In|July|at Google Cloud Next '18, we announced the Cisco & Google Cloud Challenge, to give our developers and partners a window into the possibilities for building hybrid cloud applications. Hybrid cloud opens up an entirely new world that combines the edge, the private cloud, and the public cloud, evident in the interest and responses in the Challenge.

We had hundreds of registrations and several final submissions, varying from solutions related to data aggregation, IoT, collaboration, customer service, energy management, and even weather and astronomical data collection at a high level. While picking a winner from the competitive solutions was tough, we are excited to announce our top two winners and two runners-up for the Challenge. We thank each one the submitters for spending their time and effort and participating in the Challenge.

In the weeks ahead, each of our winners will blog in greater detail about their respective solutions. For now, let me quickly introduce them.

Winners: HCL America Inc. and Bucher + Suter & Expertflow

HCL -Telco Service and Business Insights:Aggregating data from a wide variety of service sources and putting it into an actionable dashboard to determine service health is the goal of this submission. They used the Cisco Container Platform on premise as a data collection point with local interaction point. In conjunction with that, they used the Google Cloud Platform Service Broker and a wide variety of in cloud services to process and store data all with the hope of predicting poor customer service and customer churn before it happens."poor customer service before it happens. Follow HCL on LinkedIn.

Bucher + Suter & Expertflow -Hybrid Chat:The business problem here was an interesting one, attempting to scale things like customer service chat throughput by augmenting human input without eliminating it entirely. The architecture marries on-premise Cisco Container Platform for chat interaction with the human contact center agents and the chatbot chat system they use, within Google Cloud Platform/Dialogflow for the Artificial Intelligence engine making the suggested responses. Their solution also showed how a human can use this augmented experience to scale to handle more simultaneous chat conversations while improving response quality without sounding robotic. Follow Bucher + Suter and Expertflow on LinkedIn.

Runners-up:  SoftServe and MinionLabs

SoftServe:The solution attempted to describe public and private cloud functions, as opposed to traditional supercomputing techniques, to assemble the computational throughput necessary to analyze such data correctly. Follow SoftServe on LinkedIn.

MinionLabs:Their solution provides real-time device level electricity consumption insights to businesses using a smart energy device. The solution energy consumption pattern enables users to make informed decisions to reduce their energy consumption. Follow MinionLabs on LinkedIn.

As far as the journey goes, this was a first for DevNet to embark on a partnership challenge. We learned from every experience. The audience choice, the technologies, the marketing campaigns, the new sandbox planning, the logos, the prizes, and even the choice to judges taught us something. We are a much stronger DevNet with this feather in our hat. "Two clouds, infinite possibilities" showed the world that hybrid cloud opens up an entirely new world and we attest to it!

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