Empowering Hospitality Digital Transformation with the Extreme Smart OmniEdge

Ryan HallManager, Vertical Solutions MarketingJune 20th 2018

Across hotels, convention centers, resorts and casinos – digital transformation has shifted how customers define a quality guest experience and have shaped the critical IT priorities for organizations moving forward.  Seamless access to robust Wi-Fi connectivity, unfettered support of multiple devices, and the ability to engage with the property’s staff and services via mobile are all inherent to a strong guest experience today. Without delivering these network capabilities guest satisfaction, and with it the brand’s reputation, surely take a hit.       

Whether it’s leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT), accessing data analytics to better understand guest behaviors, or employing targeted location-based marketing, a digitized society has also opened up new and innovative opportunities for how hospitality organizations interact and drive value with their customers, in addition to how organizations optimize their day-to-day operations. 

However, meeting guest expectations and harnessing the network as an asset is especially challenging for hospitality IT teams today, who are often understaffed and lack sufficient resources to support their organization’s unique network requirements, which may include a number of distributed locations across a geography or may be a large, diverse environment with a cross-section of users and devices at the network edge.  This also includes hospitality managed service providers who are tasked with with the support and maintenance of a significant number of hospitality properties.  

Extreme Networks’ Smart OmniEdge has an answer.    

The Solution: An Intelligent, Adaptive, Secure Network Edge for Hospitality

Extreme Smart OmniEdge, which includes new products ExtremeAI and Extreme Cloud Appliance, delivers on all of the business requirements and IT competencies for Hospitality businesses with a network edge solution that is intelligent, adaptive, and secure – enabling organizations with a customer-driven experience for their users and a comprehensive network solution to achieve their digital transformation goals faster.

Smart OmniEdge comprises of a secure, unified wired/wireless infrastructure complemented by a broad portfolio of applications and services. With ExtremeAI, network solutions are augmented with artificial intelligence and machine learning; IT teams can dramatically improve Wi-Fi deployments and offload the burden of fine-tuning exercises with RF management, which includes self-optimization and autonomous-correction from learned history, events, users, devices and environments.  With Wi-Fi now seen as a hospitality amenity, more and more guest satisfaction scores are driven by the quality and consistency of the Wi-Fi service.  A solution that proactively fine-tunes Wi-Fi RF and provides performance KPI’s to demonstrate and validate performance gains is invaluable for Hospitality properties, brands, and management groups – as well as focused hospitality managed service providers who support them.   

Smart OmniEdge also delivers greater flexibility to hospitality organizations and the internal or external teams that maintain these environments.  The solution is managed from a single pane of glass to simplify day-to-day network management and (potentially tedious) network administration.  This is specifically helpful for hospitality brands or hospitality management companies that are responsible for a distributed set of properties.  Furthermore, Smart OmniEdge is the only solution in the industry that leverages the same unified network products and all the features cited above across cloud and on-premises deployments via ExtremeCloud.   

Additional hospitality-specific benefits of Extreme Smart OmniEdge include:   

Pervasive Intelligence:

  • Smart OmniEdge provides the intelligence to better engage mobile users and drive both business and operational transformation, a central goal for hotels, casinos, resorts and more. 
  • Onsite network issues are identified sooner or even prevented, increasing and maintaining a quality onsite experience for guests during the course of their stay, and maintaining strong guest satisfaction scores for the property or brand.   
  • By augmenting human intelligence with AI, Extreme’s virtual network engineer independently tunes the network for the changing conditions, freeing up IT resources to concentrate on more strategic technology initiatives, like leveraging location-based mobile marketing, amplifying the brand loyalty app with additional guest services, or expanding the coverage of their guest wireless network.
  • Smart OmniEdge also includes an open-API architecture to easily support and integrate with native tools third party platforms and apps.    

Business Adaptive:

  • Hospitality brands or hotel management companies with distributed locations and unique deployment requirements may leverage a variety of network configurations – cloud-based, on premise, etc.  Smart OmniEdge doesn’t require organizations to lock into one architecture or deployment model. 
  • The network now adapts and grows as the business grows.  Whether the network footprint is expanding in one location – like a convention center, resort, or large hotel – or the network is expanding into to new properties, Smart OmniEdge quickly adapts to accommodate business needs while keeping network management, hardware (wired/WLAN) and the guest experience consistent. 
  • Smart OmniEdge integrates seamlessly into location-based services, an emerging initiative for hospitality organizations and their properties, as they to access valuable analytics related to foot traffic trends and tracking of in-house assets, in addition to sending contextual promotions to guests.  
  • When network upgrades or expansions occur, this often comes with a rip and replacement, taking away valuable time and resources (and with it, profits).  With Smart OmniEdge uptime and availability are steady, critical keys to success for all hospitality properties.   

Intrinsically Secure:

  • While hospitality properties are faced with pressures to create a consistent, value-added and personalized experiences for guests, embracing digital transformation comes with intimidating and unknown security risks – that shouldn’t stop hospitality from embracing new digital endeavors.
  • Extreme’s product portfolio offers end-to-end network protection against any and all cybersecurity threats, in addition to offering a comprehensive security ecosystem that delivers integration/automated compliance checks, threat detection, and intelligence related to onboarding devices and users. 

To learn more about Extreme Smart OmniEdge, visit our solution resource page; additional insights related to machine learning and its benefits for IT networking, read the Farpoint Group’s White Paper on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

For more commentary on the digital trends impacting hospitality today, explore the resources below!