Many companies are looking to optimise the way in which they use their office space.
Key questions about how well that space is used can drive decision making to help reduce costs and improve usage. Let’s dive into how Cisco Spaces can help.
What is Cisco Spaces?
Cisco Spaces is a multi-use application for making use of location awareness from your network.
That typically might be your wireless access points determining the location of Wi-Fi clients, or other sensors in the network, such as Meraki Cameras which can act as powerful sources of information to use in your Spaces deployment.
These can be displayed on maps and various use cases run to make use of that location data. Spaces allows the connection of third-party applications, so you can use your location awareness.
The Spaces eco-system is shown in the image below:
- Outcomes: The reason for using Spaces in the first place! These are typically use cases and the more you can attach a use-case to a business outcome the better the result for your business
- Software: Spaces is made up of the core Space application and the third-party applications which can link in: this allows diverse use cases such as way finding, Wi-Fi onboarding, OpenRoaming, sentiment monitoring, anti-theft monitoring and many more
- Hardware: The mix of Cisco and Meraki products can feed input data to Spaces alongside access points and Cisco Video Devices.
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The Network as a Sensor
Continuing from the section above, the hardware that feeds information into Spaces can enable a range of use cases.
This is best illustrated with an example: Workspace sensing
In this example, we will ingest information into Spaces from a couple of key sources:
- Cisco Video Devices: The cameras on Cisco Video Devices can detect how many people are in the room and measure noise levels. This in turn can be used to enable presence: showing that someone is in the room
- Access Points: The access points in the room, as well as providing Wi-Fi coverage, can also sense the temperature, humidity and air quality – and this can also be used to illustrate the quality and usage of that space
The image below shows how some of the telemetry in the room is fed back into the Spaces application: in this case that there are two people present in the room:
Cisco Spaces Use Cases
In the above section we explored just one use case – but there are many!
Once you are able to count people and determine their location, you can start to produce a lot of insights about how a space is used and how nice that space is to use.
There are many use cases available – here’s some more use cases for consideration:
- Occupancy Patterns
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- Optimised Space Utilisation
- Space as a Service Insights
- Occupancy Rates
- Room Booking Data
- Sustainability Reporting
- Energy Efficiency Opportunities
- Office Attendance Insights
- Return on Investment (ROI) calculation
- Predictive Maintenance
- Integration with IoT
- Real time space availability
- Peak demand Analysis
- Environmental Comfort
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Visualising Workspace Usage
Taking all this information into Cisco Spaces is one thing: but how do you make it useful?
The image below shows an example of how the data collected can be displayed and made use of. In this case, the number of people attending the office is counted and it can then be displayed to show which are the busiest days in the office. This allows a business to balance out the numbers of people attending the office on a given day.
Worth noting there’s the number of guests showing as attending the office too – so you can get a full picture of exactly how many people were in the office:
This information can be presented in a really user friendly way, to show the numbers of people in a given area of meeting room and if that room is booked. The image below shows when the room is booked, available, or occupied by people who are present without a booking:
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Workspace Usage with Cisco Spaces Summary
This run though on Cisco Spaces touched on a few use cases, but provides a starting point to understand what is possible when you combine sensors and software.
If you consider that you have already deployed many of those sensors – your network switches, access points and Cisco endpoints, the case becomes compelling to see what you can do with that data.
The ability to use the Firehose API allows third party use cases to be plugged into Cisco Spaces allowing you to be quite specific in terms of use cases – and the business benefit you get.
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