At Cisco’s San Jose, CA campus, the Customer Experience Center (CXC) provides a place for customers and prospects to check out the company’s offerings and how they address customers’ business concerns.
Even in California, a little touch of winter celebrates the holidays in the building lobby.
Customer Experience Center
Named in honour of John Chambers, Cisco’s chief executive officer from 1995 to 2015 and chairman of the board from 2006 to 2017, the Customer Experience Center is one of eleven such facilities globally: two in the U.S., one in Canada, five in Asia Pacific, two in China, and one in London, UK.
Finding your way around
Anyone who needs a little help navigating the center can ask the dapper virtual concierge, who can serve several buildings thanks to Cisco’s Webex conferencing.
Cisco caffeination
Cisco’s commitment to education is even demonstrated in how it caffeinates its staff and guests. At the IMPCT coffee bar in the cafeteria, every cup of coffee purchased sends one hour of education to the communities that produce the beans.
Parking Tech
Demos are mainly in miniature. Here, the cars may be a bit undersized, but these are the actual sensors that sit in parking spaces, detecting when there’s a vehicle in them. That information can be shared via an app, saving drivers the annoyance of circling endlessly looking for a space.
Robot
The control panel for this baby robot minimizes the need for a human to wander around, attending to it (or its full-sized counterparts in a factory). The operator can adjust settings, monitor status, and often troubleshoot, without leaving the monitoring station.
An engineer’s view
CXC demo engineer Mark Burlini shows how all of the IoT devices on a factory floor connect securely with the rest of the factory, and with the enterprise, to safely manage the technology and make use of cloud resources to improve processes. That monster screen he’s in front of is touch-enabled.
A Table of Things
Some of the devices used to monitor and operate devices on factory floor, in this case, a ferocious-looking grinder.
The Threat Map
The CXC displays the malware attack map generated by Cisco’s Talos security organization. And no, the world was not malware-free that day – the big map hadn’t been updated when we walked by. The smaller maps indicate where in the world mischief was afoot at the time.
The final threat
Getting to and from San Jose is a bigger challenge than the tech. Look familiar, Toronto?