Asset Tracking - Aruba

Transcript

• Steve Statler 0:03

  Hello and welcome to the Mr. Beacon podcast. My name is Steve Statler of Statler Consulting. And I'm here today with Özer Dondurmacıoglu. I was it did a massacre your name?

  
  

  Özer Dondurmacıoglu 0:18

  No, that was great. That was great. Thanks, Steven, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

  
  

  Steve Statler 0:21

  So Özer, the general manager for Meridian Apps, which is one of the businesses within HP enterprises, a Aruba company. And I am just so excited that you guys are part of our ecosystem, because you make all of us look better, because you're a grown up company with 1000s of customers. And in fact, 1000s of employees and I was at you're just in full disclosure, I did speak at your, at your developer conference last month or the month full OS, which is amazing. And I was just struck by this sea of people that were there. And it just kind of makes me feel that the this beacon ecosystem is being adopted by more than just startups. So thanks for making us look good.

  
  

  Özer Dondurmacıoglu 1:11

  Yeah, absolutely. Great to be here. Great to be part of the ecosystem. It's an up and coming area of technology. But you know, as everybody we have always been wireless slash mobility geeks, right. The conference that you attended was called Airheads. Right. So we like to deliver new pieces of technology to that community. And as an evaluated, get the tires, make sure that it's ready for them to use in large scale, similar to the adoption curve that we went through with Wi Fi. Well,

  
  

  Steve Statler 1:42

  I have a principle which is you can always judge the health of the ecosystem by the parties that the company's thrown around it. And if your party's any measure it, then business is going quite well.

  
  

  Özer Dondurmacıoglu 1:55

  Yeah, that's true. That's true. I mean, the interesting part is, the Airheads crowd essentially wakes up in the morning and says, How am I going to support a mobility infrastructure right? Times have changed slightly right? It's very similar to our day to day lives, where we're accustomed to waking up grabbing a piece of digital equipment and interacting with everyone around us. And in our social lives, we know how that infrastructure is built by the service providers by Internet pipelines and the base stations and everything else. And in the enterprise in the workplace, that experience is not being accepted as just normal, just standard. Right outside, we know who they are. They're the service providers doing this in large scale. And indoors. There are the IT teams who are adapting the mobility infrastructure in large scale. So it's great to great to work with them and introduce these type of new technologies to them and see what they think.

  
  

  Steve Statler 2:53

  Well, the developer ecosystem is an important part of the progression of the beacon ecosystem. And I think we'll probably come back to that later in our discussion. But just before we get right into the thick of it. We're going to talk about some new news today, which I'm excited to hear about, because I think it's very relevant to where the markets going, but can you just remind us what the meridian beacon offering consists of, as of last week?

  
  

  Özer Dondurmacıoglu 3:20

  Absolutely. So Meridian solution starts with actually the Aruba wireless LAN infrastructure as a basis, right. Can we deploy our solution and third party environments when it comes to a third party wireless LAN solution? Yes, we have seen examples of that. There are successful deployment of that, but primarily our go to market motion starts with a successful implementation or of an Aruba wireless LAN network. Better wireless LAN network utilizes two wireless technologies today. traditionally known Wi Fi, 11, ac. And secondly, Bluetooth low energy, Bluetooth four, we have been shipping Bluetooth four and Wi Fi enabled access points for a while actually, we have shipped over a million of those APS deployed running today, both of those wireless technologies running that gives us an ability to not only rely on Wi Fi for things like Wi Fi location or analytics type of solutions. From a location service perspective, but also Bluetooth powered use cases. common use case for those are proximity engagement. Right. So I'm a retail store. I have lots of orange APS deployed in my retail stores. And what I want to do is, I want to use the beacons inside the APS to engage with my users who might be carrying my mobile app. You know, they're my most loyal customers, my fans, my frequent visitors, I want to engage with them and I want to count their presence. Gather some important analytics from their presence. So proximity engagement comes one. Secondly, indoor wayfinding comes to mind. So basically that blue dot glowing blue dot experience indoors All right, I'm driving on the highway. I'm on Google Maps, I can see where I am. And I can discover things around me. Why can I do that indoors? So we said, Okay, let's try to solve that challenge, too. So Meridian offers indoor mapping technology, indoor routing, turn by turn directions, and a blue dot, using that orbit that we learned infrastructure on that map. And next up from there was we said, hey, this technology is really good. But let's not make it so hard to adapt. And given that beacon infrastructure requires not only centralized management, and centralized software tools, we said, why don't we enable people to build mobile apps really quickly. So Meridian also integrates an App Maker component that is actually being used in HPE offices, and UBC centers, several of our high profile customers and Aruba itself, across many of its campus location uses as a mobile internet tool. Some of our customers use it as a primary patient engagement tool, basically a basic app making capability that gets started, that our customers can adapt and test their mobile engagement project before investing heavily in third party ecosystem solutions. Now, the fourth piece of the puzzle from there is what the topic of the of our discussion, I guess, today, it's the asset tracking solution, right. So

  
  

  Steve Statler 6:30

  So up until now, it's been if I wanted to make a mobile app, then I think the roots of Meridian were that ability to create apps and then you've, then you've got this blue dot, where am I? And then you've got the navigation, how do I get to where I want to get to? And just to be clear, you don't have to have the app creation tool in place to use the other bit, I can write my own app and use your API's. Is that the case?

  
  

  Özer Dondurmacıoglu 7:02

  Absolutely. So for example, I public deployments such as Stanford health, or Levi's Stadium, Churchill Downs, our ecosystem partners rely on our mapping technology, routing technology, Aruba Bluetooth infrastructure, to create that experience on a custom application. And usually, as customers realize that our app making capability is good enough for them to get started to learn the craft of mobile engagement. And they're having success in engaging with their primary audience, whether it be fans for a brand or patients for a healthcare institution or employees for corporate campus, they start realizing Hmm, this is actually changing not a not just an incremental change, but actually giving us new opportunities of engagement. I mean, things that we were not feel like we could do before, right at Levi's Stadium, people can order food from the mobile phone. And that becomes an independent revenue stream. That was never there before. I can notify patients 24 hours before they get to my my hospital filling out their information, which was not possible before because we used to rely on pen and paper before, right? So even the operational stuff, operational procedures that we go through as a fan or as a patient changes, and businesses look at that and go hmm, I can actually change the way I would do business. You know what, I love the fact that Airbus helped me get started at a low cost point. With this app making capability. And indoor mobile engagement, I'm going to take it up a notch, I'm going to go hire the one the ecosystem partners from Aruba meridian, I'm going to have them build me much feature rich, much more engaging, and design wise, much better looking mobile apps to take it up to the next step.

  
  

  Steve Statler 9:01

  So just a couple of things, because I want to tease people a little bit longer about what the new news is, and just make sure we've got a very firm foundation. But before I do that, let me just say that I love the Stanford healthcare app, and this ability to do the line busting, it just kills me every time I go to the doctor's and there's a big line and you know that the people behind the counter the nurses and the doctors are waiting for patients, and the patients are waiting to see them. It just seems nuts that you have to wait in a line in the 21st century. So the fact that you can actually have that automatic check in because the app knows that someone's in the waiting room is fantastic. So let me just kind of flatter you a little bit with that and then get into a bit of detail. Let's just quickly round out the picture of where you are, as of last week. So you have all this cloud software API's, but you have hardware as well and there's the access points. Do all Aruba access for Since now, with all the new products, are they coming with Bluetooth standard? Or is it an option?

  
  

  Özer Dondurmacıoglu 10:05

  It actually comes with Bluetooth standard, no change in price point. We felt like it was a needed component, because we can manufacture these access points in large quantities, we actually did not take a hit in our cogs structure. So we're not reflecting any cost increase to our customers authour, APS wallmount, APS desktop mount APS, there's over a dozen AP models now, that come with Bluetooth standard.

  
  

  Steve Statler 10:35

  So as you start to retire the old products, then based on the new ones come along, they'll all have Bluetooth, so it becomes ubiquitous. That is correct. And but it's beyond, you have more than just the access points, don't you because because you've got beacons, so you can actually buy an Aruba beacon, which is should have, I've got some kind of Matchbox size, they're all around the office here as well. So those are good. And at the conference, you kind of basically plastered those all over a massive hotel very quickly, and we got navigation from that. But you also have these Wi Fi gateways, which, which, which, which I think is important, because if you've got like, I've got a client at the moment, we're big manufacturer of things, nothing to do with technology. And they have some of the new access points and some of the old access points. So you basically provide this device so that they can fill in the blank spots there. So that wasn't really much of a question. But I just wanted to fill in the gaps. So what's new today?

  
  

  Özer Dondurmacıoglu 11:44

  Yeah, so there is one piece of the puzzle that, again, we're learning from our social lives, right. We've been monitoring what people have been doing with their smartphones in their smart homes, location based interaction is definitely comes to mind. But then they've also been using the Bluetooth radio to track things. So now if I go out of this campus and track somebody down and say, Hey, how do you track your keys at home? When you when you after you're sick of losing them? They'll probably tell us say I just put a title tag on it, you know, 20 $25, use a smartphone app. And that became a really standard answer. Some people are putting GPS tags on on big physical items as well like their cars to pinpoint them in a large parking lot. So those same people who utilize that technology show up at work next day. And similar to our experience, let's say for example, the Stanford experience, right? We got accustomed to checking into flights 24 hour in advance only using a smartphone app and carrying the carrying the check in boarding pass on our mobile phone. And then he translated into a Stanford healthcare use case. So the same patients there are now looking at Stanford, and saying, Hey, this is a use case that I'm not very comfortable with that experience, we felt like it's going to translate itself into even a similar use case for asset tracking. So we went to our customers and said, Hey, we you have this mobility infrastructure, it's now enabled Bluetooth, in addition to Wi Fi, we know that Bluetooth can be relatively useful in tracking assets. What are you doing to track assets, then do you have any need? And they said, well, first of all, we have to build a separate infrastructure for that. Secondly, we have asset tracking needs, but software tools are quite expensive to purchase and operate with. And third, you know, when we implemented the solution, we got the accuracy that we wanted, but ease of use became a problem. Like we couldn't enable people to use a mobile app, for example, to track the assets they want to track and get in touch with others, at the same time, using a mobile engagement app to track placemarks people as well as as well as a piece of piece of physical asset. So we decided to do something about it. We looked at the asset tracking market. And we said, you know, how can we improve the solution set that's available in the market, while continue to stay friendly to the rest of the Market improving the value of our W LAN. Good.

  
  

  Steve Statler 15:03

  So why, you know, from from a business perspective, I can see why this is a benefit to hospitals. And I know from personal experience that manufacturers are looking at this because it's like they've been they've grown up watching Star Trek and Star Wars, and they just can't believe that you can lose stuff, valuable stuff, and it's wasting people's time having to write it off. And does this have any commercial implications for for you guys? You know, why is this a good business for technology vendor to be in?

  
  

  Özer Dondurmacıoglu 15:41

  A very good question. So at the end of the day, Aruba has a single mantra, that has been the case from 2002. And since its foundation, we always believe that the primary connectivity method to the network needs to be mobile. And asset tracking essentially enables that for physical assets that have no way to connect into the network. So first, we're solving the challenge of connecting them back to the network. So we can eventually down the road rely on third party tags to do this third party Bluetooth tags. But we just wanted to prove to the market that this could be done with the existing wireless infrastructure. So we innovated on a robot tags. So Aruba tags come in one shape and form in this initial release in June, but it will change. And it will come in a variety of different forms in the upcoming quarters. And as I mentioned, might start supporting third party tags as well. But these herba tags connect what's not connected. And as these things move, who else got the mobility infrastructure to find where they are to help people find them, service them, count numbers of them in a specific floor or specific zone, way find to where those physical assets have moved. Very quickly, we're already there, we already have indoor mapping technology, we already have a way to create zone and floor based definitions, we already have developer tools that can scale beyond just a single site that can look at multiple 1000s of sites across millions of tags, thanks to our scalable cloud service. And we always have access to the most of the time, the missing link, the infrastructure component in the middle. And that's the urban Web. Right? So we see it as a incremental capability toward the wireless land value prop. But we see this also as a valuable entry point for many Aruba, we learned customers to start trying out as a tracking. And when we looked at the market, we said, this is a this is one of the coolest technologies that people can deploy in their environment, I mean, hospitals losing chairs, and they're having a hard time tracking them counting their presence. Why is nobody using them. And they basically said, it's just expensive to maintain a separate infrastructure. So hopefully, with this entry level solution, tracking physical assets, we're opening doors, we're opening some eyes to the fact that this is in fact possible. This is in fact can be deployed in large scale. And we're also very cognizant about the fact that our customers needs will evolve from Bluetooth based technology to ultra wideband, to specialize RFID to GPS to NFC based solutions that we do not provide today. But many of our ecosystem partners like Stanley healthcare provide, and they can consume that context in a single pane of glass, you know, Bluetooth, Wi Fi context from us. And from their specialized infrastructure, the additional asset tracking context. So we see this as a value to our to the asset tracking ecosystem. By making a play in it, enabling many robot they'll be like customers to try out asset tracking in their own environment to believe that it's a viable use case, and go on expand from there and start using even more specialized components from the likes of Stanley.

  
  

  Steve Statler 19:26

  So so you're not going to be doing the like sub meter accuracy with this. What level of accuracy should we expect? And I know that's there's a lot of variables there. But clearly, there's a play with very expensive Ultra wideband tags and infrastructure where you can get more accuracy, what level of accuracy should we expect from this offering?

  
  

  Özer Dondurmacıoglu 19:50

  So very good question. So I'm going to tell you a little bit of backstory of how we got here. A lot of long hours in the herbal hardware team A arubaos CTO office is also engaged. We have tested a variety of different environments in the lab in the RF cages and office environments in hospitals, and large retail store facilities. And what we realized is location. Technology is hard. For those companies who think that creating a location engine is just a work over the weekend, you know, you might want to think again. So the so the good news is a robot has a lot of expertise, not only wireless infrastructure space, but also in creating a stable set of algorithms that can actually take advantage of this massive wireless LAN infrastructure. So the work goes back to how are we going to enable that location and technology in the first place? So we said, we're going to first be very practical about which wireless LAN deployments we're going to say, we offer support for. So we looked at our wireless then install base. And we said, what are the access point design requirements today? For a good performance? file you hertz coverage, voice and video ready network? Basically, a criteria that you would expect from any wireless LAN today, right. And that was 1550 feet 1520 meters between each access point. So okay, that's our design criteria. And we said, do we need to do fingerprinting? Can we do fingerprinting? The clear answer that we got from our customers was no. If you start doing fingerprinting, too much friction between it and the line of business, we cannot move fast enough, plus RF environment, always changes, interference sources, new wireless equipment, getting, you know, going into the environment. So our fingerprinting was also out the door. So we said, okay, let's build a scalable cloud infrastructure that can learn from the presence of not only few access points around a specific tag being tracked, but many, and build a system which can eventually, in real time test, and deploy multiple location algorithms. No location algorithm is going to be perfect for every single environment, because things change, environments change. So that's what we're building in the cloud learns from the readings of access points over time. So there's a certain amount of averaging is involved. I don't want to call it machine learning because it is not machine learning today. But we're building the foundation for averaging lots of data crunching. And secondly, we're building the foundation to eliminate the need to install just one perfect location algorithm because maze in our experience just doesn't exist, just like the perfect or a fingerprint doesn't exist. So given those requirements, given those parameters, we are able to achieve three meters of accuracy when the access points are deployed 15 to 20 meters. And within one to two minutes, the latency really has something to do with how long the tags chirp. So based on that, based on the amount of data that we require, to average out, and to place a tag on the map, we felt like one to two minutes was an acceptable threshold while keeping the tag battery life up to two years. And of course, maintaining the cost point for the tag that we heard from our customers. So long answer to the short question, but it's kind of important to discuss all these different parameters that happened in the background.

  
  

  Steve Statler 24:11

  It is really important there's a whole bunch of questions that come out of your answer. So first of all, you've introduced a new tag is that right for that correct? That's correct. So this is kind of a kind of I always get confused between American confectionery and British confectionery but it's the size of a Marie meant is it kind of like that size as opposed to the the matchbox it's kind of smaller, so presumably, smaller battery, and so you're reducing the, the chirping to I mean, so in the iBeacon world, it was 10 times a second, which is, which is a lot presumably this is a lot less frequent than that.

  
  

  Özer Dondurmacıoglu 24:49

  Yeah, it is. It is chirping every six seconds, and it is chirping, of course, at the highest power of the radio law a lot. house so that the Aruba access points can hear it, process it, package it share with the marine cloud service. And that gives us a better love better your life of two years, as I mentioned. And we have seen environments which might require a higher chirp rates. But we need to start to walk before we run. And many of our customers, this is a this is an, you know, we're at the end of the day and mobility infrastructure. We're not a tag manufacturer company, you might see us work with our customers, as they bring new requirements to the table, and tag manufacturers that they prefer to work with to the table, you might see us actually support more specialized hardware down the road. We don't have anything to announce on that front yet. But if we do, we would love to jump on these calls. Again, yeah, board on that. But so far, tracking physical assets, being able to locate misplaced items like wheelchairs in a hospital environment, or bedside equipment, or large boxes of products that are high value, high margin that might be stored in the top level rack in a retail store for storage purposes, and now we're wandering around the facility trying to find them those set of use cases, that seems to do the trick.

  
  

  Steve Statler 26:25

  Well, I think another thing just to echo and expand on what you said earlier is this is a whilst it's a logical progression, it's actually a major step change in the technology. And I point this out, because, you know, previously location was calculated on the phone and the Phone has a bunch of sensors, it can kind of look at your accelerometer, it can do all sorts of clever stuff. And there may not be a phone involved in this at all, if you're tracking pallets and the out the calculations are done in the in the cloud. And I mentioned this just because as I've looked on behalf of my clients who are typically wanting to assemble a solution, you know, it's very easy for people to say, Oh, we did location, and we did it on the phone. And now we're just doing asset tracking, it's basically the same thing. But it isn't, and there's a lot of hard work to do. And it sounds like you guys aren't at all really been getting to grips with that. How much does it cost?

  
  

  Özer Dondurmacıoglu 27:19

  So the Aruba tags itself, they start at $40 US list on purpose, we try to hit the mark on being very competitive to Wi Fi tags that used to actually last last much less time, you know, I think it was about six months to nine months. And then they will use to cost a lot more. So we said why don't we just cut the price barrier there and increase the battery life in the meantime. In addition, of course, there's a robot W LAN infrastructure that needs to go and an Aruba Meridian software solution that needs to support and make sensible attack tracking data.

  
  

  Steve Statler 28:04

  Okay, and what are the protocols that are being used? And I guess some extent it doesn't really matter so much because we're not dealing with the whole iPhone versus Android thing. But are you just chirping out iBeacon packets or what's

  
  

  Özer Dondurmacıoglu 28:19

  There, they're just they're based on iBeacon. They're essentially listening. The Aruba, AP is always had the capability to listen to sources of Bluetooth signals out there. So we're kind of making your own version and they're beaconing at a certain rate and a certain you know packet lengths and a frame type for our access points to make sense out of them and detect them and track where they are. The good thing about ERB AP Bluetooth radios is they're always listening. So there's not not too many scheduling events or anything like that Wake Up Calls, etc, that we need to waste time on one of the benefits of the Bluetooth technology, right? It's just very simple, yet very effective on tracking tracking assets, if that makes sense.

  
  

  Steve Statler 29:14

  Very good. It does. We got to wrap up fairly soon. We're going to try and just get a few more questions in so use cases. We've already talked about lots you've talked about health care, obviously, we're all getting old and sick. And so that's make sense. And you're tracking assets. And presumably you can track people as well. In in hospitals.

  
  

  Özer Dondurmacıoglu 29:34

  Yeah, one thing that I want to I think clarify is we've looked at the people tracking use case, what we realized is there's a lot of legal compliance and latency requirements around people tracking. So when you say people tracking people automatically assume that independent of how fast the person moves, you should be able to track it. There's no There's no you know, side mark that you can put on say, we can track people and, and but we can track it in a couple of minutes, right? There's no such thing you just either track them how fast they move or not. So we're not addressing the people tracking use case. Because, again, we want to do this right, right, we don't want to go out there and like, you know, like some asset tracking soldiers and say, of course, we can track anything, right. That's the easiest thing to say. I want to see it in action before I publicize it. So we're going to start with physical assets, we're going to learn from the market. And if the market tells us that aid, this is a use case that can be sold in our environment, with the technology that you have, with slight improvements, that we will go and attack it. But in the initial release, just physical assets only.

  
  

  Steve Statler 30:46

  I love that you actually say, No, we actually don't do that. That's refreshing. So I appreciate your correcting that. And I would just echo it is really tricky. I've been involved in solution designs where we were tracking small children in schools. And that is very, very difficult because incredibly rapidly in large groups. And then they also try and steal the receivers as well. So you have to put them quite.

  
  

  Özer Dondurmacıoglu 31:19

  I recommend wearing it sensors and ultra wideband darts, as they call it from Zebra. Those are that's the same technology that tracks basketball players and NFL players on the field. So I mean, it works great.

  
  

  Steve Statler 31:38

  All right. Well, that's good. So other use cases, just briefly, is it just healthcare other other use cases that we've

  
  

  Özer Dondurmacıoglu 31:46

  We've seen, honestly, corporate campuses started to raise their heads because we have a very successful track record and corporate campuses for wireless land projects. And these corporate campuses turn into small towns, sometimes, as you cross two three building facility. There's all sorts of tools and assets facilities team uses. Education sector, of course, a lot of the education campuses, higher education campuses have health care facilities as well. And if you remember, you know, our higher education days, classrooms always changed things move or computer carts all over the place. And those types of use case started raising their heads as well. Again, the use case essentially is I have my Aruba, W LAN already. It's high density, because I'm supporting highly mobile users. What else can I do with it? So we're going after specific use cases in healthcare and retail, because we believe that line of business cares about those use cases. But our traditional higher education and corporate campus customers might as well start utilizing technology as well.

  
  

  Steve Statler 33:04

  Okay, that makes sense. What about Google and Eddystone? You guys have been notable as one of the major players in this space that haven't announced support of that, can you shed any light on on that? Absolutely.

  
  

  Özer Dondurmacıoglu 33:19

  So we are actually active discussions internally and externally, to create the perfect use case for it. What we like to build is a end to end solution first, that can be adopted by our customers. So for example, if you look at indoor mapping solution, it comes with a standard set of capabilities. And then developers build capabilities on top. If you look at App Maker, it comes with standard set of toolkit. And developers make it better as a tracking the same way. You know, we follow the same agile development cycle, two weeks for each release a new capability with asset tracking. And then you have the tools that are built into our system to get you up and running, or developers make it better. So we want to do something similar for Eddystone. It fits right into our existing end to end system beacons, AP beacons, sensors, Meridian software, we enable a couple of applications that we write on our own, and then we lead developers make it better. So we're in the investigative phase of that, we actually started hearing more and more Eddystone type requirements. I think the customers are trying to I think there was a little bit of hype cycle about what a stone was because it was kind of sort of market as a Atlas mobile engagement platform and then people realize that oh, okay. It's not Apple is just taking advantage of some of the existing apps on your phone. And then people track back to reality. And now real world use cases are showing Yup. So when those kids show up, want to take advantage of that, and drive it from there, but yeah, it's an active discussion topic for us.

  
  

  Steve Statler 35:08

  Fantastic. Well, I'd be great to see you guys get into that I yeah, without going to off topic, I'm actually just off to San Diego airport, we've deployed 12 beacons in the terminals there to promote a website. And it's literally over 50% of the website traffic is generated by physical web beacons, which is just, I didn't expect that at all. So that's more than we get from the USA Today article that promoted this the good traveler program, which is carbon offsetting program more than any of the other things. So it's just incredible. It's all so that would be great if you guys got into that. All right. Well, actually, there's loads of things I'd love to talk to you about. But we have to respect people's time, I have to respect your time. So any last things you want to just cover before we sign off?

  
  

  Özer Dondurmacıoglu 35:56

  Absolutely. I mean, again, just to reiterate, we love mobile, we love people on the move, we want to make them more productive. The asset tracking solution that we deliver here, again, as always looks at it from a mobile first stand point of view, we are enabling this technology on top of our existing developer SDK and cloud service API. It's not a separate solution. It's not a separate product. So our existing ecosystem partners are taking advantage of it. There are some new names that I briefly mentioned already, that are jumping on board and trying to take advantage of the cloud service API to improve their asset management software capabilities. And going forward, we see that asset tracking use case, just like the mobile engagement use case, are going to depend on the presence of a smartphone. We believe that iOS and Android are the most popular operating systems that people carry with them wherever they go. So we feel like that level of engagement, being able to support large scale large numbers of mobile app developers in the world is going to give us a differentiation. So if anybody out there who's listening, who has a mobile app developer, who are starting to support enterprise use cases as part of their portfolio, I want to kick tires. With our mobile engagement and asset tracking solution. They should just give us a call and take a look at Meridian apps.com. Fantastic.

  
  

  Steve Statler 37:29

  Well, that's big news we've covered today, HP enterprises, Aruba division is now in the RTLS business, the real time location, system business in the asset tracking space, great vote of confidence in that part of the ecosystem. I was thanks so much for telling us all about it. Absolutely.

  
  

  Özer Dondurmacıoglu 37:48

  Thanks for having me.

  
  

  Steve Statler 38:08

  What are the three songs that you'd take to Mars? If you ever three songs, songs? I mean, they can we can be flexible? If you want an album, then I'll negotiate with

  
  

  Özer Dondurmacıoglu 38:19

  You probably take? That's a very good question. This is very tricky, because I spend my time on email and Spotify playlists all day long. But we've reached the stage where you don't keep track of albums anymore, right? You just kind of listen through. But I will take a CL than probably with me. I listen to her quite a bit. And then Queens of the Stone Age has to come with me and then probably Daft Punk. Go back to my university in high school days.

  
  

  Steve Statler 38:56

  All right. Very good. So how did you end up doing this job just out of interest?

  
  

  Özer Dondurmacıoglu 39:05

  So the interesting thing is I've been part of the Aruba team since 2004. started as an engineer. And back in the day, we had a interesting challenge of making people believe that mobility infrastructure will be the primary way people connected in the enterprise, just like it was becoming the primary connectivity for people in their social lives. Right. So it all started with the cordless phone at home and and the cell phone arrived. And then we started talking to each other. We used to complain about how calls dropped while we're on the highway driving but that became the dominant technology. And Wi Fi was the only candidate to offer that dominant technology thanks to Intel Centrino, so we would go and knock around doors in 2005 2006 and say, Hey, Wi Fi is going to be amazing, you know, you should just rely on that for your primary network connectivity, and people will Last night or something like that will never happen go away. So we went through that phase of excitement, disbelief, you know, challenges around security deployment scale with Wi Fi with mobility. And along the way, my career role from engineer to technical marketing to field support, sales enablement and, and I used to lead our product marketing team up until last November. And of course, a lot changed since 2008. Right with the arrival of the smartphone. And now I feel like we're at a similar transition. In terms of location services, you know, it's very common now for us to think that we can interact with our friends while we're on the go share location, find a car that's moving, and look at land, watch it on a smartphone screen, when we book it, we can find our keys at home using a tracker. A lot of people are getting used to that idea, ask the question, Where am I? Where is it? Where are they in our social lives? And I said, You know what, I kind of want to feel that same excitement, uncertainty that I felt in 2005 2006 with Wi Fi with location services, so I said okay, let's let's go back to the drawing board and see if this piece of technology this piece of mobility technology can be relevant in the enterprise market as well. Which I believe that it will be because, you know, we're all social animals. We like to bring our social behaviors and the technologies that we accustomed to to our work life. So that's how kind of the journey started and you know, you talk to Keo you brilliant mind, and other founder Nick Farina. brilliant mind, they founded the company around in Norway mapping solution then it became an indoor location solution, thanks to the advent of Bluetooth beacons and now it's evolving so it's great to see it evolve and help the technology reach its next phase and hopefully, adopted with a lot more Aruba Aruba, customers.