Arun ShankarAlan Ni is responsible for driving innovation and strategy around helping enterprises and organisations create smarter spaces, leveraging mobility and IoT. Ni works directly with customers to define their requirements and outline a solution plan. The idea is to expand the ecosystem and ensure smooth integration with other solutions to enable transition to smart digital workspaces.
Ni defines transformation as leveraging a range of technologies to improve or materially transform a business or end-user experience. The nature of work and workplaces is changing as people expect mobile devices to digitise physical experiences.
In the physical office, the rise of activity-based working environments is providing people with new options in work settings. Mobility and location-based services are the keys to unlocking high performance workplaces that embrace and promote collaboration, creativity and more effective teamwork. Outside of work, end user expectations for experiences are rising as well. Lying at the heart of all of these transformations is pervasive, secure connectivity augmented by location-based services.
Customers learn that it is a journey, that the deployment is not the end, but just the beginning. With the new solutions in place they can continue to adapt and support their employee, customer, and partner needs as they evolve.
For a dream transformation project to roll out and be successful, it is imperative to have committed buy-in from all stakeholders, who may reside in different groups within an organisation. It also needs to have a clear strategic direction, an identified problem to be solved, and the customer’s willingness to be flexible and willing to push the boundaries and fail. They also need to have committed funding in place and tie the project into a strategic initiative.
Aruba learns from every transformation and strives to use that knowledge to guide product development and support activities. With digital transformations, lessons learned from one type of customer deployment can often be applied to other market segments.
AmericasMart Atlanta, the largest wholesale market center of its kind in the United States, recently underwent a digital transformation and is delivering a unique mobile experience. Its three interconnected buildings contain more than 1,500 permanent showrooms as well as exhibition halls, collectively housing 4.2 million square feet of product. Members representing more than 9,000 different brands, exhibit at AmericasMart and its 16 annual tradeshows.
AmericasMart, which generates an annual Atlanta economic impact of more than $561 million, designed its facilities to offer customers the advantage of transacting business in a contained environment and needed network infrastructure to provide comparable benefits. AmericasMart moved forward with its transformation, deploying access points, controllers, network management and network security solutions, augmented by a location services platform and beacons to enable accurate blue-dot navigation and turn-by-turn directions via its mobile app.
Future plans include the addition of proximity notifications for guests and also asset tracking. The new location services are saving attendees and exhibitors time by providing the most direct and efficient routes through the market center to find what they need.
For exhibitors, the new network is enabling more secure and reliable sales transactions and access to their networks, while attendees can quickly and easily connect to the network with a single SSID. Executives from AmericasMart have pointed out that the transformation is allowing them to provide the mobile, digital experience they’ve always envisioned.
Key takeaways
- Nature of work and workplaces is changing as people expect mobile devices to digitise physical experiences.
- Rise of activity-based working environments is providing people with new options in work settings.
- Mobility and location-based services are keys to unlocking high performance workplaces.
Secure, reliable, pervasive connectivity is the platform for transformational experiences in the workplace, explains Alan Ni from Aruba HPE.
