Cisco Systems is pursuing CEO John Chamber’s mantra
‘the network is the platform’ with renewed vigour today, in a number of announcements on the smart grid front. Through creation of the Smart Grid Ecosystem, work with utilities customers in the newly formed Smart Grid Technical Advisory Board (TAB), and the introduction of new security services and solutions, the company is positioning to be at the forefront of this emerging market.
This is not Cisco’s first foray into what the company has calculated will be a
$20 billion market over the next five years. Cisco outlined its plans to establish a complete communications fabric based on IP standards that would stretch from power generation points to businesses and homes this past May, and the company put this in practise in a number of very large deployments: through its
Energy Smart Miami Initiative, and in partnership with Miami-Dade County, Florida Power and Light, GE and Silver Springs Networks, Cisco is working on the deployment of more than a million wireless smart metres to every home and most businesses across the county, and is involved in a similar project - "Pecan Street" - with the City of Austin and the Environmental Defense Fund to pilot clean energy and smart grid goals, as well a
Duke Energy (4 millions of customers).
Today’s far reaching announcements, however, are of a different quality and signal Cisco’s intent, as Inbar Lasser-Raab, Cisco Senior Director of Networks Services, explained, to capture the momentum that currently exists in the market, but also to position the company “to really help shape the nature” of this emerging industry.” Cisco’s role, according to Inbar, is to provide a single, standards based secure end-to-end infrastructure that brings intelligence to the grid, in pursuit of smart grid goals - increasing efficiencies in energy transmission, enabling energy management at producer and consumer levels, and integrating energy from renewable sources. To that end, the company has worked with “partners, customers and standards bodies to drive that vision – towards the adoption and creation of those large IP infrastructures.” The results of Cisco’s effort have been encapsulated in three major announcements.
