Meraki's First Global Virtual Hackathon Is a Real Success

Over a handful of days at the end of May, Meraki held its first global, virtual hackathon. It was a rousing success! Over 100 participants, on 30+ teams, worked diligently on building innovative solutions using the Meraki platform at their center. The result was ten new project submissions. Check them out!

The lead up to the event included defining challenges in specific verticals — Retail/Hospitality, Manufacturing/Healthcare, and Operations. We also wanted to bring together other Cisco technology teams. These included Webex Teams and Umbrella. The teams were encouraged to use additional technologies on top of Meraki to show the power of APIs in building solutions that solved problems within the selected verticals. The kick off to the hackathon was attended by over 400 people interested in what these platforms had to offer!

Armed with the DevNet and/or Meraki lab environments, the teams worked over 48 hours and the results were outstanding! Here’s a quick look at some of the winners.

Overall hackathon winner: Quick Pick-Up

“Hospitality challenges with the current COVID-19 pandemic are real. One challenge is that people are often waiting for a long time for order pick-ups. The Quick Pick-Up solution facilitates contact-less order pick-up processing for restaurant patrons. Thus, eliminating the need for phone calls and IVR.”

Public Vote Winner: Filter Point

“Impact Networking manages 594 Meraki networks across the nation. Impact has begun to include Umbrella with many of its clients to augment the protection for our roaming end points when those clients are not in the office. One of our field network engineers reached out and asked if there was a way to copy the Filtered Categories, Whitelists, and Blacklists from Meraki to Umbrella. We realized a method to do this did not exist. Shortly after, we heard about the Meraki Hackathon and knew exactly what we wanted to work on!”

Retail/Hospitality: RAPID (Retail Android Pandemic Incident Disrupter)

“COVID-19 has disrupted many business processes. As a result, many people are in the process of redefining ‘normal.’ The retail space is one area that needs to rethink the way they operate to ensure the safety of their employees and customers. Team 2 at NTT has developed an idea/application to assist with that. Using Meraki MV cameras and sense API, our clients are able to keep an accurate count of people entering and exiting their store/location.”

Manufacturing/Healthcare: Insight Citizen Care Pod

“The Citizen Care Pod is outfitted with a variety of Cisco Meraki gear, including cameras, SD-WAN, and access points for connectivity. These are used to collect and send data to the Connected Platform so that customers can analyze and be more responsive to real-time data reports.”

Operations: NORRIS

“Tools like Stealthwatch can help identify which systems have been compromised. But a gap exists between identifying the affected clients and taking swift action to prevent a further spread.

NORRIS visualizes the location and threat assessment of wired and wireless clients. It enables single button quarantine of malicious clients. Then, using APIs to automate changing vlans and firewall rules to isolate these devices from the rest of the network, a technician can be dispatched to resolve the situation.”

Define your own Challenge: Automated Network Deployment & Support Healthcare App

Using the Meraki Dashboard API, the CAE application is a single step Meraki deployment tool. It enables the healthcare industry to setup an entire suite of Meraki solutions using a single step action.