Cisco has made a couple of interesting announcements in its IoT space, including a new hardware platform and a collaboration with Microsoft on hybrid IoT solutions.

There are three new components to the Cisco IoT Operations Platform: Connection Management at Scale, Fog Computing and Data Delivery.

Connection Management at Scale is a platform which will help businesses manage an ever-expanding amount of IoT devices. Fog Computing is there to make sure "data processing and device control happens at the right place for each job," and Data Delivery allows organizations to collect, collate and act on the data their systems are creating.

General availability of the platform is expected "later this year."

The second announcement is about Cisco’s partnership with Microsoft. Through the collaboration, Azure IoT Suite will be able to connect to Cisco Fog deployments, which Cisco hopes will give its customers added value through an integrated solution.

"Microsoft thinks there is a natural balance between the cloud and the edge in IoT," Sam George, partner director, Azure Internet of Things, writes in a blog post here.

"Cloud is a natural place to manage IoT devices, to collect data from them, gain insights using analytics and then operationalize those insights. Edge is a natural place to collect, optimize and react to data with low latency based on the insights generated in the cloud. In this way, cloud and edge work together to help IoT reach its full potential."

"We believe IoT, Cloud and IoT Edge will continue to play a critical role in digital transformation. We’re excited to extend our work with Cisco and bring the Value of Microsoft’s IoT technologies and solutions to even more customers," George adds.

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