If you’ve ever wanted to learn more about what the Cisco Store Tech Lab looks like on the road, here’s your chance! The Cisco Store team opened a travel store at Cisco Live EMEA, held in Amsterdam from February 5-9, 2024.

Around 7,100 visitors came through the Cisco Store, and 396 attendees participated in 23 tours. Tour attendees (including senior network engineers, technical solutions architects, and heads of IT) represented a wide range of industries and companies, including Adidas, Airbus Defence and Space, Amazon, Apple, BMW Group, Fujifilm, H&M, Hugo Boss, and Sephora.

We walked attendees through key highlights of our Tech Lab, demonstrating how multiple products can work together. We started at our grid wall (dubbed the Triforce of Wisdom), displaying Meraki cameras and sensors, RFID tags, and more, including Meraki’s latest launch, the MV13 and MV33 smart cameras.

The Triforce of Wisdom also included the Meraki MT40 smart power controller: twelve of these controllers were wired throughout the store to allow us to baseline our power consumption at the show, in partnership with CAE Labs’ WiserWatts platform. We have similarly baselined our power consumption at our San Jose store, allowing us to schedule our power and thus reducing our energy consumption by 66%! Next year, we plan to schedule our power at this show to compare energy and cost savings. WiserWatts also allows us to easily see which of our products are at end-of-life and makes suggestions on how to operate more sustainably.

Our Tech Lab expert Brian Domine then showed attendees how they can use our Cisco Store Xplorer app on their smartphones to interact with augmented reality hotspots around the store to learn more about various tech products.

Visitors had the opportunity to scan a QR code to interact with a chatbot powered by Webex Connect, allowing them to ask questions about the Cisco Store and the Tech Lab and escalate their questions to a live agent if necessary.

Visitors were then brought through our ship-to-home kiosk, featuring four iPads remotely managed on Meraki MDM. This allowed us to have full control over the tablets regardless of their location. A perimeter was also set up around the kiosk to alert us immediately if any of the iPads were removed from their docks, thus ensuring full security of our store without requiring human security guards.

The next stop was our partner VusionGroup’s electronic shelf labels, placed throughout the store. Because our travel stores employ temporary staff, they had to be able to easily find and restock merchandise. By inputting an item’s product ID, the corresponding shelf label would flash to allow for easy identification at the back-of-house, thus streamlining store operations. These labels require no additional infrastructure: they connect automatically to Meraki access points.

Moving further on into the store, visitors got a glimpse of how all the digital signage was managed by Wipro VisionEDGE. By simply clicking an MT30 smart button, our store staff would be able to change our screens to a store open / store closed state. We also demonstrated how Meraki Display, an Apple TV app, livestreamed the store’s camera feeds onto one display without requiring additional backend access, allowing our staff to easily monitor live feeds without having to log into a dashboard.

See some merchandise you like? Visitors could take advantage of our smart fitting rooms. Every item in the store was RFID-tagged, so a customer simply had to bring the item into the smart fitting room to see the product appear on the screen and request different sizes.

We then demonstrated one of our newest solutions, powered by our partner Cogniac. When a customer picked up a Sustainability Campaign or DevNet T-shirt, we trained Cogniac on the Meraki MV63 camera facing the shirts to trigger Wipro VisionEDGE to change the adjacent screen. Customers could then immediately see information about the item they had just picked up on the screen (for instance, the Sustainability Campaign video).

Almost done! Next, visitors saw how we use EVERYANGLE in conjunction with Meraki cameras to analyze customer data in the store, including demographic breakdown, customer sentiment, dwell time in specific areas, and queue counting to ensure checkout lines do not grow too long. This information gives us valuable insight into who exactly is coming through our store and how we can best cater to them. We also showed visitors VusionGroup’s Captana dashboard, which maps our products on the shelves and notifies us if anything is out of stock, as well as monitors our store’s planogram compliance, thus optimizing our store staff and merchandisers’ time.

At the end of the tour, visitors could scan a QR code to participate in a Slido poll asking them about the most interesting technology they saw that day. Participants’ answers were added to a word cloud, giving us a better idea into what caught their attention! Results from the poll indicated that the Meraki sensors and smart cameras detecting proximity seemed especially interesting to our attendees.

The Cisco Store is committed to powering an inclusive future for all. We set up a donation tower at the entrance of the store, allowing passersby to drop in tokens: every token represented a €1 donation to the organization of their choice.

Our next travel store will be at Cisco Live Global in Las Vegas from June 2-6, 2024. We will be setting up an 8,000 square foot store with 24 Tech Lab tours, estimating 500+ participants from 275+ companies.

Interested in demonstrating your technology? There is still time to set up an activation with us! Please reach out — we’d love to hear your ideas.

In the meantime, check out our full tour walkthrough on our Cisco Store Tech Lab YouTube channel, and we hope to see you in-person soon!

If you’ve ever visited the Cisco Store Tech Lab in San Jose, California, you’ve probably seen how seamlessly Cisco and our partners’ retail technology is integrated into the store. Now, how do we showcase that technology at our travel stores? Learn about our efficient set-up process at our most recent show, Cisco Live EMEA 2024, held in Amsterdam from February 5-9. 

Everything starts with the floor plan of the booth at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Center. Once we have that, I’ll start mapping out where all the store technology needs to go: we work with our partners to decide where to place their solutions to ensure they can work optimally. 

For instance, we met with EVERYANGLE to determine what areas we want to monitor for footfall analytics, queue counting, and engagement zones. Cameras had to be placed in strategic locations to give us full coverage of the store. 

Cogniac helped us figure out where to place our Meraki MV63 camera to have a clear view of specific T-shirts that were used in a demo in conjunction with Wipro VisionEDGE. When a shirt is picked up off the rack, the MV63 relays that information to Cogniac, and then Wipro VisionEDGE receives a trigger alert to change the screen next to the shirt to educate the customer about the product and explain how our products empower an inclusive future for all.  

Before we ship out to Amsterdam, I’ll set up the technology we’re taking in a lab in San Jose to test that everything is functional. I had our equipment road-tested and packed into just three crates by mid-December (a month and a half before the show), and JLL Logistics helped us ship it all over to Amsterdam.  

A few days before the start of Cisco Live, JLL delivered the crates to our booth at the RAI, and our team started unpacking and deploying the equipment. Since we had the map ready, placing everything where it needed to go was seamless. I gave the network team the placement of the switches, cameras, smart fitting rooms, and so on beforehand so they could run the proper electrical lines through the booth, and all we had to do once we arrived was plug everything in.

This is the first year we’re baselining the store’s power consumption, both at the San Jose store and at all our travel stores, with the help of CAE Labs’ WiserWatts. We plan to schedule our power at next year’s shows to compare energy and cost savings. It took a bit to figure out how to route the power for all the technology through the Meraki MT40s (smart power controllers that monitor and remotely control power). We deployed twelve MT40s for full coverage of the booth, and it took a few trips to the electronics store to get the right adapters, but now that we’ve done it once, it will be a lot easier globally. After that, Fidel (the store’s Merchandising Project Manager) helps us place all our Meraki cameras. Everything is online by the Saturday before the show starts, and then we do any last-minute configuring and deploying our digital signage playlists.

The technology makes it a lot easier for our store associates in their day-to-day functions. Meraki smart buttons were set up to allow the associates to change our digital signage (for instance, changing the screens to indicate that the store was closed) without requiring backend access. Our travel stores utilize temporary store associates, so the process of restocking merchandise was similarly simplified: all they had to do was input the product’s ID, and the corresponding electronic shelf label would flash in the back of house to indicate the item’s location.  

Now that the travel store and tech lab are set up, I review the tour schedule with Kaleigh (the Cisco Store and Tech Lab’s Program Manager) to make sure the flow of the tours is fluid. We had a tour scheduled for the Cisco Champions the day before the show started, so our rehearsals had to be completed in advance.

We’d set up what we like to call the Triforce of Wisdom, or our triangular tech wall, to display our technology to visitors. Fidel, Courtney (our Marketing Lead), and Anjana (our Product Marketing Specialist) had wired up the products, such as the Meraki MT40, VusionGroup’s SESimagotag electronic shelf labels, and so forth beforehand so visitors could see the technology in-person. Meraki just launched their new MV13 and MV33 smart cameras a few days ago, and tour attendees had the opportunity to gain a sneak peek into those products during the show.  

And that’s it! Our set-up process has been streamlined in a way that allows our small team to have things up and running in a matter of a few days.

To learn more about the Cisco Store Tech Lab, come visit us in San Jose, California, or catch us at Cisco Live US in June. If you were able to stop by the store at Cisco Live EMEA, thanks for saying hello! Hope to see you next year.