Cisco Partners get creative and develop unique solutions in APJC Innovation Challenge 2022

Technology shapes every aspect of our lives—from the way we communicate to the way we work and how we play. It’s no wonder, that innovative companies are always on the lookout for new technology to give them a leg up on the competition. If you’re looking to be inspired by game-changing solutions on Cisco’s broad range of leading technology, that’s where our Cisco Partners across Asia Pacific are leading the way.

Innovation

Innovation is key to staying ahead in this predictably unpredictable world we live in today, and while it may be hard to come up with new ideas, it’s important to keep challenging the status quo. Cisco Partner Innovation Challenge encourages our Partners to develop and showcase new and innovative concepts and over the past few years Asia Pacific Japan & Greater China (APJC) has been leading the way when it comes to Innovation.

As a region, Asia Pacific has a strong commitment to promoting innovation, and Cisco and our world class Partner Ecosystem is poised to continue playing a leading role in shaping the future of the region. Now in its fifth year globally, this challenge shows that any partner of any size, and in any location can build meaningful solutions with the breadth of Cisco platform and products. This year we continued with the challenge to drive awareness and adoption of Cisco Platform APIs across our APJC partner community. We can’t wait to see what our partners are developing in time for 2023 Challenge but for now, Congratulations to our 2022 winners!

APJC Innovation Challenge Winners

Australia & New Zealand: Outcomex

Smart CityDeck is an all-in-one smart city management solution which includes sensors and smart cameras, network connectivity, and Outcomex’s built platform. The platform consolidates data collected from their IoT solutions’ components and delivers the information to the user on an application tailored to the data they require. Through the utilisation of Cisco API’s and industrial hardware, Smart CityDeck offers real-time visibility and analytics, allowing the user to easily monitor different environments in their smart city, such as construction sites (before and during construction), public spaces, residential and commercial spaces, and wildlife habitats. The data enables customers to make informed decisions when strategically designing spaces, improving the community by catering to its residents’ changing needs, as well as enhancing social, educational, environmental and economic aspects of life.

ASEAN: MasterSystem Infotama

Environmental sustainability has become a critical component for Service Providers and electricity consumption is one area that Service Providers are constantly looking at improving when it comes to reducing their carbon footprint. The Mastersystem Sustainability Optimization (MSSO) application improves a Service Provider’s sustainability in network operations by continuously monitoring network equipment’s utilization when it comes to power consumption, heat generation, port, line card, CPU & memory usage, while continuously optimizing them. MSSO will provide a benchmark for Service Providers’ management and Operations team to help them achieve their environmental goals.

Greater China: Shanghai Kevins

The Classroom of the Future is not only the extension of the concept of “smart classroom“, but a system top-level design architecture in which functions are continuously modularized. Under the impact of the COVID-19, remote education has become a very common scenario. Our solution is suitable for a variety of deployment scenarios, whether it is private cloud, public cloud, or hybrid. It can meet the needs of users from different industries. The hope is that the Classroom of the Future will serve all communities, especially in remote areas where educational resources are needed

India: Velocis

BullsEye created by Velocis is a comprehensive Root Cause Analysis Engine that focusses on causes and not symptoms. BullsEye provides holistic views on issues and derives RCA based on decision Matrix, which none of the existing tools provided. BullsEye connects to multiple domains and platforms and fetches Key Performance Indicators all the while using deductive reasoning logic as well as a decision matrix for finding a Root Cause Analysis. In its 1st release, it integrates with Cisco ThousandEyes AWS CloudWatch Cisco DNAC controller ITSM (Everest). BullsEye is designed to understand issues/ queries stated by Business User (Hybrid Working) & IT Admin in Conversational English using an “NLP (Natural Language Processing)” capability.

Korea: SNet Systems

In South Korea, S Net Systems’ Ocean, is a private cloud management portal that provides individual portals for users and administrators. Ocean links legacy and virtual infrastructure environments through APIs to create a service subscription and management process and apply policies to infrastructure environments. With Ocean, S Net Systems customers have the unique advantage of being able to operate and manage the private cloud environment through an automated portal like a Public Cloud and optimize costs for industries that cannot leverage the public cloud as a result of security compliance issues.

Special Mentions

As a result of the overwhelming innovation we are witnessing across the region, in addition to the winners in each of the five participating theatres. Two partner submissions caught the judges attention and were awarded special mention for their solutions using Cisco technology to solve real world business issues. They are:

Australia & New Zealand: Insite Communications

In the wake of the COVID pandemic, the Early Childhood Education (Childcare) segment has faced many challenges, not least of which is how to maintain a high level of care and educational services to its customers, with both funding and staffing crises in full effect. Children’s safety and ensuring they are not left unaccompanied in the centre, posing risk is to the child and their family, there is both severe financial and reputational risk to a company that is unable to provide a safe environment. Insite Communications has been working closely with Childcare customers in ANZ under the theme of “Safety + Technology” to develop a Meraki-based solution to solve for this problem.

India : NCINGA

Sri Lankan partner’s NCINGA’s solution introduces deep learning and data engineering techniques to identify and predict abnormal behaviors within network nodes by analyzing their real-time health data. The solution consists of an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipeline, a deep learning model, and a web-based dashboard. Existing implementations including one of the country’s largest Service Providers identified over 50 network nodes infected by software bugs that can lead to extreme CPU/Memory utilization and device crashing. Proactively prevent device crashes and unplanned service outages.