February 21, 2019 By BlueAlly
Your customers want more than a just great product. They want a great experience. Businesses all around the world are embracing digital transformation to deliver new memorable, personalized experiences. Airbnb immerses guests into each host’s unique world. Experiential retail is bringing shoppers back into stores. Hospitals are reinventing themselves to create patient experiences that feel more like a “home away from home” to improve patient outcomes. While the digital era is disrupting business and creating new opportunities, it also brings with it challenges and rising expectations.
User Expectations are Growing
People want a great connected experience wherever they are, whether at work, in the classroom, at their favorite store or at the stadium. They are relentlessly unforgiving when their applications are slow or the Wi-Fi is spotty.
For IT, assuring a consistently great Wi-Fi experience has never been more challenging. Not only are there far more people, devices, and a plethora of diverse applications to support, but the rise in IoT is creating even more complexity.
The Gap Continues to Widen
“Do more with less” has been the mantra of IT for the last decade. Even though today’s economy is booming, IT budgets remain flat. Despite the increasing strategic importance of wireless access as the connectivity platform of choice, the IT team has limited insight into the network performance. They’re still relying on a legacy, disparate set of tools to troubleshoot Wi-Fi issues, leaving less time for strategic projects that drive the business forward.
The sixth generation of Wi-Fi, 802.11ax, also known as Wi-Fi 6, is a key innovation that will help to address insatiable user expectations for a great Wi-Fi experience. 802.11ax is significantly faster and optimized for crowded environments such as stadiums, airports, convention centers and universities where a dense population of clients is competing for network bandwidth. And, it’s an ideal technology for IoT.
But next-generation Wi-Fi alone isn’t enough to deliver consistently great user experiences. Like today’s smart vehicles, networks need to deliver performance while automatically avoiding problems. The network must become smarter, autonomously tuning performance and adapting to changing conditions to deliver the experience people expect. Smarter, proactive networks get IT out of their conventional reactive role so they can spend more time creating new services that deliver strategic value to the business.
Enabling the Experience Edge
Technology innovation is increasingly critical to create extraordinary digital experiences for employees, customers and guests—and to drive sustainable advantage for business. The network at the edge is at the heart of this transformation. It’s what connects people, devices and IoT to the digital world. As the foundation for digital experiences, the network must be secure, intelligent and always on.
But a solid network foundation is not enough. To meet the increasing demands of the business and growing user expectations, IT must be able to scale its resources by finding an easier way to deliver improved and consistent service levels. Delivering on this requirement means not only having a state-of-the-art network, but giving IT the ability to proactively anticipate issues in a highly dynamic environment before they impact users and the business.
802.11ax is Here
Aruba is introducing the 510 Series, a new family of 802.11ax, IoT-ready access points, with advanced WPA3 certified security, AI-powered Wi-Fi performance assurances, intelligent power monitoring, and integrated Zigbee and Bluetooth 5 radios. These innovations willaddress the need for greater performance in highly dense mobile environments and for the growing number of IoT deployments, while also improving battery life on client devices.
But Aruba isn’t stopping there. We are taking our innovations one step further with new enhancements to our AI-powered automation and assurance solution helping IT to realize the promise of the autonomous network.
AI-powered Automation and Assurance
Aruba NetInsight is an automation and assurance solution that combines AI and crowdsourcing to deliver a powerful solution that continuously monitors and troubleshoots the network and delivers predictive, actionable intelligence to improve network performance and the user experience. By leveraging crowdsourcing from hundreds of thousands of AP installations, NetInsight consistently expands and optimizes its prescriptive insights so that customers can benefit from the anonymous learnings of peer network installations.
NetInsight assesses the health of a network, benchmarks it against peer networks, and can automatically make configuration changes to optimize performance based on best-in-class networks. For example, it can compare the Wi-Fi performance of a university lecture hall with other university lecture halls, and with closed-loop automation, automatically push changes to the network to deliver a better student experience. IT spends far less time reacting to user complaints and investigating trouble tickets. NetInsight enables IT to quickly identify the root cause of a problem and remediate faster than they could have with legacy tools.
Wi-Fi Goes Green
NetInsight can also help organizations lower their carbon footprint and save energy costs. Think about an office where most people work during the day, say 8am to 6pm. But the APs are powered all night long, even when no one is using them. NetInsight works in concert with our new 802.11ax APs to learn the typical usage patterns in an environment, such as an office, a university campus or a shopping mall, and then automatically powers down the APs when they are not being utilized. We call this capability Green AP and we’re excited to see how our customers maximize their energy savings and advance environmental sustainability.
The Aruba AI Advantage
Secure, autonomous network operations requires an AI solution built on a foundation of real-world expertise, robust, diverse and representative data to power the algorithms that deliver intelligent, actionable insights to improve performance, security and the user experience. Aruba has a unique advantage over many competitors in creating secure autonomous networks, including 16 years of Wi-Fi expertise, with learnings and best practices built into our AI algorithms from our customers’ diverse networks around the world and from millions of installed APs.
At Aruba, we’re commited to helping our customers deliver extraordinary experiences for their employees and customers. IT can be confident in building those experiences on an amazing simple, intelligent and state-of-the-art platform for the network edge. Our latest AI-powered mobility innovations will help our customers to realize their visions today and well into the future.
