APJC Partners shine in Innovation Challenge

When it comes to the Cisco Innovation challenge, it seems to be a very productive pursuit for partners in Asia Pacific Japan, and Greater China (APJC).

The Cisco Global Innovation Challenge was designed and launched in 2018 to drive awareness and adoption of Cisco APIs across our global partner community. Now in its third year, the number of submissions globally has not only increased fivefold since its inception, this year a little over 80% of total submissions were from new partners who had not participated in the challenge before.

Since its launch, partners from Asia Pacific Japan, and Greater China have performed well in the APJC Innovation Challenge. In 2018 with MFEC and in 2019 with Wipro – APJC partners have claimed the runners’-up position two years in a row in the Global Innovation Challenge.

As a precursor to the Global challenge, across the region, Cisco’s APJC Partner Organization runs a theatre version of the challenge and the winner and runner – up from each theatre joins the global challenge as finalists

This year we are very proud to announce that an APJC partner has won the top award. We would like to congratulate Outcomex from Australia for getting the top award at this year’s Cisco Global Innovation Challenge.

They created Farmdeck, an end-to-end farm management solution which includes sensors, network connectivity, data storage, and data analytics platform. This platform allows Outcomex to deliver valuable insights to customers on an application tailored to their farm. Through the utilization of Cisco API’s and industrial hardware, Farmdeck offers real-time visibility and analytics allowing the user to easily monitor their environment, make informed business decisions, and automate certain tasks. In summary, Outcomex’s submission combined innovation, affordable end-to-end IoT solutions, and was customizable to help the Agriculture industry work smarter and more efficiently. Find out more in this in-depth interview with CEO Marco Delgado

In addition to Outcomex, there is so much more innovation happening across APJC that here are the winners from across APJC.

In ASEAN, Logicalis developed JarviX. an intelligent platform that helps the hospitality industry in managing and ensuring safety precaution is taken from the moment a room reservation is made. With built-in temperature checking, e-form declarations, social distancing, and no human interaction post sanitization human interaction this creates a safe environment for guests.

From hospitality we move to the office with Macroview Telecom from Greater China creating a post COVID-19 digital workspace consisting of clean technology for the office, this includes a hygiene standard indicator, touch-free world, minimal on-site support, social tracing model and a solution road map.

Sticking with the office, India’s Nipun Net Solutions’ proposed nView integrates with Cisco DNA Spaces (People Tracking), CKC platform, (IoT Sensor monitoring), Cisco WebEx platform (Collaboration in real-time) and Meraki cameras (Surveillance) to help customers monitor real-time situations, track people, collaborate easily and reduce accident probability and hence help save more lives. This solution would also help organizations to cope with challenges posed by pandemics with real-time monitoring of physical distance at the workplace, which includes contact tracing, temperature monitoring, sanitization compliance, and face mask compliance.

With everything going on this year, Phone Appli from Japan realized that reducing the risk of infection and minimizing its spread is paramount. However, economic activity needs to continue safely. With this in mind, their solution enables customers to carry out economic activities while ensuring their safety by providing value to almost any organization. Currently, customers (5+) are interested in the solution they developed which creates a list of people who may have been near those infected person for significant periods of time based on location history tracking.

Finally, hospitals have always been crowded, and today the need to limit the spread of infection is critical. An infection to a hospital origin could damage a hospital’s reputation along and hit them financially. Therefore, Airquay created the Hospital Information System or HIS which provides a holistic view of pandemic or epidemic control. HIS will be equipped with additional features such as hand washing to prevent infections from occurring in advance and using facial recognition technology to identify contactors and preventing the spread of infection. This includes real-time tracking of the infected patient and notifying nearby security staffs when a threat situation occurs.

It was so heartening to reading the different nominations from so many partners in 2020 and we look forward to seeing even more innovation from our diverse partner ecosystem as they show us the unique ways that they are using Cisco as a platform to support business and the community in APJC.