Putting Cisco on the Map at ONS

When one of the oil and gas industry’s largest events needed a solution to save resources, time and money, they called Cisco. At the Offshore Northern Seas (ONS) conference, organizers wanted to find a way to eliminate the paper maps, guides and updates that needed to be printed for the over 90,000 attendees and 1,300 exhibitors participating at the event. Forgoing the printed material, ONS came up with the idea of a digital app to guide conference goers around their show.

With the help of Cisco Connected Mobile Experiences (CMX) ecosystem partner, MazeMap, ONS had the searchable and linkable maps it needed. With Cisco CMX Location Analytics, ONS identified and addressed congestion at the venue.

“Cisco CMX is a key component of our wayfinding solutions,” says Thomas Jelle, CEO at MazeMap. “Attendees can search for exhibitors on the ONS app and maps guide them to the booth they’re looking for.”

The next part of their solution was installing the hardware needed to make sure those maps made it to their attendees’ wireless devices. Using Cisco switches and wireless access points (APs) with integrated 802.11ac, ONS was able to provide their members with the ability to navigate the 40,000 square meters of conference space spread out over multiple buildings.

The results were success as a high adoption rate–more than 23,000 unique users–connected through the navigation services. This high connection rate allowed for ONS to provide an accurate navigation experience for its attendees by helping them find the best way to get from their current location to a desired booth or conference exhibit. The fast-scaling Cisco solution also diagnosed bottlenecks and quickly scaled the network when attendance climbed past ONS’ expectations.

To learn more about the ONS solution, please visit the case study page.