Cisco today announced a data and analytics strategy and a suite of analytics software that will enable customers to translate their data into actionable business insight regardless of where the data resides.

With the number of connected devices projected to grow from10 billiontoday to50 billionby 2020, the flood tide of new data - widely distributed and often unstructured - is disrupting traditional data management and analytics. Traditionally most organizations created data inside their own four walls and saved it in a centralized repository. This made it easy to analyze the data and extract valuable information to make better business decisions.

But the arrival of the Internet of Everything (IoE) - the hyper-connection of people, process, data, and things -is quickly changing all that. The amount of data is huge. It's coming from widely disparate sources (like mobile devices, sensors, or remote routers), and much of that data is being created at the edge. Organizations can now get data from everywhere - from every device and at any time - to answer questions about their markets and customers that they never could before. But IT managers and key decision makers are struggling to find the useful business nuggets from this mountain of data.

As an example, take the typical offshore oil rig, which generates up to 2 terabytes of data per day. The majority of this data is time sensitive to both production and safety. Yet it can take up to 12 days to move a single day's worth of data from its source at the network edge back to the data center or cloud. This means that analytics at the edge are critical to knowing what's going on when it's happening now, not almost 2 weeks later.

The case for analytics at the edge is not solely driven by bandwidth constraints. In many cases the data being analyzed simply has a useful life shorter than the time it takes to send the data to a central place for analysis. Location-based information is a perfect example. When someone (or something) is on the move, location-based information is only valid for a brief point in time.  Much of this data today is never analyzed at all because centralized analytics can't provide insight quickly enough.

This scenario -repeated continuously in companies around the globe -has led to what I call "the Analytics Imperative" -the ability to extract meaning and outcomes in a world where 99.5% of the data collected is never analyzed.

Organizations need new strategies for analyzing these massive data sets. It is no longer viable to move 100% of your data to centralized data stores for analysis, as the examples above illustrate. Instead, customers today need solutions that enable real-time analysis to take place anywhere from the data lake or data warehouse to the edge of the network, including data in motion. The reality of IoE is that turning massive volumes of data into useful information will require analytics from the cloud to the data center to the very edge of the network.

Data and analytics will be the means by which value is extracted from the Internet of Everything. This explains why Cisco has entered the business of data and analytics in a big way with the introduction of Connected Analytics, pre-packaged analytics software ready for integration into existing Cisco infrastructures to enable powerful industry solutions. Why Cisco, you may be asking.

• Connected infrastructure:Only Cisco has the connected infrastructure from the cloud to the data center to the edge to enable analytics everywhere
• Agile pervasive data access:market-leading data virtualization capabilities  to leverage even the most distributed data
• Real-time, streaming analytics at the edge: streaming analytic capabilities built right into our industrialized routers
• The ability to leverage your existing infrastructure:Distributed analytics can be done either in NEW infrastructure or in EXISTING infrastructure. Using the intelligent Cisco infrastructure already in place dramatically reduces deployment and ongoing costs and significantly decreases time to deploy
• Deep domain infrastructure expertise: Nobody can understand network data better than Cisco; pairing that data with enterprise data can provide insights that aren't possible without the network data, and THAT is where Cisco has created strength in our analytics.
• Intercloud integration of private/public clouds:Enables organizations to draw insights from data stored in both private and public cloud environments
• Broad ecosystem of partners:Strategic partnerships have been critical to Cisco's success over the past 30 years and continue to be so in the data and analytics space; from Hadoop partners to analytics partners, our customer solutions leverage a full stack of best-of-breed technologies from Cisco and our partners

Cisco approaches big data and analytics in a way no other company can, leveraging our strengths in hardware, software, services, and partnerships to embed powerful analytic capabilities from the data center to the cloud to the edge, providing insights across the most distributed and remote data.

The Analytics Imperative? We get it. And we are here to help you extract value from your data in ways no other vendor can. To learn more about Cisco Connected Analytics for the Internet of Everything, visit this site.