Why I’m So Thrilled to Welcome the Location Services Company, July Systems, to Cisco

Today, Cisco is closing the acquisition of July Systems, the cloud-based mobile experience and location services platform that has been powering the Cisco Connected Mobile Experience (CMX) Engage solution in our Wireless Networking portfolio. I am very happy to welcome the team onboard.

The technology July Systems has developed is critical for our customers. Their solution provides businesses with deep and accurate analytics about who and what is in their physical locations along with the ability to act on those insights in real-time through Cisco and our partners’ systems at a truly enterprise scale. Using Cisco’s and July Systems’ combined capabilities, Cisco’s partners can develop vertical solutions for customers more effectively and take full advantage of end user location data.

For example, I was recently at a meeting in a hotel who is also a customer of the CMX Engage service. During the meeting, July Systems’ founder, Rajesh Reddy, was able to demonstrate that in the hotel we were in there were precisely 228 Wi-Fi users, 38 of which were members of the hotel chain’s loyalty program, and how many had used the gym during their stay.

This kind of data is critical to business. Hotel owners, for instance, know that their most profitable customers are the ones who spend more time on their properties. But until now they haven’t had any way of knowing when their guests were actually in their facilities, or what amenities and services were being utilized and which ones provide the most value to their guests. Now they can not only get that data – either as unidentified user data or linked to specific guests who have opted-in to their loyalty program—but also take action on that data in real time.  With appropriate respect for privacy, this visibility fundamentally transforms how hotels manage their operations and enables them to provide the best service to their guests.

July Systems provides its location services, behavioral data, and analytics capability as an enterprise-grade cloud service. The data is designed to be integrated with business context, to serve the creation of highly effective Web and mobile applications.

We plan to leverage July Systems’ capabilities to deliver Location as a Platform: July Systems’ solutions have the capability to capture appropriate user permission and ingest, rationalize, and process data from multiple sources; add context; and share that data with partners and customers looking to deliver new business outcomes for applications such as healthcare, government, security, logistics, manufacturing, hotels, education, and retail.

The acquisition also supports our journey to intent-based networking, a fundamentally new way of building and managing networks for the digital era. Cisco recently announced that we are opening up our intent-based networks to developers, with a suite of powerful new platform tools. The July Systems acquisition fits our vision of creating an open and programmable platform for innovation for our partners and our customers.

July Systems’ current customers include Intercontinental Hotel Group, Westfield Corp., and many others. I could not be more pleased that we will be working even more closely with the July Systems team, and will be able to bring their experience and market knowledge to more of Cisco’s partners and customers.