The Port of Cartagena, in Colombia, is tapping into analytics on the edge to improve the port’s efficiency in the use of assets such rubber tire gantries, cranes, and trucks.

The port is working with the recently-announced global collaboration between Cisco and IBM to provide instant Internet of Things (IoT) insight at the edge of the network. Businesses and organizations in remote and autonomous locations will be able to tap the combined power of IBM’s Watson IoT and business analytics technologies and Cisco’s edge analytics capabilities to more deeply understand and act on critical data on the network edge.

Today, billions of interconnected devices and sensors are gathering vast amounts of real-time data about the physical world. In recent years cloud computing has offered companies a powerful way of storing that data and turning it into valuable insight. But for businesses without easy access to high bandwidth connectivity, these capabilities are sometimes out of reach or take too long. To address the problem, IBM and Cisco have joined forces to offer a new way to produce immediate, actionable insight at the point of data collection. The new approach is designed to target companies operating on the edge of computer networks.

Several years ago, the Port of Cartagena started monitoring equipment conditions such as engine temperature, engine speed and run hours to improve efficiency and maintenance costs. Now the port is beginning to use the IBM Watson IoT Platform with Cisco streaming edge analytics to monitor an expanded set of conditions in the cloud. This capability, including predictive analytics, is expected to help the port to get ahead of equipment degradation and needed maintenance to keep machines running efficiently and avoid costly equipment failures.

“The city of Cartagena is considered a gateway to Colombia and home to the country’s major industrial expansion and development,” said Eduardo Bustamante, Director of Operations, Port of Cartagena. “As a container terminal transshipment hub, our port ships goods to almost 600 ports in 136 countries around the world.”

The opening of the new Panama Canal has created new challenges for all ports in the region and has made service reliability a key factor of success, Bustamante noted. “With these new capabilities from IBM and Cisco, we gain immediate insight into the health and operations of our more than 47 rubber tire gantries and 180 trucks,” he said. “As a result, we expect to be more productive in our maintenance processes to help ensure our fleet runs even more efficiently and vessels and cargo are moving smoothly in and out of our port.”

“The way we experience and interact with the physical world is being transformed by the power of cloud computing and the Internet of Things,” added Harriet Green, general manager for IBM Watson IoT commerce and education. “For an oil rig in a remote location or a factory where critical decisions have to be taken immediately, uploading all data to the cloud is not always the best option. By coming together, IBM and Cisco are taking these powerful IoT technologies the last mile, extending Watson IoT from the cloud to the edge of computer networks, helping to make these strong analytics capabilities available virtually everywhere, always.”

“Together, Cisco and IBM are positioned to help organizations make real-time informed decisions based on business-critical data that was often previously undetected and overlooked,” added Mala Anand, senior vice president of the Cisco data and analytics platforms group. “With the vast amount of data being created at the edge of the network, using existing Cisco infrastructure to perform streaming analytics is the perfect way to cost-effectively obtain real-time insights. Our powerful technology provides customers with the flexibility to combine this edge processing with the cognitive computing power of the IBM Watson IoT Platform.”