The Digital Edge

I had an opportunity to attend a Mobility BU hosted training at Cisco HQ in Santa Clara. This training covered Hyperlocation, Connected Mobile Experience (CMX) and the Enterprise Mobility Services Platform (EMSP). I had been looking forward to this ever since I received the invite, having invested time into the solution as early as 2013. These technologies are unified in purpose in that each of them have a role to play in transforming the end-user experience and enabling businesses to engage with their customers in new and interesting ways.

As one of the Wireless Field Day 8 delegates, I had an opportunity to see the Hyperlocation Module (HALO) up close and personal, however we never got a chance to actually play with it. For those interested, I wrote a detailed blog post about the technology after the WFD8 event. This time around however, we not only got to spend time talking through the technology and its use cases, we actually spent time playing with it in the CMX Lab at Cisco HQ. Seeing hyperlocation in action is impressive and the accuracy was within one meter as advertised. While the location accuracy is great, what is really intriguing is the network is aware of where the user is rather than relying on the user to interact with a beacon or something similar. I had the opportunity to walk around the floor space with an iPhone6+ and watch its movement on the screen. The response was impressively crisp for being 100% Wi-Fi based, but not quite as smooth as beacon-based movement tracking. This distinction is important though as beacons do require a user to be using their app to adequately engage, where as hyperlocation is simply the network being aware of the device and its movement inherently.

Cisco’s CMX software works by detecting the presence of a device on the wireless network. Presence is simply the device being local to a given access point, it does not necessitate location, however location is an option and can be accomplished through standard triangulation or by the addition of the HALO module. Connection is the process of getting the user to opt-in through captive portal, SMS, social media, or mobile app. Some organizations are challenged with mobile app adoption so alternatives are a welcome addition. Lastly once the user is connected, engaging with them in new and innovative ways is the goal of the platform.

Playing with CMX at the Cisco lab was fantastic—we walked around with various devices ranging from phones to Ava the telepresence robot who drove herself around the lab. Our movements generated a ton of data for CMX which we could then use to send notifications, trigger an action, etc. The reports and analytics offered around these actions are simple to navigate and provide powerful insights for organizations.

EMSP is an open, cloud-hosted mobile application platform which provides an intelligent way to deliver customer engagement and is used with CMX to leverage location based services. Upon location acquisition of customer, EMSP wifi-enabled, browser-based captive portal provides a mobile experience specific to the location of the mobile device user, who they are and what they’re doing. EMSP then provides event-based, actionable insights which enable improved monetization and conversion of customer from looking to buying, from general presence to engaged interaction. In addition, the EMSP solution includes a tool suite for rapidly and dynamically updating content for the context-aware mobile experience. With this in mind, EMSP simplifies and accelerates time to deployment. It has the intelligent hooks to act upon the insights provided by CMX location services to improve the client experience, influence behavior, solicit feedback and automate workflow.