Cisco DNA Spaces Ecosystem Partner Spotlight: Mazemap

Trying to find your way around a large campus, whether it is going to an appointment or looking for a specific conference room, can be disorienting when you are unaccustomed to the layout. Cisco DNA Spaces works with a multitude of partner apps and devices vendors to provide customers intuitive wayfinding solutions. Additionally, the location data that has long been used to make buildings more sustainable and secure can also make them safer, while optimizing adaptability and flexibility.

For today’s ecosystem partner spotlight, we will delve into how we are working with our App Center partner Mazemap, to enable indoor navigation for better user experiences and efficiency.

Creating great experiences through indoor positioning and wayfinding solutions

MazeMap is an innovative digital wayfinding platform, offering solutions for large campuses such as universities, hospitals, offices, hotels and event venues.

In addition to wayfinding, Mazemap offers meeting room visualization and booking tools, indoor positioning, and IoT integrations.

MazeMap stands out from other mapping vendors for a number of reasons:

1. MazeMap is a robust web based solution and can easily be used by many by a click of a link or scanning of a QR code. A mobile app is not required to use MazeMap. However, Mazemap can easily be embedded into mobile apps if needed.
2. MazeMap offers ‘Find Nearest Available’ meeting spaces by category with DNA Spaces location services when combined with Webex presence sensors or PIR sensors.
3. MazeMap’s Outlook integration visualizes in orange or green the status of the meeting spaces, and allows the user to book the meeting space via the map.
4. MazeMap uses AI and machine learning algorithms to create maps so delivery times and updates to existing maps are very fast
5. MazeMap’s solutions are easily scalable and can be adapted to suit buildings in one location or large complexes with a global footprint.

Cisco DNA Spaces and Mazemap provide joint customers a more holistic solution and enable innovative ways to experience building spaces. Through a robust integration with the Cisco DNA Spaces Firehose API, Mazemap can easily leverage Cisco DNA Spaces data in real-time to provide a large range of services, making the solution more diverse and agile.

Many solutions for indoor mapping and location services face major hurdles with complexity and limited ability to scale. A typical enterprise environment often has different vendors with their proprietary end devices that only work with proprietary applications. As a result, enterprises are required to deploy separate gateways, making it difficult to scale. For every use case you want to deliver, that means having one siloed technology stack with proprietary devices and applications. There is almost no visibility between these siloed technology stacks, impeding flexibility, and creating vendor lock-in and disjointed support models. In the end, these proprietary siloes lead to higher TCO for customers that want to deploy multiple use cases and end devices.

Cisco DNA Spaces Indoor IoT services eliminates proprietary siloes by providing an open, multi-vendor ecosystem of partner applications, integrations, and end devices. Cisco DNA Spaces, with gateway enabled Catalyst 9000 family access points and switches, acts as a middle ware that supports multiple vendors and end devices, including wireless, wired, sensors, and Webex. Customers can choose, onboard, and manage end devices suitable for specific use cases from the IoT Device Marketplace, and make those devices work with partner applications to realize industry-specific outcomes. With an open ecosystem, Cisco DNA Spaces provides a rich data set that allows Mazemap to deliver indoor mapping and other valuable use cases on top of existing Cisco infrastructure.

Universities, hotels, hospitals, corporate offices, and large venues leverage Cisco DNA Spaces and Mazemap for a variety of use cases:

• Indoor positioning and wayfinding: In large building complexes, such as universities, hospitals, offices, hotels, and conference venues, the challenge is it’s often difficult to find specific rooms or points of interest (POI’s). Combined Cisco DNA Spaces and MazeMap solutions provide A to B directions with indoor positioning.
• Meeting room visualization, booking, and cancellation with Webex Boards: Trying to find an available meeting room can be a challenge. In addition, many people book meeting rooms but never show up. With data flow from Cisco DNA Spaces Firehose API, MazeMap is able to see which rooms are available and book in one click, find the closest room to your location (with indoor positioning), and auto cancel meeting rooms in case of ‘no-shows’ to maximize utilization.
• Hot Desking: Employees can select and book their desks in advance, allowing cleaning staff to know which desks to clean and disinfect in between uses. With PIR sensors and Indoor IoT services, employees can see in real-time which desks are occupied. Enterprises can map out desks and assign color schemes and names to visually convey the new safe seating arrangements.
• Find My Friends (or colleagues): When at a busy event or in a large building or campus, it can be a challenge to locate your friends and colleagues. The combined solutions allow you to see the real-time location of people who have consented to share their location with you. Find My Doctor/Nurse allows medical staff to locate each other in times of need. A user can opt out anytime.
• Heatmaps: When trying to decide how best to utilize your building space, it can be difficult to know which areas in your buildings have significant occupancy or aren’t being used to their full potential. Using Cisco DNA Spaces positioning data, you’re able to pull anonymous data and see in real-time where people are located around the building and gain insight into how people use your spaces. You can also let users find quiet spaces and avoid crowded areas.
• Asset Tracking (Using Cisco DNA Spaces Asset Locator): – Keeping track of limited resources and equipment like IV pumps and ventilators is a challenge in large hospitals, often resulting in doctors, nurses and general staff wasting valuable time locating them. MazeMap pulls real-time position data from the tagged equipment. This data comes from Cisco DNA Spaces.

Making buildings smarter

Today, people expect their buildings and spaces to be as smart as our websites, mobile apps, and electronic devices. Indoor mapping can also be a strong foundation that allows you to deploy smart building use cases, such as controlling building temperature, humidity, and lighting.

Mazemap now takes both wired and wireless PIR sensor data to improve space utilization and empower flexible workspace environments.

Combining the underlying Catalyst 9000 access technology with Cisco DNA Spaces IoT Services for Smart Building empowers the smart building to:

• Improve efficiency and responsiveness: Allow for flexible employee movement and reduce manual efforts by using asset tags, real-time wireless location data, and sensors to monitor environmental conditions and increase visibility of critical assets and industrial facilities. Use 90W UPOE+ to power the flexible workspace to adapt quickly as needs change.
• Ensure safe building and room capacity: Leverage location data to monitor social density in buildings and respond to incidents with proximity reporting. Use AI automation, displays, sensors, and alerts to provide intelligent workplaces that make returning to the workplace safe.
• Maintain workforce continuity: Maintain your operations, even when a standard working environment isn’t feasible, with secure, policy-based remote connectivity into the operational domain.

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