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ClearPass Extensions help Skyfii customers take flight

By Charlie_Clemmer posted Sep 12, 2016 08:55 AM

  

If you’re delivering hyper-personalized content to anyone on your Wi-Fi network, then you may already be experiencing Skyfii’s cloud-based mobile analytics platform.

 

Our technology blends data points from multiple sources to create actionable competitive insights and enables presenting fine-tuned messages, to customers and internal constituents, in real time or on a schedule you choose.

 

Although Aruba users appreciated our base platform and early integration with Aruba’s Analytics and Location Engine (ALE), many of you wanted to leverage new and expanded capabilities within your deployments of Aruba OS and AppRF, Aruba Instant and AirWave. We responded by providing the option to incorporate those data streams on our platform.

 

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ClearPass integration helps turn big data into smart data

 

Yet a key integration was missing: ClearPass. To get the benefits of our solution, you still needed to adopt Skyfii’s guest portal because it contained the ability to amalgamate the various data streams back to the guest user.

 

Now that’s solved. With customer-deployed ClearPass Extensions you can turn one-dimensional functions – like network authentication and customer analytics – into a single seamless, agile and adaptable process.

 

Harnessing software-powered innovation via open development platform

 

Each ClearPass Extension is an Aruba Cloud-connected microservice that runs on your ClearPass platform, but is not part of the platform itself. As Extensions are nimble to develop, test, deploy and update, they enable leveraging innovations by partners such as Skyfii as they become available. In short, you don’t need to wait for the next upgrade to the ClearPass platform.

 

Essentially, this means Wi-Fi authentication capabilities within ClearPass continue sitting behind your enterprise firewall but interact with our solution via APIs. Of course, this saves you from the impractical chore of building a custom Skyfii integration to ClearPass.

 

Extend your ClearPass deployment while unlocking hidden potential

 

Whether your organization serves retail shoppers, hospitality guests, university students or even members of the public utilizing government facilities, combining Skyfii with Extensions enables you to extend the custom branding you’ve developed within your ClearPass portal while unlocking the vault of information ClearPass already collects.

 

The new approach also offers sophisticated communication opportunities for both your guest and internal networks. For instance, you can present a different marketing offer to a Millennial mom shopping for baby goods in your store than a Gen Xer dad who is taking his college-age child to dinner at your hotel’s restaurant.

 

Within your enterprise, you can identify users who are eligible for the latest human resources program, broadcast spiffs to sales staff or reinforce new branding messages to externally-facing employees. From a safety perspective, you can reduce risk by pushing out travel, security or weather advisories to staff based on their real-time geographic location.

 

Possibilities as endless as your imagination

 

Moving forward, we intend to incorporate forthcoming APIs as Aruba continues to shift toward further flexibility and adaptability. An example is Aruba Central, which is gaining more location capabilities.

 

This means the sky’s the limit, regardless of the wireless infrastructure you deploy. Now you can email a survey after the fact or understand the demographics of mobile users who visit a certain location at a certain time of day. Equally, you can boost the engagement and loyalty of your top employee talent by sending them relevant notices.

 

Extensions make it all possible in a manner that’s seamless and streamlined for your end users, while maintaining the dependable and secure ClearPass-enabled Wi-Fi you’ve come to count on.

 

Charlie Clemmer is Senior Director of Technical Sales for North America at Skyfii, a global provider of location-enabled mobile analytics and marketing solutions based in Sydney, Australia. Previously, Clemmer served as a Systems Engineering Manager for Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company where he helped customers across all industry verticals identify, adopt, deploy and maintain secure networking and mobility solutions.

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Comments

Sep 15, 2016 12:04 PM

Charlie, Great artical and fantastic job presenting at Aruba Tech Day 2016! It's a great honor to work side by side at Skyfii with a respected professional, while having fun with our long time pals at Aruba and the awesome partners and customers we are priviliged to work with every day at Skyfii.

 

"Get'ur'Dun" Charlie!

 

Sincerely, 

Keith "Tex" Morris

 

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