ClearPass Extensions help Skyfii customers take flight

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.

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.