 Live from Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE. Covering DevNet Create 2019, brought to you by Cisco. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage day one, Cisco DevNet Create 2019 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Lisa Martin with John Furrier. Please welcome to theCUBE for the first time, Mathew Gerard, the co-founder and CTO of Mapwise. Mathew, it's lovely to have you on the program. So Mapwise and Cisco are partners, but first, give our audience an idea of Mapwise, what you are, what you deliver, where you're located. Yeah, so Mapwise, a startup company, we are based in France, and so we want to bring digital services inside buildings. We feel that a lot of our life has been digitalized, but that there are still a lot of services that can be brought inside those buildings, and one of the key elements when you speak about digital services in buildings, is to have a map, a map where you can show all the different details about the buildings, the live data that is generating from all the sensors that is in the building, that's why the partnership with Cisco actually comes in to bring all those infrastructure sensors that you get to bring that to be displayed on the map as well and bring services to the user. So one of the hot announcements is the Wi-Fi 6, I'm jazzed about, it was an 802.11, something A or B, I forget what it was, they're now calling it Wi-Fi 6, thank God, although even numbers, I'm skeptical of that. You know, odds are tend to be better, bug-free, going back to our old days as you know. But Wi-Fi 6 changes the game at many levels. What are some of the things that will help you guys because we all been in the buildings where concrete bounces RF, you can't get through certain things, we've all been in stadiums where it's kind of like a nightmare with bandwidth. Wi-Fi is like part of Maslow's hierarchy of needs now, we want our Wi-Fi, businesses want Wi-Fi, so new things are happening, what's your take on Wi-Fi 6? So our take is that we really want to bring all those services, of course bandwidth is something, but for us it's not necessarily the critical part. For us it's really the kind of data that you can get from the Wi-Fi, making sure that all those IoT devices can be deployed in more and more of those buildings. Everybody wants to know if a meeting room is available or not. So what's the best way of doing that and just having a small sensor that detects presence and that can be broadcasted back to the cloud and then displayed on the map. So there are so many sensors, that's one of them, but in terms of pollution, of temperature, that if you have those in the building can bring new services around all those mapping. So bandwidth not an issue, obviously, this is like a giggy ethernet now and it just helps with the signaling. What about range and coverage area and tenant chains? These are the kind of things we're hearing about some of the benefits. Does that help you guys at all? Does that help the maps and get more range? Yeah, I mean, and at the same time, what the challenge we are facing when we look at the Wi-Fi is to be able to use it to locate people and to know where I am, so that I can be providing services around me. And so that usually came with a need for more density of access points because the more density you have, the better we can access the location of a user. And so what we see is a lot of evolution in the Wi-Fi and the kind of capabilities that they have in positioning people. So we hope to see that as well in Wi-Fi 6. What's your vision on location services inside an enterprise? Because we saw that movie play out on the consumer side with mobile iPhones and androids now everywhere. You know, we all seen it, we got, and we know when the ARB is showing up and all the things are happening on the maps, map mashups back on the old WebPoint 2.0 days. What's the new sets of things that will come out that you see? What's your vision? Yeah, what we see is that as you were mentioning, mapping and wayfinding is something we are using every day. And nobody would even imagine how it was back in the time where we had paper maps. And so we believe that that is also coming into all the office and industry environments. And for example, the possibility of seeing live what's going on in my building, what's available at services, where are the people that I need to interact with? Where are the assets I need to actually go grab? That's something that today seems like complicated to do and I'm pretty convinced that in a few years from now it's going to be natural, like ways is natural every day for everybody. And this is the opportunity for Mapwise and with Cisco as well to convert existing structures into these smart buildings. Are you seeing that as well as with the development of new buildings that are kind of built natively smart? Yeah, of course the new buildings are built more smart and with new infrastructure that allows a lot more, but the new buildings are still a very small percentage of the buildings that are out there. And so the great thing is that all the infrastructure that already exists is already capable of a lot. And so even with the updates that are being done there, there's a lot of data that today are totally not used that we believe still can bring a lot of new services and a lot of potential. Through any industries in particular where you and Cisco are working together where this is really, they're right for this type of transformation. I can think of hospitals as one thing that comes to mind with being able to identify where everything is, sensors, services, especially in life and death situations. Yeah, so I mean, what we see is that everybody that goes to the hospital has the same reaction. It's like, where is everything, right? It's the kind of campuses where it's really easy to get lost. And so whenever you get there, you need to get to your appointments. And if you don't find it, what you're going to do is to ask the medical staff. So you ask people that are actually saving life how to get to your next appointment, which we feel is kind of a waste. Huge efficiencies. Yeah. Not just asset tracking, which is low hanging fruit, IoT devices in terms of instrumentation, but just supply chain services. Just like it's a tsunami of new things. Absolutely. Limited by a lot of old school, either technical limitations on connectivity at the edge or just software, right? Yeah. And you know that in healthcare, there is a lot of time where a surgery room is ready with all the surgeons and the staff and the patient is not there because the person who is supposed to go get him in his room and bring him to the surgery block is actually late. And so we think that that's such a waste of time and money that could be much better utilized. You could bring surge pricing into this surgery room. Yeah. Yeah. We're backed up or, hey, I got low pricing. I got a price line for, I mean, but this is all joking aside, but this is really important. This is like real value. Yeah. High price resources, idle in a hospital. There's probably a zillion examples of those. Okay, what's the low hanging fruit that you guys see? When you look, when you start rolling out map-wise and start wondering, is it just getting a physical footprint of it? Is it just a graphic rendering? Is it the mash-up piece? Is it visualization? What are some of the key things that you guys are doing or have done to remove the blockers for adoption and create more movement for that value? Yeah, so what we see is really the first step is bringing some way-finding, helping people navigate around the buildings. And so basically taking the old stock of technical floor plans that everybody has that usually just a few architects use in a company and being able to drag and drop that into a web platform and from one day to another making it available to 100% of the people that actually live in that building on the daily basis. So that's really the first step we see and then together with Cisco being able to bring the location of the user so that I have the same experience outside of the GPS as I have inside the building with the Wi-Fi infrastructure. It'd be great to know too, there's a lot of people streaming video around one access point, might want to add another one. These kinds of things just are natural ideas that people would do. Yeah, and I mean, where the bandwidth is the best, where the noise is the lowest, where potentially the temperature is higher or lower. You know, today in the flex office, people can choose to sit wherever they want. So what are the key reasons to choose one spot or the other? And I think that there are a lot more value that we can bring to those occupants. So you have here at DevNet Korea 2019, you have a breakout or had today, a breakout and a workshop. Tell us about the workshop first in terms of the title, the conversations and some of the interesting conversations that you had with some of the participants. Yeah, so the workshop was about how to bring the link between the map and the Meraki infrastructure that you have. And so potentially even before anyone connects to a Wi-Fi, we're actually already showing him usually like a portal, a captive portal where he can log in and how we can add in that captive portal all the services, like showing him where he is on a map, how to get to any destination, potentially services that are around him. So that was the goal of the workshop. And it was great because everybody was saying directly in his industry, like I had somebody from a university and say, this is exactly what we need as well for a campus. So I think that's something that we can also bring to much more industries. They're much more of a horizontal opportunity, like you said, across industries. And you also had a breakout session, what did that dive into? So the breakout session was specifically around location analytics. So it's a completely different world, but it's about then using the location of the crowd and of every single device in the building and see how people move. Where do they go and to understand the behavior of the people that are there? Just to give you an example, if you look at an event like this one, maybe the organizers would like at the end to understand how much time people spend more looking at the talk, looking at the workshop, going around. And so basically using all the data that is collected by the Wi-Fi, we can get a lot of analytics and numbers to better assess if the space was so well organized. Making sure people at their desk doing their job. Oh, no, no, no big brother. That's the potentially downside around it, so it's something we need to be sure about. Innovation versus creepiness, you know, it's always the trade-off, privacy. It is, it is a trade-off, and I think we need to be aware of when we allow it. I mean, when there's somebody working alone in a building, you actually do want to know where it is, because it's good for your safety. It's all over. We all have privacy problems. The GPS knows everywhere I'm doing here. Yeah, it's over it, people. I think it's good to know which cases and to obtain. Like, sometimes I want people to know where I am exactly because that can actually help me, and I have other cases where I do not want it. And so I think it's so, so important that any developer with building application with that data is aware of that privacy issue and can know when to anonymize the data or when not. Great stuff. Manchu, thank you so much for joining John and me talking about MapWise, what you're doing in Cisco really, really interesting technology. Maybe next year at DevNet Create, you can tell us all of the analytics from this year. Yeah, absolutely. All right, we appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Thank you. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, live on theCUBE from Cisco DevNet Create 2019. Thanks for watching.