LOS ANGELES, Feb. 06, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — IoT Breakthrough, a leading market-intelligence organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global Internet-of-Things (IoT) market, today announced that Cisco has been selected as winner of the “Industrial IoT Company of the Year” award in the 9th annual IoT Breakthrough Awards program.
The 2025 IoT Breakthrough Award highlights Cisco’s commitment to building and advancing breakthrough IoT solutions that transform industrial operations. Through its cutting-edge Industrial IoT (IIoT) technologies, Cisco empowers organizations to optimize productivity, enhance safety and achieve sustainability goals by connecting and automating critical infrastructure.
Cybersecurity and future-readiness for AI continue to be paramount concerns for industrial operations. Cyberattacks on industrial systems can lead to significant disruptions, financial losses, physical damage, and even injuries, while rapid technological advancements are necessitating speedy adoption of new technologies and processes. By embracing IIoT technologies, industries can position themselves for future success by improving security while becoming more efficient, agile, resilient, and sustainable.
Cisco is spearheading IIoT growth by leveraging its robust and comprehensive industrial networking portfolio that provides the core infrastructure for IIoT deployments. Designed specifically for industrial needs, Cisco’s switches, routers, and wireless equipment share a common foundation with their enterprise counterparts, ensuring robust performance across all industries and applications. A shared operating system, management platform, and security measures facilitate collaboration between IT and OT teams, enabling OT to leverage best practices and create a scalable and adaptable network to meet evolving operational demands. Cisco’s innovative approach to OT security breaks down silos between traditional security and networking teams, eliminating blind spots, and increasing efficiencies. Integrating security directly into the network fabric enables better visibility, segmentation, and threat detection and response. Such solutions can be more easily managed, scaled, and adapted to meet evolving needs and address new threats.
Cisco’s industrial solutions empower industries to leverage the power of AI/ML to drive innovation to meet current and future needs. The network’s high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity between OT and IT domains transports large volumes of data generated by sensors, machines, controllers, and other devices to analytical applications in datacenters and cloud. By leveraging this data stream, operations can gain valuable insights and make informed decisions, which are essential for implementing AI strategies.
Cisco has delivered on their vision by enhancing their industrial products with a range of innovative features, providing greater value to their customers. New switching and wireless products address evolving customer needs for higher-performance and density. By enhancing network segmentation and implementing zero-trust remote access, cybersecurity is significantly improved. Furthermore, integrating with Splunk enables organizations to achieve greater operational resilience. This shift towards proactive operations allows for a more adaptable approach to new opportunities.
Cisco makes it easy for their customers to achieve their vision by publishing validated design guides that are blueprints for successful networking and security deployments, providing a solid foundation for customers to build upon and achieve their business objectives.
Over just the past few months, Cisco has been recognized by several analysts for their innovations in and contributions to industrial networks and security:
- In its 2024 report, the analyst firm Forrester Research named Cisco a leader in OT security citing Cisco Industrial Threat Defense as a comprehensive OT security solution to protect, detect, and remediate across IT and OT environments
- In September 2024, ARC Advisory Group, in an ARC View report named Cisco as a worldwide leader in Industrial Ethernet market share attributing it to the need for embedded security, IT/OT integration, and AI-readiness that are driving vendor preference
- In its report on Industrial Edge Networking Components – 2024 analysis, the analyst firm Omdia highlights digital transformation as the core driver of the market as customers continue to invest in more automation, stronger cybersecurity, and building a foundation for AI
By partnering with Cisco, industrial organizations can leverage cutting-edge technology to drive innovation, improve efficiency, and enhance security. Cisco is an ideal partner for evolving industrial organizations due to its robust IIoT networking portfolio, integrated enterprise-grade security, over 80 validated designs for reliable solutions, enabling of AI-powered insights through rich process data, and a strong partner ecosystem.
“Cybersecurity urgency and AI are driving operational networking modernization globally across all industries, said Keith Higgins, Director of Product Marketing at Cisco. “Cisco offers market leading, industry-tailored solutions to connect and protect critical infrastructure, with validated designs that improve IT/OT collaboration. This approach is aimed at delivering significant benefits in terms of reduced risk, operational efficiency, and digital resilience while accelerating implementation timelines.”
“Most people know Cisco for their enterprise networking products. But for over 20 years, Cisco has been instrumental in making enterprise technologies decisive for digitizing industrial operations.” said Steve Johansson, managing director at IoT Breakthrough. “As industrial networks get larger and more complex, organizations need to leverage the same time-tested and proven management and security technologies that have been perfected in the enterprise. By enabling IT best-practices in OT, Cisco has freed industrial networks to scale and be flexible, while enjoying the same robust security as the enterprise. Thus, we had no hesitation in recognizing Cisco with our Industrial IoT Company of the Year award.”
The mission of the IoT Breakthrough Awards program is to conduct the industry’s most comprehensive analysis of the global Internet-of-Things industry and then recognize the ‘breakthrough’ innovators, leaders and visionaries in a broad range of IoT categories, including Industrial and Enterprise IoT, Smart City technology, IoT Security, Connected Home and Home Automation, Connected Car, and many more. This year’s program attracted thousands of nominations from companies all over the world.
About IoT Breakthrough
Part of the Tech Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence and recognition platform for global technology innovation and leadership, the IoT Breakthrough Awards program is devoted to honoring excellence in Internet-of-Things technologies, services, companies and products. The IoT Breakthrough Awards program provides a forum for public recognition around the achievements of IoT companies and products in categories including Connected Home and Home Automation, Connected Car, Industrial IoT (IIoT) and Smart City, Consumer IoT and more. For more information visit IoTBreakthrough.com.
Tech Breakthrough LLC does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our recognition programs and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with award designations. Tech Breakthrough LLC recognition consists of the opinions of the Tech Breakthrough LLC organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Tech Breakthrough LLC disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this recognition program, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
