Cisco Live excited many delegates this year, and one of the highlights was the World of Solutions. "Only Cisco could pull this off" one delegate mentioned on Social media (#CLUS). There was an even stronger sense of confidence that Cisco was relevant to many industry verticals this year. The Industrial section of the 'Cisco Campus' showed off tons of new advances, and, for the first time, a small but important process industries (including Oil and Gas) booth opened up showing the services-based solutions Secure Ops and Collaborative Operations. Let's talk about Collaborative Operations.

As you learn in the Video, Suresh Venkat speaks to the how Collaborative Operations goes beyond the 'one-to-many' collaborative solutions out there today, and provided a 'many-to-many' experience, that can be 'always-on' and people, data, and things can be brought into the session to create a more productive process (yes, that sounds a bit like the Internet of Everything -and it is an example!). Having that kind of capability can reduce downtime in, for example, the oil and gas industry, or or any industry that's looking for a control room type environment to plan, monitor or react to situations and incidents or progress projects more rapidly.

The solution can bring in surveillance media, any endpoint audio including two-way radio, and integrate with mobile wireless collaboration devices like the Librestream camera he displayed. The 'multiple-tile' single-pane-of-glass approach demonstrated other integrations as well. Not only news feeds (useful for assessing situations from a news-media/PR perspective), but also feeds from SCADA data analysis systems like the BRS Labs panel Suresh shows in the video, and the Bit Stew analytics software visualization feed demonstrated live at the show.

As Suresh sums up "It's all about getting the right people together at the right time with the right resources and make a decision in real time".

To learn more go to www.cisco.com/go/oilandgas.

And, as always, tell us what you think.