Waikato Business News October/November 2017

WAIKATO BUSINESS NEWS October/November 2017
13
Cisco Inc saves with Company-X software
Company-X has answers to Cisco’s
questions.
Cisco Inc, the San Jose,
California-based
worldwide leader
in IT and networking, has
saved thousands of dollars
after piloting new technology
developed with Company-X,
the Hamilton-based software
specialist.
Company-X heard Cisco
staff and contractors were
struggling with time consuming
text searches through terabytes
of data. So, Company-X
software developers James
Brunskill and Caleb Dearlove
set about building a solution
to make searching simple for
Cisco.
Every time one of Cisco’s
55,000 staff or 120,000 contractors
across the world went
looking for an answer about a
product or service it cost the
multi-national US$25 in lost
productivity, said Cisco senior
manager Ashela Webb. But
that cost has been significantly
reduced by the introduction
of Cisco Answers Machine,
which Company-X has developed
with Cisco to instantly
answer questions from staff
with business-critical answers.
Over the year Brunskill
and Dearlove developed the
software that finds information
in Cisco’s database and
delivers an instant answer
with a reference to the source.
Thousands of questions have
been answered since.
An early version of Cisco
Answers Machine was piloted
three months ago with users
rating the relevancy of the
answers they received. In the
majority of cases the answers
were deemed helpful.
We hope to grow
Cisco Answers
Machine to the point
that devices that we
sell will have their
own Cisco Answers
Machine that you
can text a question
to and get an instant
answer.
Webb said, “It’s one of our
leading examples of innovation.
We are getting a lot of
value back out of Company-X.
Cisco Answers Machine has
reduced the number of hours
engineers spend getting their
questions answered.”
Brunskill described the
software as a question answer-
ing system, based on a database
of common questions and
answers.
“You can interact with it
using Cisco Spark, Cisco's
innovative business messaging
platform, and via text message.”
Brunskill said.
"We’ve been doing work
applying Artificial Intelligence
techniques to pull data from a
variety of data sources across
Cisco. As well as providing
new ways to interact with the
knowledge via voice, Cisco
Spark, websites, and so on."
Cisco Answers Machine is
a great solution for answering
frequently asked questions,
Webb said.
“There’s certain pieces of
information that are asked for
over-and-over again. Like a
publicly available price list.
Do staff and contractors really
want to go and search it on the
website? Or, internally, how
do I set my time off banner
so other members of the team
know that I am off the prem-
ises? Or can you hack one of
our switches? We have got
a 120-page PDF you can go
through.”
“It’s been amazing working
with Company-X. They
are really good at finding the
use case that will be most useful
given the constraints of any
particular project.”
“We hope to grow Cisco
Answers Machine to the point
that devices that we sell will
have their own Cisco Answers
Machine that you can text a
question to and get an instant
answer.”
Cisco and Company-X are
working on making the solution
voice activated, and have
already done some demonstrations.
“The one big challenge
with voice is how you authenticate
it,” Webb added. “We are
just trying to understand how
it deals with accent, acronyms,
and Cisco’s business language.
All of those things are really
interesting.”
HE HAS THE ANSWERS: Company-X software developer James Brunskill, right, confers with colleague Marcel van de Steeg.