Cisco and IBM have announced a global collaboration to bring intelligent insight to IoT devices at the network edge.

IBM’s Watson IoT and business analytics will combine with Cisco’s edge analytics technologies to enable machine-driven action at the point of data collection, according to the announcement.

The two companies expect industries such as oil and gas, manufacturing, mining, and transport and logistics to find the most benefit from the collaboration. These are the sectors where bandwidth to network extremities often restricts the ability to send data back to the cloud for analytics purposes.

Harriet Green, general manager of IBM Watson IoT’s commerce and education division said in a statement: “By coming together, IBM and Cisco are taking these powerful IoT technologies the last mile, extending Watson IoT from the cloud to the edge of computer networks, helping to make these strong analytics capabilities available virtually anywhere, always.”

“With the vast amount of data being created at the edge of the network, using existing Cisco infrastructure to perform streaming analytics is the perfect way to cost-effectively obtain real-time insights,” added Mala Anand, senior vice president of the Cisco data and analytics platforms group.