Earlier this year I spoke with Roger Sands CEO at Wyebot on the Tech Interviews Podcast (here’s the episode and show notes) about how Wi-Fi has evolved from the thing in the enterprise that enables the cool kids with laptops and smartphones to not have to “plugin” to a wire at the desk, to a mission-critical service. Today wireless devices are no longer nice to have they are critical to our business from the obvious equipment in hospitals, to the less exciting but equally crucial things like sensors in factories all of which demand networks that are flexible, resilient, performant and secure.
The issue is that Wi-Fi networks for many have grown from something that supported edge cases that have evolved into a pervasive resource that our businesses demands, while our ability to manage them has not evolved in the same way. I spoke with Roger back at the start of the COVID response and since our chat, the challenge of how we support our enterprise Wi-Fi usage when our enterprises have become so fragmented and dispersed and our resources more stretched than ever has only grown.
What reminded me of our chat was a press release I was sent by the team at Wyebot talking about the latest updates to their Wireless Intelligence Platform (WIP) with new support for Wi-Fi 6 and new security features as well as a better capability to classify devices that it discovers and this prompted me to take a moment to look again at what Wyebot do and where they can bring value to the modern enterprise.
Wyebot is a Wi-Fi Automation company who have built their business on the premise of helping enterprises take on the complex world of delivering business-critical Wi-Fi. Their approach is both innovate and simple. It requires no more than a sensor to be deployed into the wireless network environment, the sensor is standalone and requires no integration, and simply monitors the information that is passed around it. Therefore, there is no cracking open encrypted packets to inspect data it is only looking at Wi-Fi performance and stability and monitoring to ensure unknown and untrusted devices are not finding homes on your network. The sensor is then passing this information back to the WIP SaaS, which of course is where the value is, as with most modern solutions it’s not the data you collect, it’s the questions you ask of it that is important.
It is the WIP via its analytics engine that asks those questions and can help to pinpoint issues quickly allowing for a speedy resolution and importantly that resolution can often be done remotely from a centralised support team which, in the current climate and for the climate we are likely to remain in for the medium term, is crucial.
This kind of model is something I have seen discussed elsewhere as enterprises realise that traditional approaches to support and service are not going to be fit for purpose in the long term. Too many of our enterprise IT support models are based on the idea that most of our users are within the fours walls of our enterprise and too much of our enterprise tech is built with the idea that enterprise techies will install it, the last few months have shown real holes in that model. Therefore, approaches like this from Wyebot, simple to deploy in any location and then can provide centralised intelligent support and automation to help fix issues and maintain a business-critical service are going to need to become commonplace.
When I spoke with Roger, it felt that Wyebot’s view was this was an enterprise technology with use cases in more traditional enterprise locations, but today the enterprise location has shifted and now more likely to be our homes and home offices and the need for managed robust wireless networking is perhaps even more critical in those locations than we realised. Maybe like me, you’re not the only family member working from home, your wireless network is also supporting a lot of non work-related activity, the plethora of smart devices, content streaming and gaming can all impact performance of your work connections, I think for many of us a service running in the background maintaining our wireless business-critical qualities would be very welcome.
This post is not meant as an advert or even endorsement, however, as I discussed with Roger on the podcast, Wi-Fi is only becoming more business mission-critical and in more locations and solutions like Wyebot’s Wireless Intelligence platform, could find themselves having more value in the new model enterprise than they ever imagined.
If you want to find out more about Wyebot then you can via their website wyebot.com.
Roger has been a Tech Interviews guest twice, if you would like to listen to those episodes you’ll find them below.
Techstringy 