Vicki Batka (Cisco)
Cisco has recognised the most innovative partners across Asia Pacific following a standout year of customer growth through the channel.
Unveiled during PartnerXperience in March 2019, the Theatre Innovation Challenge was designed to accelerate partner-developed applications which add value on top of any existing Cisco technology.
NTT Malaysia took home the honours in ASEAN, Taleka excelled in Australia and New Zealand and Wipro came out on top in India, in addition to also being recognised as a runner-up in there global category.
Meanwhile, Genesis Technology, Net One Systems and SNET Systems were honoured across Greater China, Japan and Korea respectively.
“With IT driving business transformation, Cisco and our partner ecosystem in APJC are providing our customers with a competitive edge by delivering business outcomes that align to their digital transformation goals,” said Vicki Batka, vice president of Partner Organisation across Asia Pacific and Japan at Cisco.
“The Cisco APJC Innovation Challenge proved just that, with partners across the region developing applications on top of existing Cisco technology with added value to customers.”
According to Batka, the aim was centred around creating solutions capable of solving customer business problems using the vendor’s programmable technology, spanning the entire regional channel.
“The challenge inspired and encouraged innovation and new programmability business use cases,” Batka added. “We received a number of highly competitive submissions by partners from across APJC, that included a range of solutions to solve business and social problems using Cisco programmable technology specific to their particular market.
“It was great to see the impact that Cisco and our Partners can have in our customers but also on our communities.”
ASEAN: NTT Malaysia
The team created a “software-defined visualisation (SDV)” tool that takes each SDN platform’s published APIs combined with a machine learning engine and integrated these into a web-based tool.
This provides end-to-end network and application topology visualisation, path trace with application dependency mapping, business impact analysis and machine-learning based exceptions alerting.
Australia and New Zealand: Taleka
Taleka was selected as the winning partner with ecosystem partner Appspace, for a solution designed to enhance the workplace experience through Cisco Webex. The offering combines AI insights, on-demand content and the Appspace App running on Cisco Collaboration Endpoints.
Working with Appspace, the goal of the solution is to achieve faster technology adoption across users of all generations. By using only voice, users can request educational guides, tips and tricks which is then displayed on the collaboration endpoint.
India: Wipro
After reading a survey by the United Nations which highlighted that unemployment rates of people with disabilities are far higher than people without, the team from Wipro began creating a Digital Accessibility System for the Future Workplace.
With this, Wipro aims to tackle challenges by empowering the disabled through a digital assistant and providing organisations with the right platform to mitigate the challenges.
This is achieved by allowing differently abled people to interact with the IT network using DNA Center via audio input/output and utilising audio/video integration with WebEx teams to boost collaboration. Wipro also used a context aware system using AI that understands the intent of a person through natural conversational language and places this into action through DNA Center.
Greater China: Genesis Technology
Leveraging Cisco Meeting Server (CMS) as the core development for their video conference manager, Genesis Technology's goal is to reduce connectivity challenges and provide an entire meeting lifecycle management for video conferencing.
The aim is to achieve higher efficiency as well as quality to meet "quantifiable business needs" which range from cost optimisation of business travel costs to improved employee productivity and morale.
Japan: Net One Systems
Cisco's disaster recovery wi-fi solution helps network administrators reinforce wi-fi network availability while reducing security risks through providing free wi-fi during disasters.
The introduction of the vendor's disaster prevention wi-fi system is a replacement and system proposal, which can create new demand that will help fulfil CSR and CSV needs.
Korea: SNET Systems
SNET’s AI-safeguard is a service monitoring tool which manages customer assets through a real-time location tracking solution that integrates with CISCO CMX and LTX tag. Targeting the manufacturing sector, the solution is designed to protect worker safety.
