The Actility Blog
Cisco Live in the city of lights!
Cisco Live is Cisco’s premier education and training destination for IT professionals worldwide. This year, Actility sent two hands full of their crew to support its very own booth at the edition in Las Vegas, running from 25-29 June. Over 28000 partners and customers attended the event and benefited from a curriculum of more than 1,000 sessions offering unique opportunities to acquire cutting-edge knowledge and skills on innovative technologies. Cisco Live is a five-day immersion in sessions and specialty programs on numerous topics including, of course, IoT. It is a chance to see and be seen by suppliers and customers, to see and deliver demos, to explore and assess the latest solutions from all markets and meet the industry’s top vendors.
For Actility, this event was a tremendous success. The LPWA market in the US is just getting traction and now is a fantastic time for us to position ThingPark™ as the leading Network Server in that space. We come back fully energized and rich from the experience. We realized we were capable of grabbing real attention from visitors. The attendees interested in IoT and in connected objects were drawn to our booth, impressed with the possibilities Actility’s ThingPark delivers and the power of LoRaWan in the LPWA landscape.
We spent our days evangelizing. Our booth focused on Smart City solutions, as our market analysis tells us this is the ‘low hanging fruit’ in the US. We had numerous devices to demo on our booth, such as a Smart Streetlight powered by Flashnet, a Smart Parking solution with our partner PNI, a SmartBin waste management solution, the ever-popular connected mousetrap and others focused on that vertical market. And our biggest hit was our live shuttle bus tracking demo, powered by Actilitys’ ThingPark and Abeeway™ tracking devices and using Cisco IXM gateways.
Cisco used seven gateways, of which four deployed indoor covering the entire convention center and only three were necessary outdoors to cover the shuttle route on the entire southern part of the Las Vegas Strip. Cisco placed Actility’s Abeeway trackers inside the buses taking participants to and from the Convention Center and their hotels. And the demo was impressive! Shown on our booth as well as Cisco’s, and on the information desk in the lobby. We got people’s attention. Here is when we truly contribute to making people’s lives easier and smarter: using an app on their smartphone or public screen to determine the arrival time of the next shuttle bus between their hotel and the Mandalay Bay Convention Centre, attendees could wait for their shuttle inside, and avoid waiting in the Nevada heats they had to last year!
The general theme of the event was Calling all Super Heros, You’re IT. I can tell you, we brought our Super Hero, and his name is Gabor Pop! Each day Gabor had a 15-minute presentation, in which he introduced Actility and explained a use case. We chose Smart Parking, Tracking, Smart Lighting and Smart building. His presentations stopped traffic, and guided people to our stand afterwards. We played our cards well. We found new channels to help us bring ThingPark to US market, we found new customers, some with immediate projects, others we need to develop. With a complete team based across the US, Actility is invested and betting the US LPWA market will catch up to the Europeans and Asia/Pac. Thank you Cisco Live! We enjoyed playing, meeting many superheros, and winning new relationships!