Cisco, ServiceNow announce integration for workplace contact tracing

Cisco and ServiceNow announced Thursday a new collaboration aimed at improving COVID-19 contact tracing efforts. Contact tracing is considered one of the most effective ways to slow the spread of infectious disease and mitigate the long term impact of the coronavirus pandemic. 

To that end, the companies said they will integrate Cisco's indoor location services platform, DNA Spaces, with ServiceNow's contact tracing application. 

The combination will help companies better understand the extent of employee interactions and allow them to take more immediate and informed actions in the event of a positive test, the companies said.

"This partnership allows our joint customers to seamlessly import the Proximity Reporting data into ServiceNow's case management tool, adding reliable employee location data to ServiceNow's robust Safe Workplace workflows," Cisco said in a blog post. "With this integration, companies can make more informed decisions to reduce the transmission of the virus."

Cisco's DNA Spaces platform is part of its network segmentation lineup. The platform includes Cisco's wireless and enterprise geolocation technologies. In the context of contact tracing, the platform offers businesses location-based data and analytics about how people and things move about within physical office locations or other buildings, along with the ability to act on those insights in real-time, according to Cisco.

Meanwhile, ServiceNow's Safe Workplace Suite is designed to give enterprises the tools to return employees to the workplace, track health and manage inventory for things like personal protective equipment as economies and companies re-open during the COVID-19 pandemic. A Safe Workplace Dashboard provides visualizations of the data collected by the apps as well as a map that brings in aggregated public data on infection rates.

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