ARUBA CHECKS IN TO THE HOSPITALITY MARKET WITH THE MOST SECURE WLAN FOR HOTELS
Aruba and Zerowire Offer Scalability, Manageability and Path to VoWLAN for 21c Museum Hotel and Hilton Houston Hobby Hotel
HITEC - MINNEAPOLIS, Minn., June 20, 2006 - Aruba Networks, the Mobile Edge Company, today announced that Zerowire, a leading national systems integrator with a focus on the hospitality market, has become the company's latest Solution Provider partner; further strengthening Aruba's presence in this growing market segment. Together with Aruba, Zerowire has deployed Aruba's Mobile Edge wireless LAN (WLAN) solutions in 22 hotels across the United States, with another five in progress. The partnership highlights Aruba's continued leadership within the hospitality market and enables Zerowire to offer a best-of-breed, secure and scalable wireless solution to its hotel customers.
"Zerowire has a clear understanding and established expertise in the hospitality arena. Working together has been mutually beneficial, leading to deployments ranging from the Hilton Hobby Hotel in Houston, Texas, to the 21c Museum Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky," said Keerti Melkote, Aruba's co-founder and vice president of marketing. "Aruba is a pioneer in this market and our secure centralized Mobile Edge solutions are ideally suited to meet both the growing demand of guests for pervasive wireless Internet access and hospitality IT's need to keep the multi-purpose hotel network secure and manageable."
"The old concept of deploying fat APs was a good solution for small hotels, but when it comes to rolling out wireless on a larger scale, the centralized mobility controller and thin APs from Aruba provide the intelligent functionality and security these more sophisticated hotel deployments demand," explained Adnan Syed, CEO of Zerowire.
Syed added that he has been using Aruba's mobility solutions since 2003, long before Zerowire was formed in 2005. "It just makes sense to use Aruba's Mobile Edge solutions in the hospitality market, as they provide the ability to integrate VoWLAN into the wireless network--a feature that our hotel customers are increasingly demanding. It's a testament to the commercial viability of Aruba's architecture that, to date, Zerowire has deployed thousands of APs--including the AP-52, AP-60, AP-61 and AP-65--in addition to several dozen Aruba 800 and 2400 Mobility Controllers in hotels across the country."
Joint customer 21c Museum Hotel, a first of its kind hotel dedicated to southern-style luxuries and contemporary art, is an example of a forward-looking customer planning to implement voice as well as data on their wireless network. "We selected Aruba Networks for our WLAN deployment throughout the building for coverage in common areas and guest rooms, not just to support the current guest applications, but with an eye toward implementing VoWLAN," said Bob Gigliotti, general manager of 21c Museum Hotel. "We are staying ahead of the curve by planning for VoWLAN in the near future, but increasingly you'll see more hotels turning to major players in the wireless hospitality market, such as Aruba, to deploy their voice solutions."
In addition to security, scalability and advanced capabilities such as VoWLAN, the Aruba solution eases network management and increases reliability compared with competitive offerings and wired implementations. This experience is echoed through joint customer the Hilton Hobby Hotel.
"Since Zerowire replaced our legacy high-speed Internet access solution with the Aruba Networks Mobile Edge system, support requests have been reduced from over ten a week to almost zero," added Helen Bonsall, general manager of Hilton Hobby Hotel in Houston. "All of our guest rooms were originally equipped with wired Ethernet broadband, but the wireless network has proved so popular that we have replaced this altogether with WLAN access."
Importantly, the open nature of a hotel wireless environment means that security is critical to protecting the hotels' data and computing resources, as well as the value of their WLAN. Aruba's mobility networks add protection in multiple ways. First, Aruba offers the only mobility controllers in the industry that feature an integrated policy enforcement firewall. The integrated firewall enables the configuration of user or group-based roles (e.g., hotel front desk staff, maintenance staff and guests) and associated access and security policies. Second, the Aruba system offers advanced Wireless Intrusion Prevention (WIP) to detect and prevent over-the-air attacks and risks such as rogue APs, ad-hoc networks, denial-of-service attacks and man-in-the-middle attacks. When risks are detected, the Aruba WIP solution actively disables them and alerts IT management, providing assurance to hotel administrators that the mobile edge of the network is protected.
For more information about WLAN deployments in the hospitality industry, an Aruba Networks whitepaper is available at http://www.arubanetworks.com/technology/request_wp.php?wp=hospitality.
About Zerowire
Zerowire Technologies Inc. was formed to address the growing need of next generation wireless and wired network architecture, and security needs. Zerowire is a technology driven small business with presence in Northern Virginia and Atlanta, GA, with over 100 hospitality, enterprise and federal clients across the United States. Zerowire's team brings years of government and commercial information technology, telecom and security experience under one umbrella. Its solutions utilize the latest cutting-edge technology and proven methodologies, while maintaining the uptime, availability and scalability required to meet the needs of today's business community. Zerowire does not believe in simply integrating technology. It considers itself true partners who will support a business or a project from inception to completion, and keep current with the technology shift of today and tomorrow.http://www.zerowirenetworks.com