Cisco Mobility Services Engine with Enhanced Wi-Fi Location Accuracy and Analytics: Best of Interop 2014 Finalist

Cisco has been placing a lot of emphasis on delivering solutions that provide insights and understanding on how customers, patients, visitors and communities interact with their physical environments. Mobility and leveraging mobile devices in the environment has revealed itself as a very powerful way to gather critical business intelligence. This business intelligence is highly impacted by the resolution of the location-data and the demand to improve resolution and accuracy is increasing quickly.  Apparently, this has not been missed by UBM. This year Cisco is honored to be selected as a Best of Interop Finalist for the Wireless award category for our innovations in improving location data resolution calculations.

It’s an honor to be recognized for our innovation and technological advancements in wireless, and we wanted to share a bit more about our submission with you.

What are Location Data Resolution Calculations?

Many systems acquire location analytics by relying solely on the probing that occurs from a mobile device to an access point. Unfortunately, this approach is delivering diminishing returns. It puts location analytics at the mercy of the mobile device vendors. What I mean by this is that as mobile device manufacturers look to improve mobile devices in regards to OS, drivers and battery life they are reducing the frequency of the probing from the mobile device. In addition, different mobile device manufacturer use different probing intervals. The need to do this makes sense from the mobile device manufacturer perspective, but it has an impact on the accuracy of the data acquired when representing movement of end users in the physical environment. If a user is recognized when they walk in the environment and then is identified a minute later, there is a lot of movement that can occur in that time.  But the analytics only sees two data points and draws a straight line. Not a very accurate representation.

Cisco is leveraging what we know best, the network, to supplement the device probing. Bringing in network data allows us to gather higher data resolution regarding mobile device movement, equating to a more accurate representations of end user movement in the environment.

Why is This Important?

This information is crucial in solution such as the Cisco Connected Mobile Experience (CMX) where business decisions are being made based on understanding customer traffic patterns or measuring the impact of advertising within the location. As you can imagine the more accurate the data, the more successful you will be in understanding how people interact with the environment.

How does Cisco Compare with The Competition?

Most solutions still rely on mobile device probing, which is good for location estimation. However the demand for accuracy is greatly increasing and when making critical business decision estimation may not be sufficient. Cisco is able to provide up to 8X more data points for a clear understanding of what is truly happening in the environment.

How can it be Used in the Enterprise?

As with many upcoming technologies, scalability often becomes a critical decision factor, having the ability to have granular location data resolution is great, but what happens when the amount of data cannot be store or accessed to be put to good use. That is why Cisco is also increasing the scalability of the Cisco Mobility Services Engine to meet this Enterprise level demand.

Where can I learn more at Interop?

If you are attending Interop Las Vegas be sure to visit us at our booth #1327 and come listen to Cisco, partner and customer experts discuss these new innovations at our luncheon event on April 1, 2014. Register for the event. If not, you can still watch the event by registering here.

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Are you going to Interop?

Winners will be announced Tuesday, April 1, 2014, 5:30PM in the Interop Theater on the Expo Floor

For more information visit: http://www.bestofinterop.com/.

About Interop®
Interop ® drives the adoption of technology, providing knowledge and insight to help IT and corporate decision-makers achieve business success. Part of UBM Tech’s family of global brands, Interop is the leading business technology event series. Through in-depth educational programs, workshops, real-world demonstrations and live technology implementations in its unique InteropNet program, Interop provides the forum for the most powerful innovations and solutions the industry has to offer. Interop Las Vegas is the flagship event held each spring, with Interop New York held each fall, with annual international events in Mumbai and Tokyo, all produced by UBM Tech and partners. For more information about these events visit www.interop.com.