Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, has 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 has expanded its app developer partner program for the Meridian Mobile App Platform. This will accelerate innovation of location-based mobile apps, allowing organisations to better engage with employees or customers, 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 for a diverse range of organisations. By directly interacting with customers via their mobile devices based on the customers’ in-venue location and their personalised 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.
The new enterprise-grade Internet of Things (IoT) Aruba Sensor combines a small WiFi client and Bluetooth low energy (BLE) radio for organisations 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.
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.
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.