By Claus Hetting, Wi-Fi NOW CEO & Chairman
Not everyone can dish out five or six figure CAPEX investments into new networking gear – but now fortunately, they no longer need to. Late last month Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise launched its Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) solution offering a software pay-as-you-grow model for anyone who wishes to ramp up the digital transformation of their business. Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE) also added contact tracing to its indoor asset tracking solution.
Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE) last month released two new service offerings and products for enterprise customers. The first is a brand new Network-as-a-Service offering that allows purchase of enterprise networking hardware while software licenses, applications, and other services are purchased according to a pay-as-you-grow subscription model, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise says. The second is a new ‘contract tracing’ scheme building on the company’s popular OmniAccess Stellar asset tracking solution.
Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise’s OmniAccess Stellar AP1311 Wi-Fi 6 access points for SMBs – and many other models within the OmniAccess Stellar product family – are part of the company’s new Network-as-a-Service offering.
In addition the new Network-as-a-Service solution includes Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise switches, network management & analytics, and can be expanded and enriched with SD-WAN services, asset tracking applications and other value-added services. The company says network integration services for smart cities, healthcare, transportation, and eduction will be announced next year.
Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise says their new solution will allow enterprises to “quickly scale up and adapt” their network infrastructure “with maximum agility to satisfy new business demand and improve user experience.” Alcatel-Lucent enterprise was one of the first vendors to release entry-level Wi-Fi 6 access points in early 2021 and the first to release a certified outdoor Wi-Fi 6 access point in October of 2019.
Read more about Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise’s Network-as-a-Service offering here.
Contact tracing added to asset tracking solution
Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise has been delivering wireless tracking solutions for years – and that includes asset tracking, which determines the real-time location of equipment or people identified by electronic tags broadcasting their location over BLE. A number of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise OmniAccess Stellar Wi-Fi 6 access points include BLE capability as standard.
Now the company is expanding this functionality to include actual ‘contact tracing’ – a useful feature in the age of pandemic response. The feature allows organisations to monitor the number of people present within a specific area and notify management in case of individuals moving beyond boundaries or if the density of people within an area becomes too high. The solution can also trace the location of a single user and the flow of individual contacts.
Read more about Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise’s contact tracing feature here.
/Claus.
