Cisco announced their new Digital Ceiling initiative today at Cisco Live Berlin. Here’s the marketing part:

And here’s the breakdown of protocols and stuff:

Funny enough, here’s a presentation from just three weeks ago at Networking Field Day 11 on a very similar subject:

Cisco is moving into Internet of Things (IoT) big time. They have at least learned that the consumer side of IoT isn’t a fun space to play in. With the growth of cloud connectivity and other things on that side of the market, Cisco knows that is an uphill battle not worth fighting. Seems they’ve learned from Linksys and Flip Video. Instead, they are tracking the industrial side of the house. That means trying to break into some networks that are very well put together today, even if they aren’t exactly Internet-enabled.

Digital Ceiling isn’t just about the PoE lighting that was announced today. It’s a framework that allows all other kinds of dumb devices to be configured and attached to networks that have intelligence built in. The Constrained Application Protocol (CoaP) is designed in such a way as to provide data about a great number of devices, not just lights. Yet lights are the launch “thing” for this line. And it could be lights out for Cisco.

A Light In The Dark

Cisco wants in on the possibility that PoE lighting will be a huge market. No other networking vendor that I know of is moving into the market. The other building automation company has the manufacturing chops to try and pull off an entire connected infrastructure for lighting. But lighting isn’t something to take lightly (pun intended).

There’s a lot that goes into proper lighting planning. Locations of fixtures and power levels for devices aren’t accidents. It requires a lot of planning and preparation. Plan and prep means there are teams of architects and others that have formulas and other knowledge on where to put them. Those people don’t work on the networking team. Any changes to the lighting plan are going to require input from these folks to make sure the illumination patterns don’t change. It’s not exactly like changing a lightbulb.

The other thing that is going to cause problems is the electrician’s union. These guys are trained and certified to put in anything that has power running to it. They aren’t just going to step aside and let untrained networking people start pulling down light fixtures and put up something new. Finding out that there are new 60-watt LED lights in a building that they didn’t put up is going to cause concern and require lots of investigation to find out if it’s even legal in certain areas for non-union, non-certified employees to install things that are only done by electricians now.

The next item of concern is the fact that you now have two parallel networks running in the building. Because everyone that I’ve talked to about PoE Lighting and Digital Ceiling has had the same response: Not On My Network. The switching infrastructure may be the same, but the location of the closets is different. The requirements of the switches are different. And the air gap between the networks is crucial to avoid any attackers compromising your lighting infrastructure and using it as an on-ramp into causing problems for your production data network.

The last issue in my mind is the least technically challenging, but the most concerning from the standpoint of longevity of the product line – Where’s the value in PoE lighting? Every piece of collateral I’ve seen and every person I’ve heard talk about it comes back to the same points. According to the experts, it’s effectively the same cost to install intelligent PoE lighting as it is to stick with traditional offerings. But that “effective” word makes me think of things like Tesla’s “Effective Lease Payment”.

By saying “effective”, what Cisco is telling you is that the up-front cost of a Digital Ceiling deployment is likely to be expensive. That large initial number comes down by things like electricity cost savings and increased efficiencies or any one of another of clever things that we tell each other to pretend that it doesn’t cost lots of money to buy new things. It’s important to note that you should evaluate the cost of a Digital Ceiling deployment completely on its own before you start taking into account any kind of cost savings in an equation that come months or years from now.

Tom’s Take

I’m not sure where IoT is going. There’s a lot of learning that needs to happen before I feel totally comfortable talking about the pros and cons of having billions of devices connected and talking to each other. But in this time of baby steps toward solutions, I can honestly say that I’m not entirely sold on Digital Ceiling. It’s clever. It’s catchy. But it ultimately feels like Cisco is headed down a path that will lead to ruin. If they can get CoAP working on many other devices and start building frameworks and security around all these devices then there is a chance that they can create a lasting line of products that will help them capitalize on the potential of IoT. What worries me is that this foray into a new realm will be fraught with bad decisions and compromises and eventually we’ll fondly remember Digital Ceiling as yet another Cisco product that had potential and not much else.