Digitizing the Physical World: Insights from Cisco Live Melbourne and the Industrial IoT Industry Summit

A few weeks ago, I attended Cisco Live Melbourne, and it was truly a pleasure to meet and connect with leaders, gain knowledge from customers, and hear speakers from various sectors.

I had the wonderful opportunity to speak in an Innovation Talk session alongside one of our very own Industrial IoT (IIoT) customers, Joseph Ozdemir from Mineral Resources Limited. Mineral Resources is focused on innovation in four growth pillars – lithium, iron ore, energy, and mining services across Western Australia. Within their operations, they have deployed Cisco Industrial Switching throughout their process plants, Cisco URWB for wireless communication while transporting minerals and the Cisco industrial routing portfolio to enable 4G/5G backhaul for their road trains. It was eye-opening to hear how they are digitizing operations and leveraging their existing networking skills to connect mining processes.

At Cisco Live, we also hosted our second Industrial IoT Industry Summit in Australia. We were excited to see over 130 customers in attendance and learning from the mining, transportation, and utilities breakout sessions. The quality of the discussion was extremely high and insightful, which allowed us to learn top of mind priorities from customers across each industry.

A resounding theme emerged – industry-wide acceleration of cyber security initiatives is imperative to protect operational and critical infrastructure environments from growing security threats.

There were many other takeaways surrounding the need for acceleration and barriers to overcome that resonated strongly with our team:

1. Overall, every customer expressed the need for acceleration of digitization initiatives to continue to improve business outcomes such as downtime reduction and greater efficiency.
2. Decarbonization and connectivity are becoming more important and critical. Australia has raised its climate targets and now need industry to accelerate its clean energy transition. (e.g. Australia passed to climate change act, which doubled emission targets by 2030).
3. Utilities are facing security, skills gap, and resourcing challenges when pursuing grid modernization and the incorporation of renewable generation.
4. Customers called out specific hurdles such as excessively fragmented infrastructures that need to have a unified foundation for accelerated progress across all sectors. Also, ideas were exchanged on how to overcome skill gaps and improve IT/OT collaboration.

Hearing where the points of uncertainty and risk are for our customers allows us to better align with our customer’s needs. Our strategy is aimed to tackle these 4 challenges:

1. To address growing security threats, use products like Cisco Cyber Vision to help customers understand their security posture, improve their industrial network efficiency, and extend IT security to their industrial operations.
2. We have developed Cisco Validated Designs, validated network architectures made for your industrial use case and meeting the needs for both operations and IT.
3. We are streamlining the process of incorporating third-party partner applications, ensuring a seamless experience and expediating customer time to value.
4. We are actively engaging in network automation initiatives to address the skills gap shortage: employing tools like Cisco Catalyst Center and Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN into operational environments.

In all, we would not be able to provide these solutions without trust and collaboration from operational teams, industry-leading customers, and application providers. Our journey towards heightened trust remains a focus point going into 2024. By working together, we will continue to accelerate progress and digitize the physical world across all industries.

We will be hosting another Industrial IoT Summit at Cisco Live EMEA on February 7, 2024. We look forward to continuing these insightful discussions. The invitations for this event have already been sent out, but if we have missed you or if you want more information on attending, please contact us.

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