Toshiba and Cisco are collaborating on new ways to utilize the Internet of Everything that can improve processes, productivity and experiences in manufacturing, transportation and city environments. Representatives from Toshiba and Cisco signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) this week with the intention to advance the progress of a new Smart Community.

Growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) market has accelerated dramatically in the past year throughout a wide range of industries and public sector organizations. The Internet of Everything (IoE) connects people, processes, data and things through the Internet, turning data generated from connected devices into actionable intelligence that can improve processes, decision-making and scenario planning for businesses and people. The Internet of Everything also is creating a greater need for fog computing, which stores and processes data at physical locations closer to devices and operations – or the edge – instead of handling all processes in the cloud.

This collaboration brings together the Cisco Fog Computing network environment featuring Cisco’s network-wide security solution with Toshiba’s endpoint management technology. The effort will help monitor and maintain multiple devices, stream computing technology for high-speed information processing collected from devices, and provide storage technology to accumulate information generated with M2M technology. Through this process, Cisco and Toshiba will explore the feasibility of technological verification, marketing activities, and the provision of solutions for promoting widespread use of fog computing.

Toshiba seeks to generate new value by connecting its energy, health care, storage products and services using cloud computing, big data and analytics technologies, to achieve its vision of creating a safe, secure and comfortable society, the "Human Smart Community". Toshiba will apply the technologies with the IoT, M2M, and fog computing to a wider range of devices and spread it to manufacturing systems, traffic/transportation systems, and smart cities.

Cisco believes that a new approach to infrastructure optimized for many distributed sensors and data processing is critical. Cisco is also encouraging fog computing architecture, in which new networking, computing, and storage for value generation in the IoT era are deployed from the cloud to the edge.