Cisco today introduced machine learning capabilities and tighter integration between service providers and vendors in its IoT management platform. Cisco IoT Control Center now includes machine learning models to identify anomalies and resolve problems before they impact IoT services. The feature also enables service providers to alert customers of errant or otherwise unused devices, and therefore implement greater control over connected devices.

Cisco’s IoT platform is largely the result of its $1.4 billion acquisition of Jasper in 2016, but the effort has grown considerably during the last four years. Cisco has partnerships and IoT management reselling agreements with 52 network operators and claims to be the No. 1 IoT management platform provider for connected cars.

Cisco IoT Control Center has also grown from managing 20 million IoT devices in 2016, to more than 160 million connected devices today, including a 35% growth in total devices in the last year, said Vikas Butaney, VP and head of Cisco’s IoT product team. More than 4 million new IoT devices are added to the platform every month, he added.

The vendor has been working to evolve the control center from a traditional connectivity management platform to one that now supports eSIM and 5G in non-standalone (NSA) mode. Cisco is also incubating specific use cases for 5G IoT with an emphasis on transportation, manufacturing, and smart cities. It also plans to support 5G standalone (SA) mode down the line.

“We have about 70,000 enterprise IoT customers today that are in the kind of heavier industries of manufacturing, transportation, and mining,” Butaney said. “We are working toward 5G [standalone] so that we can help our customers not just incubate the new use cases but also the capability to enable them.”

Cisco added low-power WAN IoT connectivity standards to the platform in 2017, including narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) and LTE-M.

With machine learning algorithms now integrated into the platform, Cisco is striving to simplify how customers manage their rate plans and further increase visibility into their entire IoT footprint. This gives operators that are selling access to Cisco’s IoT platform the ability to create a bundled offering, including managed services, billing, and device provisioning, according to the vendor.

“At the end of the day, the customer just wants it to work. They don’t want to be in the alphabet soup of technology,” Butaney said. “We sit behind the service provider and your price, your payment to the service provider funds Cisco so that we can stand this capability up.”