Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, has unveiled a suite of innovative workplace solutions and a new vision for three return to work scenarios – returning to the office and venues, working from home, and the office reimagined. With Aruba’s AI-powered, cloud-native networking solutions as the foundation, each scenario provides pragmatic steps organisations can take today to expedite business recovery and implement contact tracing and touchless solutions that enhance the health and wellness of employees and visitors.
The mandate to shut down non-essential physical offices and businesses tested the effectiveness of fully virtual workforces, which has been successful when the right networking technologies and tools are in place. As a result, businesses will return not to one, but to many kinds of workplaces – traditional offices, homes, on the road – within which safety must be ensured, and between which organisations must move seamlessly without retraining or compromise.
“The new fluid workplace requires contextual awareness, adaptability and scalability on a global scale – all without security gaps,” said Partha Narasimhan, CTO and HPE senior fellow for Aruba. “Throughout the pandemic, Aruba’s AI-powered infrastructure has adapted to optimise customers’ reimagined work environments at half a million customer sites worldwide, with massive teleworkforces dispatched to work from home, and for essential mobile workforces.”
According to Aruba, traditional offices and buildings are relying on AI-powered contact and location tracing tools to enable social and physical distancing monitoring solutions that make the workplace safer for employees, students, patients, customers, and fans.
The company said through Aruba-led innovations or implemented in concert with Aruba technology partners, these solutions use IoT and Bluetooth radios already built into Aruba access points and managed from a single pane of glass. “The solutions operate on customers’ existing Aruba infrastructure, eliminating the need for rip and replace, and leverage cloud-based applications that are easy to activate and affordable to deploy,” the company said.
Aruba added that it has released a new set of native contact and location tracing tools for existing Aruba infrastructure customers based on both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. “This was demonstrated at Aruba Atmosphere Digital on June 9, 2020. For expanded capabilities, Aruba technology partners AiRISTA Flow, CXApp, Kiana Analytics, Modo Labs, and Skyfii integrate with Aruba infrastructures to monitor social distancing and group sizes, and generate contract tracing trees of potentially exposed individuals.
“For too long organisations have treated working locations as a binary choice – we’re either assigned to an office or are remote workers,” said Ryan Anderson, vice president, Digital Innovation for Herman Miller. “The current requirement to work remotely has blown the doors open for a new hybrid workplace reality that experience designers and technologists alike need to account for in the future. A comfortable, secure and reliable work-from-home setting will be a key requirement for this new era.”
