More than 1,200 customers, partners and Aruba employees came together in Sydney for Atmosphere APAC 2019 in September to learn about the latest networking solutions and get deeper technical training.
One of my favorite parts of #ATMAPAC is the Orange Lab. The Orange Lab is part of the Tech Playground and is home to experimental solutions. This year, I had the honor of putting the Orange Lab, together with the focus on the use case for network automation and programming via APIs. I’d like to give a big thank you to Aruba’s technical marketing team for building the demos for Orange Lab.
If you didn’t get to experience the Orange Lab, read on!
Why Network Automation?
For many organizations, the lack of agility to adopt to network changes has become a bottleneck, preventing those companies from deploying a robust and highly responsive infrastructure.
To improve operational efficiency, margins and customer satisfaction, IT can automate routine and complex tasks that may be time-consuming, repetitive or error-prone. Aruba’s openness and interoperability of automation support APIs, standards-based protocols and open-source automation frameworks (such as Ansible and Python, allows enterprises to leverage those automation frameworks to expedite their network automation migration.
With automation, you can:
- Lower costs — Automation reduces the complexities of your underlying infrastructure, dramatically fewer person-hours are required for configuring, provisioning and managing services and the network.
- Improve business continuity — Automation removes the chance for human errors, companies can offer and deliver a higher level of services with more consistency across branches and geographies.
- Increase workforce — Transfer repetitive tasks into auditable code, a software-defined network helps drive business improvements and innovation.
- Greater insight and network control — By putting analytics on network telemetry, IT operations have the ability to become more adaptive. With refined network visibility, the agility to adapt to network control challenges increases greatly.
- Increase business agility — Automation provides improved time to market opportunities by creating a simple framework to deploy a pipeline of services, test new applications and configurations in a controlled and simple manner. Ultimately the improved time-to-market will increase revenue for the enterprise.
Network as an IoT Platform
We also showcased the network as an IoT platform at the Orange Lab. We had two demos, EnOcean wireless switch and SES-imagotag electronic shelf labels. Let’s walk through the highlights and be sure to watch the demos at the end.
EnOcean Switch
Imagine that you could with a flip of a light switch:
- Turn an access point on and off
- Create an event SSID for in a hotel
- Block Internet access for all the students in a classroom taking an examination
The joint solution uses Aruba 802.11ac access points with AOS 8.4 or higher. The access points acts as a secure platforms between BLE-based EnOcean devices and building automation, business rules, cloud-IoT or any other back-end office applications. The security and specific roles of the IoT devices are assigned by ClearPass.
The integration between a smart network, APIs and security controls creates opportunities to fulfill business requirements in a fraction of time compared to traditional methods, as shown below.
Check out the demo:
For more information on the Aruba and EnOcean solution, download the solution brief.
Smart Stores with SES-imagotag
In the Orange Lab, we also demonstrated the convergence of SES-imagotag electronic shelf labels (ESL) with Aruba's secure wireless platform.
The SES-imagotag real-time store IoT platform feeds analytics engines using data from inventory, footfall, CRM, point-of-sale, location systems and other sources.
As store personnel scan bar codes on items, they can quickly locate the correct aisle using Aruba Meridian location services. The smart SES-Imagotag also has a flashing LED light to allow retail staff to locate the item easily within the aisle. This solution would greatly help improve the productively In terms of inventory management and the restock process.
Watch the Aruba and SES-imagotag demo:
Other benefits of the joint solution include:
For more information on the Aruba and SES-imagotag solution, download the solution brief.
