Cisco Operational Insights: A New Way of Seeing Operations

Businesses thrive when they create value for their shareholder and stakeholders by maximizing revenues and minimizing costs. Technology, especially wireless and IoT, can be invaluable tools to achieve these goals. But, when it comes to operating costs, these IT pillars, while incredibly valuable, only address part of the challenge.

Cisco is leading the industry with intent-based networking to allow IT to leverage its world class infrastructure, inform actions with business intent, and create value for its customers. Cisco Connected Mobile Experiences has been very successful in improving the top-line growth. It leverages Cisco’s best-in-class location to provide better in-venue insights and provide visitors with personalized experiences to build loyalty and customer lifetime value. Now, Cisco is applying these same principles to operational workflows with the introduction of Cisco Operational Insights.

Cisco Operational Insights mission is to improve operational efficiencies for our customers and help them save time, money and in some cases even lives. It is a cloud-based platform that captures network and business context of operations in real time to provide better operational insights and corrective actions. It provides organization-wide, end-to-end visibility by capturing data from across multiple technologies and functional silos in one solution. It is cloud-based making it highly scalable, reliable and secure.

In simple terms, Cisco Operational Insights does three things – Digitize, Synthesize and Optimize

◈ Digitize

It takes network context of the operations from the CMX Location engine by capturing asset location, environmental sensor conditions, and other key telemetry or data. This is done by monitoring Wi-Fi and BLE devices or CCX compliant Wi-Fi asset tags supported by multiple vendors..

It also adds the business context such asset name, category, department, operating state, and many custom attributes.

◈ Synthesize

Operational Insights has a sophisticated rules engine that automatically triggers alerts when asset or process conditions cross custom thresholds. Notifications can be delivered via Email, SMS or push APIs to other enterprise systems. Both network and business context are analyzed historically and in real-time. Historical data is also analyzed to provide better operational insights

◈ Optimize

Operational Insights help customers save time and resources by locating assets quickly using a web interface or included mobile app. The solution improves compliance by applying the necessary business rules and immediately alerting to out-of-compliance conditions. By automating workflows and report creation and delivery, much of manual overhead is further reduced.

At its core, Operational Insights takes a platform approach. Our goal is to open up the platform to allow third-party vendors to provide Wi-Fi and BLE tags and sensors; and to leverage open APIs to extract normalized data, leverage platform capabilities and integrate with specialized application for vertical specific workflows. By suppoerting generic Wi-Fi and BLE devices and third-party Cisco Compatible Extension (CCX) capable Wi-Fi/RFID tags, the solution allows customers to monitor operational workflows from a single pane of glass irrespective of choice of devices.