Cisco Systems Inc. and ServiceNow Inc. are working together to help customers looking to get back to work improve their contact tracing efforts.

The plan is to integrate Cisco’s indoor location services platform, called DNA Spaces, with ServiceNow’s Safe Workplace Suite, which includes a new contact tracing application.

Contact tracing is seen as one of the most effective ways of slowing the spread of COVID-19, since it makes it possible to identify anyone who has interacted with someone that has tested positive for the virus. It means those people can be identified quickly, tested and isolated to prevent further spread of the disease.

ServiceNow said in a blog post that integrating DNA Spaces with its Safe Workplace Suite will help companies to better understand the extent of their employee’s interactions, and take more immediate and informed decisions if someone tests positive for the virus.

DNA Spaces is part of Cisco’s network segmentation suite. It’s built atop Cisco’s wireless and enterprise geolocation technologies and provides location-based data and analytics about how people and things move within physical offices and other buildings. It also gives customers the ability to act on those insights in real-time, Cisco said.

ServiceNow’s Safe Workplace Suite is a set of tools that’s meant to help enterprises return to the workplace safely by tracking employee’s health and managing inventory for personal protective equipment. The suite comes with a dashboard that provides visualizations based on the data collected by contact tracing apps, and a map that adds aggregated public data on infection rates.

“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,” Lucas Hanson, senior product manager for Cisco DNA Spaces, said in a blog post. “With this integration, companies can make more informed decisions to reduce the transmission of the virus.”

Cisco and ServiceNow are just the latest example of how tech firms are partnering to help businesses get back to work safely during the coronavirus pandemic — even as many big tech companies such as Google plan to have most employees work from home well into next year.

In August, IBM Corp. and Workday Inc. said they were collaborating on a platform that combines IBM’s tools for analyzing employee, health and workplace data with Workday’s planning capabilities to help companies plan and monitor their workplaces as they reopen their physical premises.

In June, Salesforce.com Inc. announced a similar collaboration with Siemens AG to offer customers mobile boarding passes enabling access to workplace locations, an occupancy management system and contact tracing services.

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