Episode 05 – Smart Spaces in the Public Sector

Charlotte
Hi, and welcome to the latest podcast episode. Today, I’m here with a group of smart buildings experts, and I’m really interested in today’s topic. It’s a little pet, interest of mine. But we’re gonna be talking about smart buildings and specifically how smart building technology is transforming spaces, that are run by public sector organisations. So I think there’s some really, practical insights coming today, which I’m excited about. But first, why don’t you start by introducing yourselves, and we’ll go from there.

John Monaghan
Sure. So really glad to be here. My name is John Monaghan.

I’m an SE, a systems engineer, with Cisco.

And as you’ve just alluded to, I specialise in smart buildings, with a specific focus on our partners and, public sector as well.

Charlotte
Great. Thank you.

Rajith Rangajeewa
Hi. I’m Rajith Rangajeewa.

I’m the intelligent workplace practice lead at ITGL.

In my scope of work, I help, companies build intelligent connected future proof future proof workplaces.

Charlotte
Brilliant. I bet you got some good war stories there.

Nick Gray
Yeah. And I’m really pleased to be here as well. My name’s Nick Gray.

I’m a solutions engineer just like John, and I sit across the whole portfolio, but have a large background in collaboration and have been working with smart building technology for the last couple of

Charlotte
years.

Nice. Nice. Yeah. There’s some fascinating, capabilities in there, aren’t there? So so why don’t why don’t we start at the beginning? So talking about how smart building technologies are actually helping public the public sector meet sustainability commitments because obviously that’s a big drive for everybody at the moment, but also balancing that against those really tight budgets that we know the public sector are increasingly being forced to work with. So I don’t know who wants to go first, but.

Nick Gray
I’ll put my hand on.

Yeah. So one of the things that I’ve certainly learned, and this is obviously working with John and the wider team, but actually a lot of the budgets can be created by the energy savings and the sustainability gains that you find.

Some stats for you. I’m straight in there with the stats, but fifty two percent of all energy used by businesses is based on air conditioning, and heating and lighting. Yeah. So if you can imagine, if you’ve got a substantial amount of energy use and the cost of energy, if you can start to use technology to automate those services, and make the places smart, what you tend to find is that can help with the investment in the technology.

So I suppose that’s my

Charlotte
Yeah.

Some good quick wins there, I would imagine. Yeah.

John Monaghan
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just to back up, what Nick’s saying, I think, there is a danger that, everyone kind of overcomplicates it.

And, there’s a lot of measures that our public sector customers can put in place that can pretty quickly achieve really good returns and results.

And we’ll probably go into some more detail here, you know, but a key a key ability is the ability to measure. So the examples that Nick has just provided there, a lot of a lot of customers are in the dark, so to speak.

And they really need help being able to measure those different properties like energy consumption.

And that’s often the starting point.

You know, it’s

Charlotte
Identify patterns.

John Monaghan
Identify patterns. Even get you know, we use the term baseline, which creates a kind of profile of the property or the building. Yeah. And focuses in on the big the big energy consumers.

So when it comes to sustainability, there’s a huge topic.

But as Nick quite rightly has said, we rapidly can zero in on energy. You know, and that’s the biggest or the second biggest cost here’s another stat.

So the second biggest cost to any organisation whether it’s public or private sector, you know is energy. Yeah. Right? And and you and I, they’re the employees. They’re the they’re the primary cost.

So helping our colleagues in the public sector, especially in the facility and estates department, we’ll probably go into that as well. Yeah. So there’s some very key individual you know worker profiles that we need to be aware of and we need to interact with.

But helping them get that baseline, you know, is absolutely critical.

And

Nick Gray
then where

Charlotte
they’re starting.

Nick Gray
So they

John Monaghan
know where they’re starting from and absolutely.

And I’ll keep saying it or probably you’ll get bored of me saying it.

But it really doesn’t have to be complicated. And there’s we’ll give some examples of how we can do that.

Rajith Rangajeewa
Yep. Yeah. As you correctly mentioned, public sector organisations are under immense pressure, right, to meet their sustainability commitments.

And on the other hand, they are, again, operating under tight budgets. Right? So I think the smart building technologies will help them.

For example, with Cisco, like Cisco infrastructure, we can unlock the potential into this Cisco infrastructure and help them. That’s where I think smart buildings plays the bigger picture. So for example, if we if we get now in most of the public sector organisation, they control the heating or the cooling in, you know, on kind of a fixed schedule. Right?

But with the help of the network, we can get that insights on onto occupancy and space utilisation and dynamically control this heating and cooling, even lighting so that companies, organisations can save on energy.

Charlotte
Yeah. Because the public sector has a lot of different types of properties, don’t they? And a lot of varied uses. You know, if you think about local government blue light services, for example, there’s lots of factors there, aren’t there?

John Monaghan
Oh, huge. Huge. And some of these properties are very old. Yeah. You know, I mean, we’re talking in some cases where some of the hospitals are we’re going back to the Victorian age.

I mean, it is quite incredible. Yeah. And and we’ve got a lot a lot of kind of sympathy with the property team who are responsible for managing those properties.

And because these properties are old and even the ones that are not sold, they weren’t developed at the time with all the best practices that we now have available to us in terms of different types of heating system, different types of insulation and of course different types of technology like sensors.

So we have to be able to accommodate, as you correctly say, all these different types of properties. And again, we’ll probably talk about it more, but this idea of retrofitting properties with technology is critical because we can’t just concentrate on new buildings because that’s a tiny, tiny fraction of the problem.

Charlotte
Yeah. Yeah. And how much awareness is there of that need to retrofit? Because I know with smart buildings, a lot of the conversation obviously starts around lighting and simple things, not smart buildings, but just energy efficiencies around changing the types of bulbs, for example.

So what are how do they balance, like, some of those quick wins to get where they need to go, but then also set themselves up, as you were saying about retrofitting, for kind of longer term benefits? Because to get to net zero, there’s a lot more that has to be done.

John Monaghan
Yeah. I mean, I’ll go quickly.

There there is definitely a we would call it a kind of pathway here.

And it, you know, it’s not mandatory, of course, for a customer, you know, to adopt that or follow that pathway.

Charlotte
It gives them a guide.

Nick Gray
But

John Monaghan
it gives them a guide, absolutely.

And it goes along the lines of let’s get that profiling and baselining in place. Yep.

Let’s analyse what is the data actually telling us and like nine times out of ten it will identify immediate opportunities for savings.

So then you’re into a phase of what we would call optimisation using that data.

Then we look at well what further improvements can we make and in the case of retrofitting, that’s usually along the lines of automation.

So Rajith can talk to you about the services that ITGL provide there.

And that will be again along the lines of using the data that the network is collecting and feeding that data over into other control systems.

Charlotte
So this is automation of heating, lighting, so when it’s low occupancy Yes. Exactly. It adapts.

John Monaghan
That’s it. That’s it. And and by the time you’ve got to that third phase you’ve already ideally made considerable improvements and all the time you’re chipping away at your sustainability targets as well. So there’s loads that can be done in what we call this retrofitting scenario.

And then there’s the optimal, which will probably come on to as well.

So there’s, as you were alluding to, there’s a lot of clever things that we can do around the management and the delivery of power

Nick Gray
Mhmm.

John Monaghan
The different parts of the building as well. I don’t know if you wanna add to that, Richard.

Rajith Rangajeewa
Yeah. So on the point of, power, so I want to highlight that with Cisco infrastructure now, we can power the end user disks that, laptops, the machines, even the mobile phone charging. Right?

DCP. I think John will be able to, give more insights to that.

Charlotte
So you’d have that Device level as well as like the larger systems.

Rajith Rangajeewa
So, because as John mentioned, now these are kind of, very old buildings and very old, power circuits, what they have. It’s very difficult to like, bring and put a new, power socket. Right? So it’s very easy to use the Ethernet cable to power everything you have rather than using the power socket.

So, power cabling because one thing is

Charlotte
Also use the network to create the power that’s needed.

Yes. Exactly. Okay.

Rajith Rangajeewa
And, one thing is because we are using low voltage with the POE, there’s no, nothing to be afraid of electrocution or something like that. And we don’t need to have electrical engineers.

We don’t need to, kind of adhere to safety standards as well.

Charlotte
And cost of maintenance must drop down.

John Monaghan
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Gray
I think just to jump in there as well, there’s also the amount of sustainable materials that are going into that. So instead of having a twin earth, you know, traditional electrical socket being installed as Rajith says, you’re deploying, effectively Ethernet cables to all the outlets. We can we’re even going a step further at Cisco where we’ve got this new thing, that’s been patented as we speak called fault managed power. Mhmm.

And this is where we’re taking up to three hundred, watts instead of the ninety watts as well. Right? So what you’re seeing is, as we just said, the ability to power a POE desk that raises up and down, a handset that we’ve done for many years, a monitor. Yeah.

I’ve seen fourteen screens through some of the partners that ITGL yeah.

So

Charlotte
Wow.

Nick Gray
I think what something that we presented at Cisco Life, which ITGL, attended is this whole type of environment with lights, desks, you know, pretty much everything you saw was powered from the switch.

And one of the questions probably no doubt later will be, well, how do you make that resilient and all those sorts of things. Right? But, yeah, I suppose there’s so many kind of, options that you’ve got now that people just aren’t aware of. And I think that’s the key thing of having these conversations to just highlight that, you know, the opportunities.

Charlotte
Yeah. Because that must unlock savings, as you were saying, on a number of different levels.

John Monaghan
Yeah.

Charlotte
Because I do think with smart buildings, people sort of do look at the obvious ones. But like you say, there’s a lack of awareness, I think, about how the technology can help them.

John Monaghan
Yeah.

That that’s a massive part of what the three of us do almost on a daily basis

Charlotte
Yeah.

John Monaghan
Is is raising the awareness. Yeah. Mhmm. You know, and then again, the property teams that we that we interact with, they’re just so busy. Mhmm. So I get we got a lot of sympathy for them.

Charlotte
Yeah, I see if we can help them progress.

John Monaghan
We can help them exactly, you know. And if we can get some of their time then we can have a workshop with them and just take them through what we would call the art of the possible. You know because this technology is changing all the time. And going back to my can I comment about the pathway?

When once they understand that it doesn’t have to be complex and we can help them literally within the next month or so, we can help them. Yeah. They really set up and take a lot of interest. They get really interested and often these teams they’re not they’re not technologists per se.

They’re not involved in the networking industry or the IT industry.

Charlotte
Because I suppose it’s facilities.

John Monaghan
It’s facilities in the States, Charlotte. So again, we have to be very cognisant that we don’t want to get, you know, start going off at tangents into the world of networking. Yeah. But that maybe doesn’t mean enough or to.

So we have to learn to almost speak a different language, you know, the proper language of the property Yeah.

World. But on that point, as I’m sure Rajith and Nick will agree, one of the there’s a few kind of best practices that you hear us talk about and an absolute best practice is getting the IT department and the estates department in the same room.

Charlotte
I was gonna ask that when you said about that dichotomy between the two.

It’s like, IT must be a crucial part of this if you’re using the network to create

John Monaghan
that problem.

It’s crucial. It’s absolutely crucial.

Nick Gray
I think the other thing as well, estates hold a lot of the budget as well. So from a budgeting perspective, you tend to find IT over some much smaller budget, but we wouldn’t just take it to IT and estates and facilities, HR sustainability.

Yeah. And what you tend to find, and I’ve seen this, is those individual teams don’t typically work together.

So

Charlotte
So they’re quite siloed.

Nick Gray
Yeah. And and one of the things that Rajith and IT Joe and the team at Cisco can do are these kind of design thinking workshops where we work with the end customer to kind of help them work together. Yeah. And what I found in my experience is facilities don’t necessarily know the capabilities of some of the technology.

You know, the networking team don’t realise the challenges for them. And when you get everyone in one room Yeah.

It actually is a bit magic because

Charlotte
make a massive Yeah.

Yeah.

Because because also as well with sustainability, you can end up doing something over here, which then has a negative or, you know, increases the carbon use over here

Nick Gray
Yep.

Yeah.

Charlotte
When you’re not joining all those dots together.

John Monaghan
Well, I’ve got a fantastic example of where that worked really well. And it is amazing the kind of conversations that you end up having. Yeah. When you get the two the you know two groups in the same room at the same time.

And we did a project recently for a hospital in the northwest of the country and the Estates Department were kind of having a watching brief on what was going on and a lot of input as well. And they presented us with another problem or use cases, we tend to use that term. Yeah. This was around water management.

And we often almost forget about water. Yeah. But water is one of the key utilities.

And it’s now become a big part of sustainability agendas.

So water leak, water leaks, water damage, water waste.

And there’s also in fact for any organisation, there’s also a legal requirement to test all the water outlets for health and safety.

Charlotte
Oh yeah.

John Monaghan
Reasons for compliance against the prevention of Legionnaires’ disease.

Charlotte
Well especially in hospitals.

John Monaghan
Especially in hospitals, of course much more so.

And long story short, unbelievably what’s happening is the estates department are literally paying someone in their own team or paying a plumber literally

Charlotte
to

John Monaghan
go around running taps and taking flow measurements with a thermometer and a flow meter.

And they said they knew that this was very inefficient. Right? I mean so they so they said look, well, now our eyes have been opened as to the power of technology. What else it can do based on what things that we’re doing in the hospital?

Could you help us with this?

Charlotte
Mhmm.

John Monaghan
And then I didn’t have an immediate answer, but I was fascinated by the use case. Yeah. Because I’m thinking this is crazy. Right?

What what I mean, we’re in twenty five and we’re paying

Charlotte
That does sound Victorian.

John Monaghan
That does sound Victorian.

And you know, lo and behold Yeah. There is a solution Yeah. To automate pretty much all of that task.

Charlotte
Wow. That’s amazing.

Nick Gray
Yeah. I’d go. Go. Go. Go.

Rajith Rangajeewa
Yeah. So, what I wanted to say is that now these technologies and outcomes we talk about revolves around the network infrastructure. Right? So we traditionally thought about the network as a, connective for the connectivity as well as maybe for your collaboration with voice and video. Right? But now the network is the foundation for smart spaces.

So basically what we say is network as a sensor, right? So the APs you see on the ceilings, on the walls or somewhere, it’s basically a sensor now. So the APs can, detect assets, locate people, see the Equipment. Yeah. Yes. Understand the utilisation of the space, can be used as a gateway for third party sensors.

So, and also when it comes to collaboration, Cisco Webex devices as well. Right? So these are also like now sensors.

So they have been built sensors to detect occupants, detect presence, understand

Charlotte
Could protect assets too, I guess, from going off-site.

And yes.

Nick Gray
Yeah. I think that’s important in hospitals. Right? Yeah. Rajith and I have spoken about this a lot where you can get quite low cost stick on sensors that go on, for instance, wheelchairs.

Yeah. And another saving that is not necessarily impacted by energy costs, maybe in time and people energies. How many porters across these Victorian buildings. And I’ve seen it in Leeds where I’m based where they have to find a bed or a particular device.

Yeah. My wife’s actually, a cardiology system. And she explained to me that if they cannot find a particular device in a certain period of time, they just go and buy another one, which is crazy. Right?

So I think a lot of these use cases that Rajith talks around, whether it’s our devices or even the third party ones, so there’s many third party ones, available that connect to our network.

I think they’re really important. Other other use cases I’ve seen is, you see where babies get swapped over accidentally. Yeah.

Charlotte
I was well, I was thinking that because, yeah, any and incubators and

Nick Gray
Yeah.

Yeah. So so you can literally get these throwaway sensors that are very low costs. Obviously, from a health and safety point of view, you can’t reuse one of them. No.

It’s a bit like the label you would wear if you if you entered the hospital and the ability to kind of track a person, and also transmission control as well. Right? So Yeah. Obviously, we had COVID a number of years ago, like a blip, but the reality is if we knew the four of us were within a vicinity within our access points.

We can track to around about thirty centimetre accuracy. So Wow. The ability for you to wear like a lanyard as a doctor, so Charlotte’s the doctor, and us for your patients, you will be able to check with and these are third parties that connect to our networks, but be able to detect exactly where those people have been and pull a report on it. So, again, we don’t need to spend millions on creating an application that Yeah.

Ultimately happens. But but the reality is in those kinda work settings, I think there’s lots of use cases, not just the turning the lights on the heat and Mhmm. As Rose just says. Yeah.

And and sometimes it might not be our sensor. Right? The underlying thing is the network is and I think it’s John’s phrase that we pinch, but the network as a sensor. Yeah.

And then you start to add on the various parts because someone may have taken a route down a collaboration route with a different vendor. They they may have gone with, you know, a different type of access point or something like that.

So I think what we can do as Cisco and IT jail is take people on a journey, and I think that’s the most important thing, you

John Monaghan
know, joyfully.

Charlotte
So what let’s mention the l word legislation,

John Monaghan
which

Charlotte
is a big issue in public sector, and I would imagine something they have to think about quite a lot.

So thinking of some of those examples of what you’ve seen in various public sector organisations, how much of that is driven by legislation and, you know, what kind of legislation?

John Monaghan
So it’s a really great point, Charlotte. And up until now, I think most organisations have been adopting sustainability practices because they know it’s a) the right thing to do but also b) they know that they can help them reduce their operating costs as well.

But we are now, you know, such as you would traditionally think of that approach as being, you know, the carrot, right? But now we’re moving into an E and F where there’s more legislation being developed all the time. So it’s more into the stick approach.

And ultimately it will be a combination of both. But just to give and this is an area that’s very dynamic so the new government are introducing more legislation. But just to give a you know a couple of quick examples.

So Nick touched on and Rajith touched on our ability as in Cisco ITGL to actually help customers with systems like lighting.

So lighting is not an area that you would traditionally think of with Cisco and ITGL. Like what have we got to do with lights, right?

But actually as it transpires lights are a big energy consumer.

But the way in which we power and manage and control lights is I would argue a little bit outdated.

And it can be made very efficient. But one of the legislative drivers for that is the fact that it’s now basically illegal to sell certain types of fluorescent and halogen lights.

Charlotte
And in older properties

John Monaghan
In older properties.

There’s loads of them. I mean no one really knows how many but from a sample poll that we conducted of our hospital, this is just hospitals never mind all the other public sector buildings. Seventy percent of them come back and say we still got a lot of fluorescent lights.

And what it means is that’s basically a ticking time bomb. Yeah. Because if those lights fail and they do, you’re allowed to carry spare parts, but you can’t buy excess stuff.

You have

Charlotte
to replace them and

John Monaghan
So if they don’t have a replacement part ready at ready at hand that part of the building would get shut down.

Charlotte
Oh, so they wouldn’t even be able to use it?

John Monaghan
No, because health and safety at work, the health and safety at work act requires certain light levels for different types of tasks.

Charlotte
So they’ve got competing legislation almost?

John Monaghan
They’ve got competing legislation. So the natural thing to do there, of course, would be you would have to, you know, formulate a plan, right? You’d have to go out and survey all your buildings and your assets and find out how many of that and work out a plan. And again without getting into all the details we have, we believe, Cisco and ITGL.

We’ve got a technologically superior way of replacing those lights.

Charlotte
Right.

John Monaghan
That reduces costs. It’s safer as Rajith was flying. Faster deployment. Faster deployment.

Charlotte
And proactive.

John Monaghan
Proactive, lower risk and lower energy consumption.

Nick Gray
Yeah. Everything. All of it. All of it.

Charlotte
The whole shebang.

Nick Gray
So that’s

John Monaghan
a really great example of where legislation is applying us a pretty strong lever.

Nick Gray
Yeah. The the other one that I believe we’re trying to help change, but I’ve certainly seen is emergency lighting. So, you know, the little green running man or woman, I suppose, it’s typically Person.

Person. Yeah.

But but with those ones too, we’ve got a number of building pods, within our Cisco locations that Rajith and the team have seen. But one of the things that I learned through this process was the amount of times that facilities need to check that emergency lighting is working. Now I believe as of today, because you need backup batteries on them and we again don’t make these lights, but third park third party companies do.

The ability to run reports and know if these lights are working, the backup batteries have that information, we can pull

Charlotte
that plumber, you don’t have to have someone going out there and physically check

Nick Gray
That’s what

John Monaghan
happens.

That’s what next probably I’ll do.

Nick Gray
Yeah. Yeah. So so the reality is, you know, people in facilities are having to check every single month to check that these exit signs are working quite rightly, from a safety point of view. But my understanding is that it’s not quite legislation yet to power those from, the switch.

So for from our point of view, doing things like this and having conversations with the government and no doubt Cisco definitely have those conversations around how we can deliver technology to improve things. I think when the more we can get this message out and start showing people the technology, but not only that, the enhancements to make their life easier. Because, again, I learned through that process that, well, you know, one of the customers that I’ve worked with, the amount of time that it takes them to check ten, eleven offices to make sure these lights are working is an incredible amount of money. So I know we touched upon saving on energy, but there’s all these other areas. Like Rajith said, trying to find a device or a person, you know. And so there’s so many facets of savings, but I think the big one that we talked around is definitely energy around sustainability.

Rajith Rangajeewa
So the other thing I just wanted to discuss was that, around now, these government buildings with post pandemic, as well as, these hybrid working policies, those are those buildings are underutilised. Right? So they are even though it those underutilised organisation doesn’t have the right capability, right tools to understand the space utilisation and occupancy. Right?

Charlotte
So with people working at home a lot of the time. Yes.

Nick Gray
Yeah. The dynamics change doesn’t have that.

Rajith Rangajeewa
The dynamics change. And, they use the fixed set points, fixed schedules to cool or heat even for lights. So it’s a huge waste of energy. Right?

And he’s so what we can do is with the network, we can understand the occupancy, understand the space utilisation, and give the, organisations that visibility into the, into the building. And maybe if it’s not utilised, the space is utilised, they may be able to repurpose that space for the betterment of the community. Right? So those are the things that we can, work on top of the network infrastructure they already have.

Charlotte
Yeah. And that’s a good point, isn’t it, in the public sector? Because I know just in my local town, the library now is available.

It’s like a one

Nick Gray
stop shop.

Charlotte
Yeah. But they’ve closed down the registry office, and sold that building. And then they’ve put the registry office inside the library so that they can mix the schedule utilisation.

John Monaghan
But the only way you can really make those decisions is by having data. Mhmm.

And again, it all goes back to

Nick Gray
To know you’re

Charlotte
making the right decision.

John Monaghan
To know you’re making the right decision. Mhmm. So how popular, how utilised was the registry space before Yeah. Ditto with the library.

And what we probably found is that and it may have been a manual study often as we’re back to inefficiency again because

Nick Gray
it’s quite expensive.

John Monaghan
Seriously, I mean I’ve been I’ve worked with many customers who unfortunately, because maybe they can’t afford it at the time Mhmm. Or they’re just not aware of what’s possible, they employ a third party company to go in literally walking around with a clipboard Yeah. Looking at how spaces are being used. And I don’t need to tell everyone how inefficient that is. Yeah. So as Rajith quite rightly is alluding to, we can be really smart about that and we can use sensors that provide ongoing analysis of how a space is being used.

Charlotte
And as it changes.

John Monaghan
As it changes as well and what effect has a particular change had, you know. So your example is a great one happening in my local town as well. They’ve actually shut down a library and moved it into a school because they realised that there was a part of the school that was underutilised because the maybe the birth rates have changed. They know they don’t need as much space in the school.

Charlotte
And they probably don’t need as much office space because that to your point in certain buildings. Yeah.

John Monaghan
It’s fascinating.

Nick Gray
I think the dynamic of how we work as well, whether it’s public or private sector, has changed as well. Yeah. Cisco use a phrase which is make the office a magnet, not a mandate. Mhmm.

And for I

Charlotte
like that.

Nick Gray
Yeah. And and for John and I, you we were chatting around this. So I’m based in Leeds. So I go where required, you know, whether it’s also with ITGL or the city office or Glasgow or Manchester.

And the reality is what we’ve done and, again, we can share this, you know, the team IT ITGL already have this, but we have a lot of data around how we flipped our office from being seventy percent kind of desk space Yeah. And thirty percent collaboration space to completely the opposite. Yeah. So it’s now seventy percent collaboration space.

Nice. What I mean by collaboration is not necessarily a hardware of which I’d love it to be a hardware. Yeah. But the reality is people go into the office to work and work on projects and stuff like that.

Charlotte
So That’s probably why they’ve gone into the office Yes. As opposed to work from home Yes. If they want to be with their team.

Nick Gray
And what you tend to find is people aren’t going into the office because they’ve got better, security at home in terms of the way they access, better collaboration tools at home, albeit with a nostril view of a webcam. But the reality is the world’s changed, and I think the pandemic only accelerated that kind of working from home. Yeah. And I think the encouragement to get people back into the office, and I know we’ll talk around this later on, but we’ve just reopened one of our new offices in London. Mhmm. And I can’t tell you how impressive it is, but the thing that impressed me was the amount of people that are now coming back into the office. Right?

Charlotte
They’re excited.

Nick Gray
They’re excited. The technology works. Mhmm. You know? And I know Rajith and the team ITGL are building out their own experience centre as well. Right? So I think from my point of view, if you if you can make the technology better in the office as well, that’s gonna draw people back in.

And it goes back to this kind of what we said around the amount of workspace.

We also found in our New York office in Atlanta, we actually shrink some of the square footage as well. So that’s gonna save money. So there’s so many things, but I love what John said. It it’s about the data.

Yeah. And the nice thing for us and IT Joe is I know they look after a lot of Cisco customers that they have, and they already have the hardware. So you probably tend to find, and Rajith can probably talk around this, that he’s probably got some of the data. He just needs to have conversations with those customers around.

This is what we already know to give that baseline as John said. Yeah. And and I think that’s the really important thing, isn’t it?

Rajith Rangajeewa
Is that Exactly. Yeah. So that’s the thing that you talk about user experience. So in a smart building, that’s also a prominent factor, the user experience. So Yeah.

Again, if I go back to public sector organisations, many kinds of users use those government buildings. Right? It can be the government employees, NHS staff, patients, students, teachers, and the residents.

So, the experience, the better built environment means a better experience. Right? So for example, like a hospital, right? So the patient recovery solely depend on the environment around him.

So if he has poor, environment factors like carbon dioxide or even poor lighting, and poor temperature controls, that means the patient recovery will be, it will definitely, negatively impact the patient recovery. Right? Yeah. So if we can, monitor first and measure this and, give that dynamic with the APIs, the open APIs we have, give that information to the building management system, the lighting systems, so they can dynamically control the environment.

Yeah. Not only the patient recovery will be more effective, it will affect the staff as well. Right? To Of course.

For their well-being as well and for their efficiency as well.

Charlotte
Yeah. It’s fascinating, isn’t it? There are so many layers to it. And and that’s one of the reasons the public sector is so interesting because there’s all those different use cases.

Nick Gray
So I don’t know whether to jump in here, but I’ll go over here.

So this is a scenario I’ve genuinely seen, and I’ve walked through a hospital, which wasn’t my local hospital, but I know lots of hospitals have our Cisco network in, and I know the guys at ITGL have a lot of those customers, which is which is amazing.

But one of the things that we haven’t touched upon is the ability to have, like, a Google Maps experience within a building. Oh my gosh.

I think

Charlotte
about that all the time.

Like, my local hospital is amazed, as I’m sure you were gonna say. Yeah. And it’s like, well, I don’t know where radiology is. I’ve never been here before.

Nick Gray
There’s a couple of use cases, Sharpe. Right. So it’s not necessarily funny, but I was dressed as an elf.

Charlotte
I feel like No. That is funny.

Nick Gray
Know. So so Cisco do this give him we do these giving back days and Yeah. A lot of Cisco staff give, donations, and we went and gave presents to sick children in a in a hospital in the northwest. So I’m dressed as an elf.

Yeah. The funny bit for me was walking around trying to find where I was going. Yeah. So going back to the John’s Point because it’s a very old building Yeah.

I’d it wasn’t my local one.

And there’s

Charlotte
not often lots of different building.

Nick Gray
Yeah.

And they’re aren’t normally six foot two

Charlotte
as well.

John Monaghan
But but

Charlotte
Well, apart from Buddy,

Nick Gray
who’s Yeah.

You’re right. Yeah.

So from my point of view, when I looked up and I saw our access points, the first thing that I could think of is we need to see if we can get Cisco spaces deployed in this location. Yeah. Because what that could do, I’ll give you an example, is you could send a text message out. So Eleanor and the team at ITGL could organise for a text message to come out and say, here is your appointment.

Charlotte
Mhmm.

Nick Gray
You’re due in this clinic at this time, and I know that’s not necessarily smart building, but using a contact centre software Yeah. You’ll know that the text or the WhatsApp’s been received. You know that you can deliver the messaging and the maps. And then you can give a hyperlink to a soft application. You don’t even need to install an app on someone’s phone now.

They would click the link, and when they get into the building, they literally

Charlotte
They know.

Nick Gray
From a to b like you will be Google Maps.

Charlotte
That is great.

Nick Gray
Think of when Tom Toms came out and sat nav and how we went from having a map. Yeah. That’s where I believe we are today. We’re we’re on a map, but the reality is the technology is there. And again, you can see this ITGL’s offices and you can see in our environment as well.

Charlotte
Well, and that brings us a good thing to finish on because we’re almost out of time. I mean, because I suspect we could be here for quite a while.

But you were gonna sort of issue an open invitation.

Nick Gray
Yeah. So I think, so one of the things that Cisco have done is our real estate, certainly the team are looking into how we put our own technologies, drink our own champagne. Yeah. Yeah. And literally two weeks ago, we just opened up our brand new city office floor. It’s in Finsbury Circus.

So we’re doing active tours with partners and customers. So one of the things that we spoke about, Charlotte, was, look, there’s an open invitation, and Rajith and the team at ITGL will know that. So love for any of your customers, that wanna come in, just get into contact with the guys at ITGL and we’ll help facilitate VIP tours with myself and John and the team. Yeah. But you can actually see the technology we have.

Charlotte
And great to generate ideas for them, you know, for their own spaces.

John Monaghan
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, our customers do want to see you only get so far with slides, right?

Nick Gray
Is this real? Yeah.

Charlotte
Yeah.

They

John Monaghan
actually want to see it working somewhere.

And Yeah. As Nick says. So so we’ve now got we’ve now got an office literally on our doorstep with pretty much all of our all of our solution. So yeah.

Charlotte
Fantastic. Really exciting.

So well, thank you all very much. I think, personally, I found this very interesting. I love to learn about all this stuff. It’s quite fascinating. And and like I said, you know, it can impact people in so many different ways. So thank you very much.

John Monaghan
Thank you very much.