* Cisco to roll out vertical solutions at Interop
At the Interop trade show in Las Vegas this week, most wireless LAN vendors will discuss their 802.11n readiness and debate the latest evolution in Wi-Fi architectures. Industry heavyweight Cisco, however, will focus its attention elsewhere.
The company intends to roll out wireless bundles for the healthcare, retail and energy industries. The solutions, to be available immediately, unite new Wi-Fi Cisco Compatible Extensions (CCX) for Tags, Cisco’s WLAN infrastructure, its wireless location appliance and its IP telephony products with products from third parties.
CCX for Tags allows enterprises with location-tracking requirements to mix and match different vendors’ Wi-Fi tags with Cisco’s location appliance and WLANs, says Lynn Lucas, director of mobility services at Cisco. The heterogeneous Wi-Fi tagging is important, because sensors in different tags track and monitor different things, such as temperature, vibration level and humidity. A given organization might wish to use a mix of tags and applications to monitor a variety of conditions and thresholds in the healthcare and energy industries, for example.
Cisco’s package for healthcare providers uses sensors mounted at check points, such as doorways, to track which CCX-tagged items and people have passed through them and at what time. This approach deterministically calculates where biomedical equipment, hospital beds, newborn babies and other items and people are and is more accurate than today’s triangulation/trilateration tracking technologies, says Lucas.
In addition to location, organizations can also track the status and condition of devices — such as whether they have been sterilized, Lucas explains.
For retailers, Cisco is mounting wireless terminals, which integrate with Cisco WLANs and IP telephony environments, to shopping carts. Shoppers can use the carts to scan products for price checks or to uncover the aisle in which the Marshmallow Fluff is hiding.
The retailer can also use the smart carts to track merchandising trends and push relevant ads and promotions to users based on where they happen to be in the store, explains Lucas.
Side note: The carts themselves might become assets to be tracked (like hospital beds and equipment), as retailers now have more to lose if expensive, computer-enabled shopping carts disappear from the parking lot.
The retail solution also adds push-to-talk (PTT) capabilities to the Cisco 7921G Wi-Fi phone using software from Berbee Software, a company that develops applications for Cisco IP telephony environments.
