Cisco DNA Spaces Indoor IoT Services with Wi-Fi 6 – Delivering Business Outcomes at Scale

Organizations today are facing unprecedented times, and the need to digitize physical spaces has never been more important.

To adapt to these new challenges, enterprises must shift toward a new, open and unified ecosystem that both (1) supports delivering outcomes at scale and (2) continues to provide the enterprise with control of their infrastructure and solution stack.

Cisco’s wireless infrastructure with Cisco DNA Spaces is a powerful framework to enable this new requirement. Wireless access points have evolved from being used for connectivity to being a sensor enabling location services –  and Cisco’s Wi-Fi 6 Certified Catalyst 9100 access points powered by Cisco’s Catalyst 9800 controllers can now serve as a powerful gateway for not just Wi-Fi devices but also BLE asset tags, beacons, and other IoT end devices.

With *Cisco DNA Spaces Indoor IoT Services, customers can take their wireless beyond connectivity, digitize their physical spaces, and gain insights on the behavior of people, and now things. Currently supporting at least 500 million mobile devices, processing over 1 trillion location updates, and live across over 1 million access points, Cisco DNA Spaces continues to scale into digitizing enterprises across various industries.

Enabling Multiple Use Cases through an Open, Unified Platform

Location services solutions today face major challenges with complexity and limited ability to scale. There is a fragmented market of proprietary solutions where new applications would require disparate hardware and software, limiting flexibility and reusability.

Vendor-specific apps and hardware mean that there are separate touchpoints for monitoring and support, resulting in disjointed support models. As customers discover more use cases and deploy more IoT devices, they run into management pains with vendor lock-in and limited scalability.

To overcome this complexity and cost, we are excited to announce Cisco DNA Spaces *Indoor IoT Services – which provides an open and unified platform for ordering IoT devices, onboarding and configuring devices, and connecting to industry-specific applications to enable business outcomes.

This offering will help customers deploy their applications rapidly, at scale, and at a significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO).  This empowers enterprises to deploy multiple use cases such as asset management, room finding, space utilization, environmental monitoring, employee safety, and more, all enabled through a single middleware layer.

With Cisco DNA Spaces Indoor IoT Services, customers can deploy a broader spectrum of end devices, all without having to deploy separate gateways.

The IoT Device Marketplace features a broad spectrum of supported end devices ready for customers to order and deploy. Customers have a wide choice of specialized beacons, tags, wristbands, badges, sensors, and other devices that are ready to deploy.

They can choose these devices based on their required use case, technology, form factor, and price. The device vendors are validated and are integrated into Cisco DNA Spaces end-to-end support model.

Customers can discover and order end devices through the IoT Device Marketplace.

Cisco DNA Spaces also has an ecosystem of partner applications that are easy to activate. The Cisco DNA Spaces App Center features industry specific partner applications that leverages the location data from Cisco DNA Spaces, delivered over the Firehose API, to drive business outcomes across healthcare, workspaces, retail, hospitality, education, and manufacturing.

Discover vertical specific partner applications on the Cisco DNA Spaces App Center.

Wi-Fi 6 Access Points with Dynamic Gateways

Cisco’s Wi-Fi 6 certified Catalyst 9100 access points can now host the Cisco DNA Spaces Advanced Gateway, deployed through Indoor IoT Services. This gateway enables management of BLE beacons and asset tags. The access points also come standard with a BLE radio, allowing them to scan, detect telemetry, transmit, and receive location information from various BLE end devices.

This decouples devices & applications, meaning customers can enable multiple applications with a wide range of devices, without having to worry about vendor compatibilities. This also replaces the need for overlay networks, and customers won’t have to deploy separate gateways.

End-to-End as a Service

Cisco DNA Spaces Indoor IoT Services is an end-to-end as a service offering that greatly simplifies the activation, configuration, monitoring and management of IoT end devices from different vendors. You can discover devices from your network, activate them, and group these devices by assets, use cases and types of devices.

Device management is made simple with the ability to apply policy-based configurations to the device groupings.

Apply policies to device groups, based on use case or asset.

End-to-end monitoring & support capabilities are also being expanded to include the end devices, in addition to Cisco DNA Spaces location data, access points, and partner applications. Monitoring will now include device battery level, last heard, and firmware to ensure that your end devices are working optimally.

Monitor devices through the dashboard and get proactive alerts on which devices require attention.