eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Enterprise mobile services platform provider Mist Systems has launched the first two services for its indoor cloud platform, Business-Critical Wi-Fi and its patented Virtual Bluetooth Low EnergyT.
CTO and co-founder Bob Friday, a former longtime Cisco Systems manager, described Mist as the first extensible, programmable microservices cloud architecture for the indoor wireless technologies of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE).
A Mist wireless network understands and adapts to each user, how they are moving, the devices they are carrying and the content they are consuming at a scale never before made available, Friday said.
Mist’s cloud platform enables a fundamentally new approach to wireless—the first major advance in nearly a decade—applying data science and machine learning to improve and ensure an excellent mobile user experience.
Because enterprises are managing more connected devices, enterprise-level IoT implementations and location-based marketing initiatives, Mist is focused solely on improving indoor mobile experiences in mobile devices. Few other companies are doing this.
Mist’s platform is aimed at a range of verticals, such as corporate offices, airports, health care, hospitality, retail, museums and higher education. It also offers a high degree of personalization and engagement with end users. Mist’s technology is at work in commercial deployment and pilots at more than 50 large retailers, higher education, manufacturers, health care, corporate enterprises and managed service providers.
Current wireless network technologies were invented before the smartphone era and even before BLE, Friday said. Because of that, legacy networks are increasingly difficult and time-consuming for IT to manage and adopt new requirements based around BLE from marketing organizations.
Mist Business-Critical Wi-Fi includes the Mist AP41, an industry first high-performance, enterprise-grade, 4×4 spatial stream, 802.11ac Wave 2 G bit Wi-Fi access point with three Wi-Fi radios, IOT module and an integrated, 16 element vBLETM (virtual BLE) dynamic antenna array.
It also includes Mist Systems Cloud, a data-science-driven micro-services architecture for managing the Wi-Fi and BLE access points.
The microservices architecture offers the agility of software as a service (SaaS) to wireless networks, enabling real-time network data to be analyzed at an unprecedented scale. It enables on-demand network upgrades and patches within minutes, compared to months with legacy wireless networks.
The Mist Systems Cloud is built on Kafka, Storm and other modern cloud elements to enable seamless scaling and real-time responsiveness. Mist’s Proactive Analytics and Correlation Engine uses machine learning to analyze user experience, correlate problems and automatically detects the root cause of problems.
Two-year-old Mist, located in Mountain View, Calif., has made available a mobile software development kit for iOS and Android, which receives the BLE beacon signals, gathers data from the mobile device sensors, and sends the data back to the cloud location engine. In turn, the location engine returns the location estimates with high accuracy, according to the company.