“With the ongoing crisis, an organization’s use of location technology has moved from a competitive advantage to a business imperative. Indoor intelligence can help organizations with their efforts to follow best practices and guidelines to increase workplace health and safety in light of infectious disease threats like COVID-19,” says Nadir Ali, CEO of Inpixon, in an exclusive interview with EnterpriseTalk.
ET Bureau: How important of a role does indoor intelligence have in helping varied organizations meet their current and future needs?
Nadir Ali: Even in normal, non-pandemic times, indoor intelligence can help businesses to increase sales significantly, decrease costs, and enhance safety and security. Using location technologies, businesses with complex buildings, such as airports, shopping malls, and hospitals, can provide intelligent maps for indoor navigation to speed visitors on their way.
Retailers can use analytics to gain insights from visitor counts and paths taken. High-security facilities, like government sites, can monitor for unauthorized wireless devices and can enforce no phone zones.
Organizations in nearly every industry can benefit by tracking their assets, equipment, and IoT devices in real-time to maximize operational efficiency.
With the ongoing crisis, an organization’s use of location technology has moved from a competitive advantage to a business imperative. Indoor intelligence can help organizations with their efforts to follow best practices and guidelines to increase workplace health and safety in light of infectious disease threats like COVID-19.
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ET Bureau: How can location technologies help companies address the current pandemic challenges?
Nadir Ali: Location-aware solutions can help companies reclaim their workplaces. Companies are leveraging location technologies to help safeguard their employees, visitors, and ultimately, families and communities.
With digital contact tracing, if an employee or visitor reports they’ve been infected, management can use location tech to see who they may have been in contact with and identify the areas and assets that may need to be deep-cleaned. There may be no need to shut down entire wings or buildings if management has evidence the infected individual only went to area A.
The same technologies can support social distancing and sanitation protocols by considering factors such as the number of wireless devices and the density of devices in a given area. Employees can even reserve appropriately-distanced desks, find an uncrowded conference room, and navigate them via a one-way route.
ET Bureau: What are the advantages of open APIs and indoor intelligence platforms that help maximize investments?
Nadir Ali: We believe organizations must choose a vendor with a truly open-architecture design to be able to extend capabilities and avoid obsolescence. It’s also advisable to adopt an integrated platform rather than try to piece together numerous partial solutions from a wide variety of vendors.
Indoor Intelligence platforms can integrate maps, positioning, security, and analytics and serve a wide variety of industry verticals and use cases. The technology-agnostic architecture and APIs allow for ingestion of external data sources and interoperability with other systems and devices, enabling customers to invest in one platform that can grow with them and support both their current and future needs.
ET Bureau: How does the indoor technology solution empower organizations to transform their indoor data into actionable intelligence?
Nadir Ali: The data sources are everywhere – from smartphones and chip-enabled employee name tags to IoT temperature sensors and smart drinking fountains. To transform that data into actionable intelligence, adding context, analytics, and interactivity can go a long way in delivering the intelligence to a person who needs it, when they need it, in the optimal format.
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For instance, most IoT devices transmitting data have a spatial component, giving them context by plotting them on a dynamic, multilayered map. Adding analytics allows one to see the key insights and trends. And everything is made available in interactive applications that support the customer’s specific use cases, from asset tracking and contact tracing to navigation and employee productivity. The ultimate goal is to do good with indoor data.
The CEO of Inpixon. With a collective two decades in enterprise software, business analytics, and information technology, he has tapped into the $12 billion industry of indoor positioning and data analytics, which is forecasted to grow to $23 billion by 2021. Nadir is a leading expert voice in the indoor intelligence and location technology industry.
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Prangya Pandab is an Associate Editor with OnDot Media. She is a seasoned journalist with almost seven years of experience in the business news sector. Before joining ODM, she was a journalist with CNBC-TV18 for four years. She also had a brief stint with an infrastructure finance company working for their communications and branding vertical.
