Stadiums, Retailers, Hotels and Hospitals Can Now Deliver Onsite Location Services that Interact with Customers Based on their Position and Personalized Profiles
Aruba Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: ARUN) today announced Aruba Mobile
Engagement, an interactive and personalized mobile solution based on
Wi-Fi and location
services powered by Aruba Beacons. Aruba Mobile Engagement enables
organizations to deliver customized push notifications and precise
onsite navigation to users’ mobile devices based on their opted-in,
personalized profile settings and position inside a venue. The new
platform enables venues’ marketing and IT departments to partner more
effectively resulting in increased customer loyalty, satisfaction and
revenue.
In developed countries, more than 90 percent of consumers’ time is spent
indoors, and up to 55 percent of consumers own Wi-Fi-enabled
smartphones. This large addressable market, compounded with a growing
number of companies worldwide planning to implement location-based
mobile marketing, presents a unique opportunity for venues to take
advantage of Aruba Mobile Engagement.
With Aruba Mobile Engagement, customers can securely opt-in to receive
mobile push notifications they care about using Aruba
Meridian-powered apps. Participating customers’ in-venue positions
are then determined using mobile apps that recognize Aruba Beacons
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology to securely engage mobile devices
inside venues. By using the venue’s existing Aruba Wi-Fi infrastructure,
IT administrators can centrally manage hundreds of Aruba Beacons and
help their business partners increase revenue streams and customer
satisfaction.
To eliminate privacy concerns, Aruba Mobile Engagement does not capture
or retain customer information and requires multiple layers of
acknowledgement from the mobile user before activation. In addition,
Aruba Mobile Engagement allows mobile device users to position
themselves by searching for Aruba Beacons versus competing approaches
that use hardware in a venue to search for the user. Notifications will
only “wake up” a mobile app after customers have completed a three-stage
opt-in process, are next to a point of interest they care about, and
input information to create their profile in the mobile app. If
customers no longer wish to receive notifications, they can simply opt
out ending all communications between the customers’ mobile devices and
the venue.
Incentivizing Customers and Increasing Loyalty with Personalized
Offers
Stadiums, retailers and hotels rely heavily on loyalty to encourage
customers to stay on premises longer and ultimately, influence their
buying decisions. These venues can retain more customers for longer by
improving their experience and delivering location-based personalized
offers and incentives to eat, shop and relax onsite. With the new Aruba
Mobile Engagement, venues now have a mechanism to deliver tailored
promotions to their customers when they are on the premises. Once
customers complete the opt-in process, notifications will automatically
communicate with the customers’ mobile app and deliver personalized
offers, promotions, and nearby amenities and services. Since this
platform uses a venue’s Wi-Fi infrastructure and easy-to-deploy Aruba
Beacons, Aruba Mobile Engagement is simple for IT staff to manage and
for customers to use.
The new home of the San Francisco 49ers and one of the world’s most
advanced open-air sports and entertainment venues, Levi’s® Stadium seats
68,500 spectators inside a 1.85 million square foot facility. Levi’s®
Stadium’s state-of-the-art network was built on Brocade switching and
Aruba mobility technology to deliver exclusive content, venue
information and services to visiting fans.
“From a technology perspective, it is imperative that we engineered a
network infrastructure that not only delivered ultra-fast connectivity
to tens of thousands of fans’ mobile devices, but also provided a mobile
engagement experience like none other,” said Dan Williams, Vice
President of Technology for the San Francisco 49ers, the team that
provided the technology infrastructure and mobile app to the Santa Clara
Stadium Authority’s project. “By partnering with Brocade for switching
and Aruba for mobility, we were able to blaze new ground and create a
platform that gave our fans the experience of a personal game day
command center in the palm of their hands. Fans can now watch instant
replays, receive precise turn-by-turn navigation, and order food
directly from their mobile devices. Visitors get to experience the
facility and game like never before by greatly enhancing their onsite
experience.”
Enhancing Patient Experience While Complying with Healthcare
Regulations
Recent healthcare policies encourage hospitals to provide patients with
critical information in a variety of languages. Currently, hospitals are
forced to distribute information by means of multilingual pamphlets or
signage. This is not only inefficient and costly when making
modifications, but also causes a distraction for staff members focused
on critical patient care. With Aruba Mobile Engagement, patients receive
up-to-date information in the language of their choice though
HIPAA-compliant, secure push notifications to their mobile device.
Additionally, patients receive information relevant to the department
they are in. Since patients must opt-in to push notifications the first
time they are located within the hospital, patients will only receive
information relevant to them.
Additional Customer and Industry Analyst Quotes
Nebraska Furniture Mart is the largest home furnishing, flooring,
appliance and electronics store in North America. Its retail outlets
range in size from 450,000 to 560,000 square feet, which makes it
critical for customers to be able to effortlessly locate products.
“Our customers love us because we are a reputable, one-stop-shop for
everything from furniture to high-end electronics,” said Robyn Messerly,
software development, Nebraska Furniture Mart. “Aruba Mobile Engagement
turns our customers’ smartphones into personal shoppers. When they enter
one of our stores, we can now give them turn-by-turn directions to our
products’ exact location in the store.”
Aruba Mobile Engagement also has applications in the nonprofit sector.
The American Museum of Natural History is one of the world’s leading
scientific institutions with over five million annual visitors, a
collection of over 33 million specimen and artifacts, 45 galleries, and
26 interconnected buildings. The Museum is evaluating Aruba’s Mobile
Engagement platform for use as part of its groundbreaking Explorer app.
Supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, Explorer provides visitors with
turn-by-turn directions and location-based information.
“We are very much looking forward to testing Aruba Beacons for indoor
positioning,” said Anne Canty, SVP for Communications and Marketing at
the American Museum of Natural History. “Indoor location awareness is a
critical feature in a complex as large as the American Museum of Natural
History, which consists of dozens of interconnected buildings
constructed over more than 100 years. The Museum has worked with Aruba’s
Meridian platform since 2010, when we launched the groundbreaking
Explorer app, which allows visitors to navigate across four floors of
galleries as well as to cafes and restrooms.”
“A rapidly emerging best practice for fostering loyalty and engagement
in customer-facing verticals such as hospitality, retail and healthcare
is being able to deliver user-specific content to consumers’ and
patients' mobile devices based on their physical location,” said Nolan
Greene, Research Analyst, Network Infrastructure, IDC. “Aruba's Mobile
Engagement solution gives venues a simple-to-implement tool for
delivering a more helpful customer experience that promotes a stronger
business to customer relationship."
"Public-facing enterprises - particularly in markets like retail,
hospitality and healthcare - are discovering the benefits of an
integrated mobile engagement strategy that combines location-based
technologies with value-added applications," said Sheryl Kingstone,
Research Director for 451 Research. "As the industry evolves to address
consumer privacy concerns, as well as these organizations' need to
better drive customer loyalty, increase revenues and improve overall
engagement, companies that can act swiftly to combine app development
with new technologies like BLE beacons will be the best positioned for
success."
Availability
Aruba Mobile Engagement will be generally available in the first quarter
of 2015.
Additional Resources
About Aruba Networks, Inc.
Aruba Networks is a leading provider of next-generation network access
solutions for the mobile enterprise. The company designs and delivers
Mobility-Defined Networks that empower IT departments and #GenMobile, a
new generation of tech-savvy users who rely on their mobile devices for
every aspect of work and personal communication. To create a mobility
experience that #GenMobile and IT can rely upon, Aruba Mobility-Defined
Networks™ automate infrastructure-wide performance optimization and
trigger security actions that used to require manual IT intervention.
The results are dramatically improved productivity and lower operational
costs.
Listed on the NASDAQ and Russell 2000® Index, Aruba is based in
Sunnyvale, California, and has operations throughout the Americas,
Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific regions. To learn more,
visit Aruba at http://www.arubanetworks.com.
For real-time news updates follow Aruba on Twitter
and Facebook,
and for the latest technical discussions on mobility and Aruba products
visit Airheads Social at http://community.arubanetworks.com.
© 2014 Aruba Networks, Inc. Aruba Networks’ trademarks include Aruba
Networks®, Aruba The Mobile Edge Company® (stylized), Aruba
Mobility-Defined Networks™, Aruba Mobility Management System®, People
Move Networks Must Follow®, Mobile Edge Architecture®, RFProtect®, Green
Island®, ETips®, ClientMatchTM, Virtual
Intranet AccessTM, ClearPass Access Management
SystemsTM, Aruba InstantTM,
ArubaOSTM, xSecTM,
ServiceEdgeTM, Aruba ClearPass Access
Management SystemTM, AirmeshTM,
AirWaveTM, Aruba CentralTM,
and ARUBA@WORKTM. All rights reserved. All
other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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Aruba Networks, Inc.
Pavel Radda, +1-408-419-0294
Director of Corporate Communications
pradda@arubanetworks.com
or
LSH Communications for Aruba Networks
Lori Hultin, +1-818-879-4651
Principal
lhultin@arubanetworks.com