Sensors and Beacons and APs, oh my!

Today at the 2015 Aruba Atmosphere conference in Las Vegas, one of the things that got the most attention from the online audience was the inclusion of a sensor product that is supposed to be out in the second half of 2015. Few things got the amount of ooh’s and ahhh’s, at least for those of us unfortunate enough to not be in the audience at the Cosmo.

From the first post showing off the screen shot, a grainy picture taken from a cell phone camera of the stage, I was immediately impressed. If you rewind your twitter feeds a few months, I mentioned a post about a product called Axon by Spirent. This repackaging of the Epitiro product from a wonderful group of people in the UK, has tried its way to break into the “see your network from the end users perspective” market. Along with 7 Signal, these products have been preaching the message of being a better way to monitor your wireless infrastructure.

Granted, I don’t know any details about the product other than what has been published on line,
-it’s by Aruba
-it screws into a wall-plate
-it monitors your network
-it feeds data to a central system
however I am just as excited as can be. I don’t think it will be long before other vendors follow suit and gut a small AP to make it do the same thing. Once the central software and monitoring engine are produced, it shouldn’t be long before this is a standard. Shouldn’t being the operative word here.

That being said, Aruba gets the golf clap on this one. Again, not knowing anything about the product, my imagination is surely running wild. The unique features that make Epitiro awesome may belong to them, but there is always room from reimagining the way to define and measure a user experience.

With all of the other fantastic demos today at #ATM15, I was glued to my newsfeed on TweetDeck for a solid hour. What wonderful things Aruba is doing; from checking students in upon arrival, to routing you to your seats at games and gates at airports, the powerful inclusion of beacons was only trumped by the seamless way the management was integrated into the product family.

Image source: http://meridianapps.com/

The team at Meridian seemed to have melded well post-acquistion, and it looks like it was a great match. If you haven’t looked at their app maker, check it out.

The irony with this blog post is that I was offered an opportunity recently to join the Airheads forum to contribute at a higher level. Not being an Aruba reseller, integrator, or partner of any kind made me hesitate at following through with that opportunity. Here’s a line from an email of mine explaining why it wasn’t a good fit:

I was enthusiastic about doing this, however, not being familiar with the products and services Aruba offered would have come off as disingenuous to anyone reading what I was going to write.

Alas, 2 days later, here I am writing about the products and services after following the company more closely. Anyhow, I look forward to seeing what the future holds, and just like the rest of the industry, I really hope HP doesn’t screw up the company. haha Seriously though, don’t screw it up. 🙂