At an event in London, the US routing giant was touting a range of own-products that it claims are IoT-ready. Cisco says it won't be coming up with its big IoT platform announcement until next year, but in the mean time it's ready to share what it thinks are going to be some of the hot directions.

You might think that a Unified Communications platform might be a little doubtful as an IoT enabler, but Cisco sees value in M2M information streams being able to provide context for human events. As well it might, since Cisco is invested in UC through its ownership of Jabber, a system that combines instant messaging, voice, video, desktop sharing, and conferencing.

The pitch is that information generated by personal devices, such as smartphones, along with other info streams, could be exploited to make decisions on human presence and availability. For instance, streaming real-time information on motion and location could enable decisions to be made on where a particular person was and whether they were ready to take a call, say. The 'states' of associated objects or zones - such as a meeting room - might, if the room were designated 'booked', become a trigger to turn devices to airplane mode.

Personally I'm not sure I want to enable Big Brother to turn off my mobile but we get the idea. With the right streams of sensor data one can imagine applications inferring likely states and conditions and acting accordingly - just as they do in industrial applications or business process automation. In one way or another, few applications are going to remain untouched by the IoT.