New Apps for Location Analytics: How We Will Build Them

Look up. If you’re in an office, there’s almost certainly a wireless access point on a ceiling very near you. But what is that access point doing, other than connecting you? Is your network using that access point to your business’ best advantage?

Wireless access points can do much more than just connect devices to a network. Many of our customers are using Cisco DNA Spaces to collect analytics on how people and things move around their facilities. It is data that can have a direct, significant impact on business.

But there is a next step beyond even this. We are building a platform to provide selected partners full access to the location data that access points collect. These partners will be able to use this data to extend their own business apps.

Let me tell you about a few of these new apps, and then how we are going to help our partners develop even more of them.

Let’s talk

I am personally looking forward to using the indoor mapping and meeting room finding service from MazeMap.

Using location data from Cisco wireless access points, person-awareness technology from Cisco Webex video conference systems in conference rooms, plus maps from MazeMap, Cisco DNA Spaces will be able to tell you where the nearest unoccupied conference room is to you right now. If you work in an open office and you’ve ever needed to duck into a room quickly to take a private call, or have ever wanted to just talk in confidence with a co-worker without having a meeting set up in advance, you will appreciate this feature.

MazeMap’s Roomfinder helps you find open conference rooms in real-time.

For one large enterprise we’re working with, we estimate a gain of $17 million in productivity by implementing this feature.  This application improves office out while making employees’ lives easier.

Campus space

In the education business, student attendance is often the main metric that determines the success of a school & how much funding various grants will make available to that school. But how can you collect accurate attendance figures in a space – like a classroom, a lecture hall, a sporting space, or a lab – reliably, repeatedly, and efficiently?

Cisco DNA Spaces is working with Involvio, a company that makes apps and services for the student experience, to use location data to track the use of campus facilities in real-time, based on the presence of students signed into the program.

The Cisco Partnership

Those are two of the six partnerships we’re announcing today. We are also working with LocalMeasure in the retail space; Airista Flow in hospitality management and healthcare; Stanley Healthcare for infant protection, patient tracking, and asset tracking; and Kontakt.io for asset tracking in manufacturing.

In all of these partnerships, we worked with the vendor to improve & scale their location-based offerings. Cisco DNA Spaces has a rich “firehose” API that can provide reliable, high quality location data to partners, as well as strong enforcement of user privacy & data security.

IT teams will be able to select DNA Spaces partner apps from an online App Center.

We maintain a connection to the services after they are delivered. Should there be an issue with location data anywhere in the application, our 24×7 monitoring and notification features will help customers and partners track, identify, and resolve issues quickly. This end-to end monitoring will reduce the time and expense of troubleshooting these complex multi-party use cases.

If you’re interested in building out your own industry-specific location services using the rich data available in Cisco DNA Spaces, check our Partners Page. On that site you can see what data is available, as well as the unique and fine-grained privacy and data protections available to both your users and your corporate data streams.

Easy onramp

IT operators are going to find these new location services easy to add to their application suites. All the new services are cloud-based. Turning one on will be as simple as filling out a few boxes in a Web-based control panel.

We want to make the richness of location data available to businesses in every industry. Knowing how people and things move through physical space can have a direct, positive impact on the bottom line. With Cisco DNA Spaces partner services, we will make accessing that value as straightforward as possible.

Learn more about Cisco DNA Spaces.

Cisco Partners: check out the Cisco DNA Spaces Partner Page.