When KitGuru caught up with Patrick Moorhead from Moor Insights at Distree last month, one of the things that most interested us was the way that Patrick went into some detail about how he sees the actual deployment of Intel's Computing Continuum rolling out. How much is it worth? This is, after all, the future – so nothing is certain – but it seems that some of the brighter bean counters at Cisco have been trying anyway. KitGuru dusts off the Casio FX calculator for a quick check.
When Patrick says Moor Insights, then that's what you get.
When he rolled through the pace of change over the last 5 years, it pretty much stunned the room.
In that short space of time, we have seen a huge see-saw between things like Nokia and Android. As one moves from ‘Sorry, who are you?' to ‘pwning most of the market' – the other brand has done a great job of moving just as far in the opposite direction.
OK. We get it. Big opportunities are afoot.
But what are they worth?
Rob Lloyd is Cisco's President of Sales and Development – responsible for finding the money trees in 2013 AND well into the future. Rob believes that we are looking at a future where something like 50 billion devices could be connected to the internet. That's close to 8 for every man, woman and child on the planet. Including those living on the edge of deserts and half way up mountains.
So, in reality, it would be ‘almost none' for the remote folks and many, many more for developed markets.
One example is parking. According to the bright stars at Streetline.com, parking is a $25 billion operation that has not really moved since businesses started using the space at the back of the building to leave their cars during the day. Part of their plan is to see cars and streets ‘talking' to each other in order to solve gridlock etc. Cisco is, naturally, happy to know that so many products will require messages to be routed.
So, taking all of these new innovations into account – what price does Cisco put on the evolving ‘Internet of Everything'?
Rick Giger is the head of Cisco's efforts to create the ‘smart grid of tomorrow' and he believes that, once some pesky privacy laws have been updated, that we could be looking at a $14 TRILLION industry.
Close to the size of the entire US economy.
Nice.
.
KitGuru says: In the same way that Patrick highlighted Netflix moving from ‘standing start' to something like ‘half the market' in just 5 years, there are companies in the world right now who are barely functioning – invoicing next to nothing – which will stride the world like Adonis by 2018. Cisco will make money on these new markets, but more as the ‘guy who sells donkeys and pick axes to prospectors', rather than being the pioneer itself. In that respect, Cisco's long term share value is probably more of a ‘dead cert'.
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