IBM Corp.’s Watson system has come a long way since its public debut on CBS’ Jeopardy! in 2011. Organizations now have access to several cloud versions of the artificial intelligence, on-demand APIs, and they will soon be able to take advantage of its capabilities at the edge of the network as well.

Big Blue plans to deliver the latter option through a new collaboration with Cisco Systems Inc. that was announced this morning. The alliance will see key functionality from Watson bundled with the networking giant’s edge routers, which are used to provide web access for oil rigs, seaports and other remote facilities that are situated beyond the reach of carrier infrastructure. The goal is to reduce the amount of overhead involved in processing machine-generated data from the field.

The more information a company analyzes on-site, the less has to be sent to its main business intelligence environment, which reduces bandwidth costs. The resulting savings can add up quickly across the upwards of dozens of remote facilitates that some of IBM’s bigger industrial clients operate. And at the same time, removing the need to transmit sensory output hundreds or thousands of miles to a traditional data center also cuts latency, meaning that the contents can be extracted faster.

Shaving even a few seconds off the analysis process has the potential make a big difference in the kind of industrial settings that IBM and Cisco are targeting. A manufacturer, for instance, could have Watson send real-time updates about a production line issue to the technicians in charge of fixing it. And the benefits only become more pronounced in far-flung locations like oil rigs, which often suffer from connectivity issues due to storms and other severe weather events. Removing the need to send maintenance logs to a remote data center for processing can save hours or even days in such situations.

The functionality should help IBM become more competitive against General Electric Co., Hitachi Ltd. and the other industrial giants that are also promising to help companies tap their machine-generated data. Cisco, meanwhile, stands to gain a similar advantage over rivaling router makers, though probably a less permanent one since the deal with Big Blue apparently isn’t exclusive. In other words, there’s a chance that Watson-powered networking equipment may eventually be sold by several different vendors. 

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