Bankers Life Fieldhouse has announced the signing of a three-year contract withRuckus Wirelessand Purple – the intelligent spaces company – to supply its guest Wi-Fi solution.
Together, the companies will combine to provide 437 Ruckus access points at the home of the NBAIndiana Pacersand WNBAIndiana Fever. Overall, the 18,165-seat arena hosts more than 200 events annually, including college and high school basketball, concerts, the circus and ice shows.
The new technology allows Bankers Life Fieldhouse to get more attendees online during events, while learning more about those audiences through fanalytics.
The provision of guest Wi-Fi will be used to enhance the fan experience, facilitating social media use and a sense of ‘togetherness’ while inside the venue. It will also enable the arena to engage with visitors more effectively, by using ‘fanalytics’ to learn more about its visitors, in order to create more targeted, timely and valuable interactions, which will have an impact on customer loyalty and sales.
Purple provides real-time analytics and marketing for venues and businesses that want to engage with visitors and understand the use of physical spaces. The Company’s ‘Intelligent Spaces’ approach already helps brands to learn more about their customer base, and enables them to take action. In this instance, Purple’s unique analytic and marketing platform helps detail fan behaviour in and around the venue, including demographic data, attendance frequency and much more.
Gavin Wheeldon, CEO at Purple, said:
It’s great to see Purple being used by such a huge name in the sporting sector. We are hoping that the results provided from our analytics platform will transform how the Indiana Pacers and Indiana Fever interact with their fans. In turn we hope that this will increase overall ticket, merchandise, food and drink sales, along with a significantly improved brand loyalty.
Ruckus’s WLAN systems bring power and simplicity together for large-scale indoor deployment, providing extended range and adaptive signal steering for the most reliable Wi-Fi.
Ed Frederici, Chief Technology Officer, Pacers Sports and Entertainment, advised:
We chose Purple for three simple reasons: the completeness of their solution, their strong focus on innovation; and their culture. They were a clear leader in the bidding process from the start. They have a consummate understanding of the market space and have developed software that is both broad and deep and brings the future to the present rather than relying on approaches of the past. They were amazingly easy to do business with and worked through our unique needs tirelessly and patiently.
Image courtesy: NBA.com
ABOUT PURPLE
Purple is an intelligent spaces company. It evolved from Purple Wi-Fi, the cloud-based marketing and analytics Wi-Fi software company, to take the lead in real-time analytics and marketing for venues and businesses that want to engage with visitors and understand the use of physical spaces. Purple refers to this process as ‘Intelligent Spaces’ and can help brands to learn more about their location, customer base and help them to take action. With 16 million users across 134 countries, Purple works with a range of brands and venues, including Indiana Pacers, Merlin Entertainment, Bloomin Brands, CenturyLink, Molson Coors, Legoland, Jaguar, United Wireless Arena and TUI. It has a global agreement in place with Westcon Comstor, in addition to an active reseller base of over 960 in 60 countries. Purple employs over 90 full time staff and currently has offices in the UK, US, Chile, Madrid, Singapore and Melbourne with more offices planned. Huge growth is being seen in all sectors, including hospitality, where people have time to spend online, retail, where footfall tracking is essential, healthcare, offering transparency around service and communication and entire cities moving towards the Internet of Things. Purple divides its offering into two specific segments: small businesses and enterprise customers. Small businesses can continue to take advantage of the Company’s free guest Wi-Fi product and purchase a cloud software license, which allows open access to marketing and analytics tools. Enterprise customers have the option of four product lines: Wi-Fi, Location, and two new offerings: Fusion and Provision.
ABOUT RUCKUS WIRELESS
Ruckus Wireless, now part of Brocade, delivers simply better wireless for approximately 70,000 enterprise, service provider, government and small business customers worldwide. The Company is focused on technology innovation, partner ecosystems and customer service—yielding the best possible wireless experience for the most challenging indoor and outdoor environments. Its Smart Wi-Fi platform delivers scalable, high-performance Wi-Fi with simplified control and management for on-premise and cloud-based Wi-Fi deployments, along with new services for secure on-boarding, policy management, location services and analytics that enable new business opportunities. Ruckus and Ruckus Wireless are trademarks of Ruckus Wireless, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other product or company names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
