Incubation engine Outshift gives Cisco an internal startup opportunity

One Cisco team is working on the future as an internal “startup” within the networking administration company.

Cisco’s Outshift team aims to offer Cisco customers and partners more innovative and forward-looking solutions, the incubation engine’s SVP Vijoy Pandey told IT Brew at Cisco Live in early June. That’s done by developing and marketing new products and technologies that are outside the scope of Cisco’s main mission.

“As an incubation engine, we are looking at things end to end,” Pandey said. “So, we’ve got product engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, all within this organization.”

The plan. Pandey, who has been with Cisco for five years and involved with innovation and incubation throughout, has led the Outshift iteration of the company’s incubation engine since February.

Outshift officially debuted at Cisco Live with the release of a new suite of tools for Panoptica, Cisco’s cloud security development platform. Pandey and his team aren’t interested in consumer products and operations so much as providing tools—like Panoptica—for developers and companies. It’s B2B, not managing personal phones or headsets, he explained.

“We are looking at manufacturing floors, we’re looking at retail store environments, we’re looking at connected cars,” Pandey said. “To us, that’s still human to device, but it’s in a B2B context.”

Big data. For data management, that means finding the niche where businesses aren’t being served. Management, compliance, and other data problems are difficult; difficulties compounded by operating within cloud environments and, something that should be familiar to IT teams, a lack of tech savvy among many users within organizations and companies.

Part of the plan is to reduce data latency (the time between data being picked up by sensors and being sent to the end user) on the one hand while refining and customizing data on the other. Pandey said that a hypothetical McDonald’s restaurant could use AI to track highly customized data when it needs to order patties, given the necessary information and permissions.

While he cautioned the technology isn’t there yet, the mission of Outshift is to make it happen.

“We want to eliminate that cost, we want to eliminate that latency, and also provide a simple way of gathering insights which is tailored to every environment,” Pandey said.