How Cisco Is Teaching Clients to CHILL

Everyone knows how difficult it can be to get home peripherals to talk to each other. Now imagine that challenge on a massive scale and you have Cisco's Internet of Things effort, or The Internet of Everything, as the company calls it.

PCMag went to Silicon Valley recently to check out the Cisco Hyperinnovation Living Labs (CHILL) to find out how it's preparing for the next wave of connectivity.

The CHILL lab is in Building 11 of Cisco's rambling campus just outside San Jose. It's a mad scientist's playhouse, something that Q in James Bond might relish, full of gadgets and drones, telepresence robots, and re-useable materials.

One lab table is completely given over to an intricate model, built entirely in Lego, of a shipyard with containers and a train set running around the periphery. Apparently it's a former supply and demand project plan in 3D for a Cisco partner. But the level of detail is impressive; there's even a Lego cat crouching behind the dumpsters.

On another wall is a sensor-enabled supermarket shelf setup, complete with drones that were deployed in an experiment to ascertain whether it would be feasible to use them in a dark store overnight to replenish shelves. The far wall is all screens showing live feeds of concurrent data science evaluations.

It looks like a glorious place of experimentation but it's serious business, said Kate O'Keeffe, managing director of CHILL. "Succeeding in the future world economy is in lighting up the world's dark assets," O'Keeffe told PCMag, "Because the net value of the Internet of Everything is $19 trillion, but that requires the world's corporations playing well together; which they don't always do."

O'Keeffe has been with Cisco for five years and relocated to Silicon Valley from its Singapore office after running a drought-solution program for a government-owned water supplier in her native Melbourne, Australia. Her role now is to bring senior Cisco customers into CHILL and out of their comfort zone. They must examine how the Internet of Everything is going to disrupt (which is a polite word for "destroy your existing business model") their future profits if they don't wake up.

"It's a circus," said O'Keeffe. "Basically there are 80 to 100 people involved at any one time, to drive this rapid innovation and come up with IoE solutions for the future. We include people from companies at every level, from the top execs, right down to end users, their customers. Projects that used to take 18 to 24 months must now be built, evaluated, and tested in days. And that is the point of CHILL."

It's like War Games for corporate America. Which is where the spy cases come in.

Ben Varghese, an emerging technology consultant at Cisco Consulting Services, motioned us over to the back space of CHILL. Varghese's role is to advise customers on disruptive business and technology strategy by creating prototypes with robotics, virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D printing, CAD, Wi-Fi, BLE, and RFID. Basically, he gets to build cool things. Or show executives who have spent the last 20 years stuck behind a desk how to do so.

"We use the Warp Accelerated Rapid Prototyping (WARP) kit," Varghese told PCMag. "Our teams of makers, hackers, lawyers, decided that this whole process of innovation was taking way too long, so we built a kit that has everything from code samples, to hardware like Raspberry Pi, that allows our team to go to remote sites and build stuff. Yes, this is our spy kit, in essence."

O'Keeffe and Varghese are about to take the spy kits (in robust carry-on cases, which fit under the seat in front on a plane for swift disembarkation purposes) and fly to Germany. They will be setting up the WARP units in an abandoned factory outside Berlin to prototype ideas with clients such as Caterpillar, DHL, and Airbus, all in the same CHILL space. It's top secret, so O'Keeffe won't reveal which Internet of Everything problem they'll be trying to solve, but it sounds like a fun trip.

In a way, Cisco has kept true to its roots. The company started in December 1984, you may recall, because co-founders Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, both working for Stanford University, wanted to email each other from their respective offices located in different buildings but were unable to due to technological shortcomings. So they built the first multi-protocol router. Thirty-two years later, Cisco is now teaching the world's corporations how to connect to each other via the Internet of Everything with a few WARP kits, telepresence robots, and other splendid gadgets. And Legos.