Intelligent Tech Channels Issue 23 | Page 23

ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY “We’ve been working with local school governors to keep kids up-to-date with the latest technology up to higher education institutions,” he explained. “Cecil Rhodes, who is from a university in South Africa, is a very happy Ruckus customer. We like to bring in premium for our managed service providers as they deliver their user cases into certain areas of The reason why we did that was because we established world class partnerships from the start, so it is a wonderful experience. We built a model where we could acquire new customers and would have a very successful post-sales success customer organisation. That type of model is going to be key as they deliver managed services’ or they resell the Ruckus cloud solution. “The reason why customers choose the cloud is that they will have less IT overheads and more flexibility in where and for how long they want to consume a product. It’s really important to have an end-to- end model where a customer feels a seamless engagement from buying right to services. The post-sales services become paramount in keeping customer satisfaction high and driving them to renew the solution when the time comes.” Chris Mendoza, Senior Director of EMEA Marketing, Ruckus Networks, said that, apart from hospitality, education is also very important for the company. INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS Issue 23 Law says that he was first attracted to Ruckus because of its partner loyalty and passion; it was unlike anything he’d seen before Smart Cities which is basically an outdoor extension of Wi-Fi. “We’ve seen that in South Africa with our supply to Vodacom and the City of Cape Town. We also have some very interesting use cases in retail and are also addressing manufacturing. In South Africa, we’re seeing a lot of interesting stuff going on with service providers in that they’re supplying subscription services to their clients. It is very much a growing market in many verticals.” Mendonza believes there is a now a trend in hospitality where they’re moving from general collectively to operationalising the network. “I think that’s very important because, if you look at just the messaging that you proceed in hospitality publications,” he said. “Hospitality has realised that they really need to operationalise the business experience with Wi-Fi. To our knowledge, we’re the only networking vendor that offers Wi-Fi and switching, but also the additional layers of IoT that allows our customers to aggregate networks to provide a faster speed. You need ultra-reliability and interconnectivity to deliver on very hardened use cases.” Mendonza added that partners need to speak to customers in a very different way and better understand customer expectation. “Customers are looking at how to use a network infrastructure and work with IT operations and really try innovation, while at the same time addressing cost, security and a speed to market so they can remain competitive,” he said. ˜ 23