Cisco Systems Inc. is turning its attention to the Internet of Things with the launch Tuesday of two new platforms for connected devices.

The first of these involves Cisco Jasper, which has rolled out a major update to its automated connectivity management platform. Control Center 7.0 is the first release since Cisco acquired Jasper in February 2016, and is designed to help enterprises offer services tailored to their needs and scale their IoT businesses, the company said.

Cisco Jasper added that the platform’s enterprise customer base has almost tripled in the last year to more than 11,000 users. Now, Jasper’s IoT technologies are being integrated with Cisco’s solutions for the first time.

Control Center 7.0 is designed to help companies solve some of the biggest issues they face when first deploying IoT solutions, and comes after a Cisco-backed survey found that three-quarters of all IoT projects fail because of poor implementation and a lack of skills.

The solution was introduced at Cisco Live on Tuesday by Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager of IoT and applications at Cisco. He said Control Center 7.0 is a software-as-a-service platform that integrates into the world’s mobile networks and provides a common operating model, method and API for enterprises to run and control devices on these networks.

Some of the improvements include features for security, automation and analytics. On the analytics front, Control Center 7.0 will have reliability dashboards as well as usage monitoring tools that report on device trends and usage.

The platform also integrates Cisco’s Spark messaging service so users can collaborate to solve any issues with their connected devices, hopefully reducing the resolution times and costs associated with these problems. In addition, it also introduces support for cellular IoT technologies, and there are premium services that include more robust security to guard against malware and phishing attacks.

Trollope also announced a second new IoT platform called Kinetic, which he described as an “operations platform” in a blog post. Kinetic focuses on things like managing connections, data delivery and “fog computing,” better-known as edge computing, which refers to extending cloud computing to the edge of an enterprise’s network.

The company said that Kinetic “streamlines the capability of companies bringing their IoT initiatives to market,” and complements both the new Control center and also its new network initiative outlined last week, including its new Catalyst 9000 programmable IoT-ready switches.

“It’s really a platform for getting data off of your devices,” Trollope said, explaining how there are currently “trillions of terabytes” of data locked up on unconnected devices across the world. The idea is that companies can use Cisco Kinetic to extract that data and finally put it to use.

“The new endpoints of the network are more about ‘things’ rather than PCs and smartphones, so Cisco needs to react and manage these platforms,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc. “It’s good to see Cisco innovating with Kinetic, and even better seeing Cisco deliver on it promises that it will do more with Jasper than was offered before the acquisition. The new Control Center is proof of that: merged and enhanced Cisco and Jasper capabilities. Now we have to see what customers and partners will do in regards of adoption.”

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