New Aruba Sensors, Beacon Analytics and App Developer Partners Empower IT Organizations to Quickly Support IoT Initiatives and Partner with Marketing Departments
Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company (NYSE:HPE), today announced
the next wave of its Aruba
Mobile Engagement solution with the introduction of the industry’s
first cloud-based beacon management solution designed for multivendor
Wi-Fi networks and beacon analytics. Additionally, Aruba expanded its
app developer partner program for the Meridian
Mobile App Platform to accelerate innovation of location-based
mobile apps allowing organizations to better engage with employees or
customers, and thereby, improving efficiency.
Since its introduction in November 2014, Aruba Mobile Engagement,
powered by Aruba
Beacons and the Meridian Mobile App platform, has improved customer
satisfaction in such diverse organizations as Levi’s Stadium and Orlando
International Airport. By directly interacting with customers via their
mobile devices based on the customers’ in-venue location and their
personalized preferences, Aruba Mobile Engagement is designed to enhance
customer experiences and revenue opportunities for the venue operators.
As the Aruba Mobile Engagement solution grows in popularity, deployments
are growing larger in scale, increasing IT management complexity and
challenges. The new Aruba Sensor is designed to dramatically reduce this
IT overhead, making it easy to manage all beacons from a single
location. Aruba estimates approximately 48 hours of time savings in a
1,000 beacon deployment during a single maintenance window.
Cloud-based Beacon Management Across Multi-Vendor Wi-Fi Networks
The new enterprise-grade Internet of Things (IoT) Aruba
Sensor combines a small, Wi-Fi client and Bluetooth low energy (BLE)
radio for organizations to remotely manage beacons across existing
multi-vendor Wi-Fi networks from a central location. For IT departments,
this means easier and significantly more cost-efficient management and
monitoring of beacon data including battery life, power settings and
software updates.
Orlando International Airport (MCO) which hosts nearly 38 million
travelers annually, implemented Aruba’s Mobile Engagement solution in
late 2014 and has since seen over 26,000 downloads of its MCO mobile app.
“The 1200+ Aruba Beacons deployed throughout our terminals have allowed
us to provide travelers with indoor navigation to airline check-in,
gates, baggage claim and hundreds of other locations including elevators
and restrooms,” said John Newsome, Director of Information Technology
for Greater Orlando Airport Authority. “Our mobile app not only provides
navigation and important airport and flight-related information, it also
helps drive sales for our concessionaires and retailers by providing
both their location as well as links to their own websites for more
in-depth information on their offerings such as menus for our
restaurants.” He added, “Since so many travelers now rely on mobile
apps, the accuracy and reliability of the information we’re delivering
is paramount. Today, to ensure this accuracy, our IT staff must monitor
the beacons manually which is burdensome for such an extensive
deployment. Using the new Aruba Sensors, however, we’ll be able to
manage our beacons remotely, saving valuable time and IT resources.”
Measuring Success with Beacon Analytics
The projected increase for IoT deployments and demand for
business-focused mobile apps, make seamless interactions between mobile
apps and IoT crucial. Knowing who is connected, their location and the
type of device they are using are all powerful tools for enabling these
interactions. To deliver business operations leaders this visibility,
Aruba has also introduced beacon analytics to measure user engagement,
including aggregated results on navigation metrics, location-based
triggers and dwell time. While businesses benefit from the information
beacon analytics provide, users can rest assured that their privacy is
protected, since beacon analytics are inherently more privacy-friendly
than alternative approaches. With beacon analytics, users must download
an app for a participating business and agree to share their location
before any information is divulged.
New App Developer Partnership Program Encourages Innovation at the
Pace of Mobility
Because Aruba Meridian is designed to power an unlimited number of
location-based applications, for business and marketing leaders, the
only barriers to entry are the creativity of mobile app development
partners and a strong partnership with IT. To remove these obstacles and
accelerate the development of new mobile apps, Aruba’s partner program
allows both Independent Software Vendors (ISV) and Custom App
Development Agencies (CADA) to leverage the Meridian Mobile App Platform
quickly and easily.
Aruba ISV partners focus on creating purpose-built, easy-to-implement
enterprise mobility apps that improve efficiencies and productivity for
a variety of organizations.
Powering Smart Venues to Deliver Unprecedented Guest Experiences –
VenueNext,
a technology platform company that seamlessly integrates everything a
venue offers into one mobile interface, has already integrated Aruba
Mobile Engagement into app solutions for Levi’s Stadium, Home of the San
Francisco 49ers, Amway Center, Home of the Orlando Magic, Yankee
Stadium, Home of the New York Yankees and AT&T Stadium, Home of the
Dallas Cowboys’ venues in the past year, with others in development. As
part of Aruba’s new partner program, VenueNext will integrate Aruba’s
mobile engagement solution into its platform for venue customer
requirements in the sports and entertainment, hospitality, healthcare
and transportation markets.
“Our approach is to unify the whole ecosystem of a large venue, both
technologically and logistically, with a view towards giving guests and
visitors a mobile seamless interface to every amenity that venue has to
offer,” said John Paul, CEO and Founder of VenueNext. “Aruba is an
important technological partner in making an unprecedented experience
like this happen with our customers. When you combine location services
and way-finding with other offerings like Food, Beverage and Merchandise
delivery, guests have a magical experience and venue owners have more
loyal and engaged visitors who have a higher propensity to return and
spend more.”
Streamlining Conference Room Bookings – With software partner, Robin,
Aruba is delivering an intelligent, centralized conference room booking
app that lets enterprises simplify meeting scheduling to improve office
productivity. Robin-powered conference rooms use location information to
automatically update attendees’ calendars and use real-time presence
information to update meeting rooms based on who is actually inside
them, rather than what’s listed on the schedule. Using Robin helps
enterprises eliminate double bookings, outdated meetings, and the
difficulty of locating conference rooms.
“Our booking system, combined with the Meridian Mobile App platform,
provides a complete solution with visibility into meeting room
availability, their amenities, and the location and directions,” said
Sam Dunn, CEO, Robin. “Together we’re helping people find the right
tools, at the right time, so they can do better work.”
For customers with unique mobile app requirements, Aruba has
partnerships with CADA partners that can build tailor-made apps based on
a customers’ unique requirements.
Melding Design and Tech to Create Meaningful User Experiences - Forge
Media + Design is a user experience (UX) design and app development
agency that focuses on elevating customers’ environments through
outstanding user experience.
“Partnering with Aruba allows us to push the envelope for how technology
interacts with people in architectural spaces,” said Gregory Neely,
founding principal, Forge Media + Design. “The Aruba Meridian App
Platform provides us with a powerful tool that allows us to
craft functionally beautiful apps for organizations to engage with their
customers and effectively communicate to build lasting loyalty."
Forge and Aruba are currently working together on a large scale app
project that will encompass over three million square feet of a major
hospital, which is expected to launch in Spring 2016.
Reinventing Classroom Management: Silicon Valley-based,
custom-app development agency Impekable
is partnering with Aruba to deliver additional app value to its
customers. “Becoming a partner allows us to cross-pollinate with Aruba
Meridian to design advanced indoor location-based apps,” said Pek
Pongpaet, Managing Partner, Impekable. “A great example of this is our
concept Aruba Classroom app which allows teachers to automate
attendance-taking in a classroom and other time-consuming tasks that
take away from teaching and learning.”
HPE Services
As larger scale IoT deployments emerge, complexity increases. HPE’s
multivendor integration expertise reduces risk and implementation time
to help quickly enable business intelligence, customer experience and
additional revenue opportunities powered by Aruba Mobile Engagement. HPE
services help bring together key elements in an IoT solution, including
strategy, assessment, design, deployment, integration and optimization
of Aruba WLAN and Mobile Engagement solutions.
Pricing and Availability
The Aruba Sensor AS-100 is available to order on December 2, 2015
starting at $195, U.S. list.
Additional Resources
About Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company
Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, is a leading provider of
next-generation networking solutions for enterprises of all sizes
worldwide. The company delivers IT solutions that empower organizations
to serve the latest generation of mobile-savvy users who rely on
cloud-based business apps for every aspect of their work and personal
lives.
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.
© 2015 Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. Aruba’s
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®, ClientMatch®, 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.
Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company
Pavel Radda, +1-408-419-0294
Senior Director of Corporate Communications
pradda@arubanetworks.com
or
LSH Communications for Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company
Lori Hultin, Principal, +1-818-879-4651
lhultin@arubanetworks.com
or
VENUENEXT
Louise Callagy, +1-415-699-2963
VP, Marketing
louise@venuenext.com