The Internet of Things is almost always talked about in future terms: IoT will or could or might change just about everything consumers and retailers have come to know about the art of selling. Despite years of this kind of preparatory language, Cisco‘s top dog still thinks that the critical point in IoT is going to catch more than a few parties off balance.
Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins sat in on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Thursday (June 2), and he didn’t mince his comments when asked about the spread of devices connected to the Internet of Things or retailers’ relative abilities to make sense of the impending explosion.
“There’s still a lack of belief about the number of things and devices that are going to be connected and the value that our customers and country leaders around the world are going to see from these connections,” Robbins said on the program. “I believe that’s going to happen much more quickly than anyone believes, and the value from those connections is going to be greater than anybody believes.”
Retailers and tech companies aren’t the only ones who risk being caught off guard by a rapidly inflating IoT bubble. Lay consumers, too, will also have to adjust their expectations on security when their digital profiles become fragmented across the burgeoning number of devices connected to the cloud. While Robbins noted that the average consumer will always push for as much security as possible, it will be up to companies like Cisco to find new ways of protecting data in an increasingly fluid and accessible digital landscape.
“The key thing to understand relative to how customer environments are changing over the next three to five years is that everything is becoming hyper-distributed,” Robbins said. “We’re connecting things that have never been connected before, so the whole notion of a premise-based enterprise is disappearing.”
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