California-based Kontakt.io has announced an integration with the Cisco DNA Spaces platform to enable Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) IoT in workspaces, healthcare, education and more.

Kontakt.io specialises in indoor location, IoT services and BLE. Its mission is to connect people, locations and things to increase satisfaction, save costs, and improve productivity and safety. The company uses open standard APIs and AI-driven event streams to help enterprises accelerate through digital transformation.

Cisco DNA Spaces is an end-to-end, indoor location services cloud platform that provides wireless users with location-based services. It delivers a scalable location-based platform, while being compatible across existing Cisco Aironet, Catalyst and Meraki infrastructure, as well as select Cisco Collaboration endpoints, with flexible deployment options.

Cisco DNA Spaces provides various pre-integrated IoT end devices, available in the IoT Device Marketplace to deliver an out-of-the-box and end-to-end IoT experience in the enterprise market.

“Cisco DNA Spaces and our partnership is a complete game-changer for the entire indoor IoT and location industry,” said Philipp von Gilsa, Kontakt.io CEO. “With more than a 50% market share, Cisco owns half of the enterprise ceiling across verticals globally. By enabling all access points to function as Bluetooth LE gateways, Cisco removes the need for an overlaying network and creates the foundation for hyper-growth for any application-centric vendor in the space. And it doesn’t stop there. All of this is cloud-enabled and standardised. Customers can now onboard 100,000 IoT devices with one click, allowing for secure two-way communications and complete device lifecycle management.”

Kontakt.io was the first vendor of Cisco’s DNA Spaces IoT Device Marketplace, which went live in October 2020. The partnership offers benefits to Cisco and Kontakt.io customers:

• Enterprise scale: Standardised and seamless onboarding, provisioning, managing, security and monitoring of all Kontakt.io devices via the Cisco network and Cisco DNA Spaces cloud.
• Cloud enabled: Users can now consume location and telemetry data using the existing wifi network with one click from Kontakt.io’s smart badges, asset tags and other BLE beacons, tags and sensors.
• Immediate value: With an existing API integration in place, Cisco customers can start using Kontakt.io apps for applications in asset tracking, temperature monitoring and occupancy management today.

“Kontakt.io’s integration with Cisco DNA Spaces represents a leap forward in the accessibility and scalability of indoor IoT services,” said Lucas Hanson, senior product manager for Cisco DNA Spaces. “Kontakt.io brings product expertise across industries, whether in healthcare or in corporate real estate management that, combined with the power of a Cisco network, can unlock true business value. Our joint customers can now utilise Kontakt.io devices with any application and manage the devices in one unified IoT platform.”

The combination of Cisco DNA Spaces and Kontakt.io can be used in:

• Environmental monitoring: Safeguard pharmaceuticals and vaccines by automatically monitoring the temperature of refrigerators and receive alerts when compliance breaches occur. 
• Medical asset management: Improve asset use, reduce overspending and improve productivity by tracking medical equipment, from wheelchairs to IV pumps.
• Occupancy and room-level monitoring: Reduce office space and improve use and employee satisfaction and productivity by measuring meeting-room and floor-level occupancy, temperature and air quality.
• Rollcage tracking: Reduce annual container shrinkage and bottlenecks by tracking roll cages and other carrier equipment between facilities.
• IT asset management: Reduce asset shrinkage and inventory time by tracking critical IT equipment and defining location-aware policies.