“Our innovations in location-based client positioning are driving new opportunities for operators and enterprises to easily leverage their Ruckus Wi-Fi infrastructure to support intelligent positioning services indoors, where people use Wi-Fi most,” said Selina Lo, president and CEO of Ruckus Wireless. “Our unique Cloud-based service approach gives customers a simple and powerful way to add immense value to their Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi networks, and the ability to easily enable new services. Cloud-based service enablement also allows for instant service provisioning without significant CAPEX contribution.”
“We see location-based services to be one of the key drivers for wireless LAN market growth starting in 2014,” said Rohit Mehra, vice president, Network Infrastructure, International Data Corporation (IDC). “As with other Cloud applications, Cloud-based location services can offer scalable, elastic compute resources for enterprises and service providers to collect, monitor, and provide real time analytics that are essential to providing rapid insight on user location and behavior, enabling improved user satisfaction or other business services that can be monetized.”
With accurate indoor positioning, organizations across nearly every vertical market can now create the right indoor contexts for marketing campaigns, develop comprehensive footfall analysis, and provide varied forms of digital concierge services to customers and employees. The Ruckus SPoT Cloud-based location service uniquely delivers a wide range of valuable real-time and historical analytics based on actual client location.
Within retail environments, retailers can use SPoT to quickly determine the ratio of new visitors to repeat visitors, measure dwell times, and analyze shopping patterns, using both historical and real-time client data. Armed with this information, companies can gain a good indication of customer retention, and take action to improve their business and network performance.
For the hospitality industry, Ruckus SPoT can be used with existing loyalty programs to improve the customer satisfaction score of hotels by improving service delivery times for guest needs. Loyalty member customers can benefit from on-device features such as automatic check-ins, way finding and indoor navigation, as well as instant coupons.
Within healthcare environments, Ruckus SPoT provides a myriad of mission-critical benefits to critical care facilities, such as navigating via a mobile application that allows employees and visitors to seamlessly find their way through complex facilities, saving valuable time, especially in emergency situations. Additionally, management personnel can more effectively plan and distribute resource utilization, significantly helping increase a healthcare organization’s overall efficiency and effectiveness.
For public venues – such as airports, convention centers, stadiums, theme parks and cities – Ruckus SPoT provides location-based services for real-time crowd control, provides location-based information to hurried travelers, and provides an intelligent way for travelers to traverse these large areas.
Ruckus SPoT provides public transit operators with real-time passenger and traffic information, to help enable better efficiency in scheduling and dispatching, as well as providing improved facilities and crowd management.
Within the education market, the Ruckus SPoT service is ideal for identifying where students and staff are located at any time. This gives schools the ability to create innovative mobile applications that, for example, push information, such as electronic text books and other digital curriculum, at desired times and locations.
Ruckus SPoT also provides full end-to-end encrypted data communication, and includes the tools necessary for companies and network operators to manage the privacy of users on their networks. These tools include authentication, MAC address hashing, and secure API access with authentication for ecosystem partners.
Available worldwide in the second quarter of 2014, Ruckus SPoT is a subscription-based service that can be purchased on either a one, three or five year basis for $25 (USD) per Ruckus access point per month. Ruckus SPoT includes an analytics dashboard, along with a web-based tool that allows for uploading floor plans and defining zones for a particular venue. Ruckus SPoT also includes a calibrator mobile application that allows network operators to quickly and easily perform RF fingerprint calibration of any given environment.
Available with the upcoming Ruckus ZoneFlex™ 9.8 version of system software, the Ruckus SPoT service requires no new hardware and can be used with indoor and outdoor Ruckus 802.11n access points such as the Ruckus ZoneFlex 7982, ZoneFlex 7782, ZoneFlex 7372 and ZoneFlex 7055 models, as well as future Ruckus ZoneFlex indoor and outdoor access points.
