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Digital Doorways to Hospitality Transformation

By Elaine Shuck, Senior Marketing Manager, Aruba

Technology is changing the hospitality industry at a pace never seen before. The pandemic has fundamentally changed how we live and work and, in many instances, accelerated the need for digital transformation across all industries. As hoteliers’ transition to a new normal, there are multiple workflows to consider as we bring people back to work, and safely re-open hotels.

Smart IT: Hospitality

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, has invested in and developed solutions to enable frictionless and highly engaged guest, staff, and workplace experiences, especially when touchless engagement mandates are in place. Hyper-aware guest and staff experiences will drive recovery, loyalty and revenue. Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform) provides the foundation for hyper-aware experiences, enabling hoteliers to deliver on guest expectations and opening the digital doorway to hospitality transformation.

Using the foundation of Aruba ESP – a combination of Aruba cloud-enabled, centrally managed wired, wireless and security solutions – hotels can enable highly secure and reliable Wi-Fi, as well as support a range of IoT applications that provide a VIP experience, complete with offering guests all the comforts and technologies they have at home. It is the industry’s first AI-powered platform designed to unify, automate and protect the edge.

Capitalize on New Opportunities, Reduce Costs, Stay Secure

Aruba ESP uses three key technology attributes that enable organizations to capitalize on new opportunities faster, reduce costs and stay secure.

Aruba ESP in HospitalityConnect: A Unified Infrastructure starts with a modern network infrastructure that is intelligent, highly automated and very adaptable. Hoteliers require wired, wireless, and WAN solutions. They need solutions for back of house and guest access that allow them to integrate IoT innovations (employee safety and point-of-sale devices, location services, guest analytics solutions, etc.) into their network infrastructure. Supported environments  include corporate and home offices, hotel properties, guest rooms, public and outside spaces (conference locations, pool, etc.). They need simple visibility and management across their entire organization with one solution.

Protect: With Zero-Trust Security, guests can expect a home-like experience in their room with confidence that their devices and data are secure. Hotels are becoming very IoT-focused, creating smart digital rooms that guests and staff can personalize (mobile check-in, keyless entry, streaming services, facility automation, associate devices, customer devices, security cameras, people counters, etc.).

IoT devices must be secured, but other data such as payment data, must be secured as well. A highly secure network allows staff to address increasing threats inside the property while also supporting security for remote access, contact and/or location tracing. Hoteliers need a software-defined overlay security framework to automate and identify who and what is connecting to the network while also being highly adaptable to enforce new use cases and policies.

Analyze and Act: AIOps and automation can set hoteliers apart from their competitors. Today, technology enables venues to offer guests an immersive, personalized experience that can boost loyalty and increase hotel revenue. They cannot afford to lose business due to systems, tools, or applications not working. They need AI-powered insights and automation to help them assure the best guest, associate, and hotel property operation experience. What’s needed is an architecture that collects data telemetry from the infrastructure, analyzes that data and serves up insights and recommendations to improve network performance, operational efficiency and drive new business outcomes.

Another attribute of ESP is Flexible Consumption and Financing Options via HPE Financial Services and HPE Greenlake, which help ease the stress on budgets and resources. These investment and consumption models such as network-as-a-service aka pay-for-what-you-use solutions, provide the flexibility to consume and finance projects over a period. Imagine how financially beneficial a pay-for-what-you-use model would be for hoteliers over the past six months, and into the foreseeable future!

Aruba’s technology partners comprise an ecosystem of hundreds of technology vendors with which Aruba has worked to ensure interoperability with Aruba’s unified infrastructure. The tested and proven integrations enable use cases that provide hoteliers numerous benefits including mobile keyless entry (Assa Abloy), and real-time safety solutions (TraknProtect). To learn more, visit our list of hospitality partners.