhere in the network.

SmartBox Analytics

We are now enabling real-time manufacturing data and analytics from Mazak machines to significantly improve machine efficiency for Mazak's manufacturing customers. The Mazak SmartBox provides safe and secure connectivity of manufacturing factory machines and devices for enhanced monitoring and analytical capabilities. This massive connectivity of the factory is reducing downtime, lowering defect rates by almost 50 percent and shortening new product cycles.

Data and Analytics Conference 

The 2015 Data and Analytics Conference was the best conference I attended all year. With 500 attendees featuring the brightest minds in the industry, I learned, presented and collaborated on the latest trends and news solutions for big data, the Internet of Things, cloud, data and analytics, digital transformation and data virtualization. The new ideas and strategies that came from this event are really pushing our plans for 2016 and beyond and I couldn't be more excited.

Some other accomplishments to note, but I won't go into a lot of detail, include our first customer in Shanghai, our first CASP cellular win (beating 11 competitors) with a tier 1 North America cellular service provider for customer experience and service assurance, launching the Customer Advisory Community, and the Cisco and IBM Watson strategic partnership.

What are some of the most exciting data and analytics advances you saw in 2015?

Cheers!

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