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How you can fill the sweet spot between consumer products and enterprise solutions
Wed, 9th Mar 2016
FYI, this story is more than a year old

When they consider their wireless options, small businesses often look to products aimed at the home user and see the limitations. They simply don't have the reliability and scalability that small and medium-sized businesses need.

At the same time, SME owners recognise that business-grade solutions are usually more complex and expensive than they need.

There's a gap in the wireless market lying between consumer products and enterprise solutions.

Zebra Technologies' WiNG Express fills the gap and provides businesses with a best performing and best value solution that fits its needs. It represents a great opportunity for channel partners.

WiNG Express takes Zebra's proven WiNG Enterprise wireless networking technology and strips out the complexity. It is the best performing on the market – with more uptime and throughput, and is the best commercial proposition – meaning a better ROI for customers. SMEs can have enterprise-grade performance and reliability, without the unnecessary management overhead and additional cost.

Customer benefits include:

Real enterprise class wireless network performance for small to mid-size organisations with 1 to 1,024 access points. It is easy to scale up as business grows and the network expands.

A robust enterprise-class WLAN that can be easily deployed in minutes. It is really simple to deploy – just turn it on to get started.

With this intelligent wireless network, every access point becomes a part of the firewall, stopping threats before they enter the network - including with Bring Your Own Device initiatives.

Powerful analytics to best manage the WLAN network and its performance. Visibility of all access points – drill down to see its history and a range of metrics.

Attractive price point for small- to mid-size enterprise-class WLANs — without compromising on enterprise-class functionality. Zebra is expanding market share to bring the superior solutions to clients at the lowest price.

Who WiNG Express is made for:

Typically, customers will be office-based businesses, smaller retail groups and mid-size manufacturers. They will also include primary schools and hospitality companies such as hotel operators (running smaller hotels – no more than 120 rooms) or cafés and restaurants. Smaller healthcare providers, such as specialist clinics, dentists, elderly care homes and others, are also strong candidates for WiNG Express.

Unlike larger organisations SMEs are unlikely to have a dedicated wireless/network manager on their staff. Typically, the responsibility for IT decisions may be taken by the managing director, a financial controller, or a generalist IT manager. For 25 access points or less, the network can be set up and run without a dedicated controller (provided all access points are of the same type).

For larger networks or multi-site deployments, WiNG Express Manager provides the essential management and reporting needed to maintain optimum performance and reliability. WiNG Express Manager is available as a virtual controller (software) or as a dedicated appliance. The virtual controller (software) can also be hosted in a private or public cloud environment, which enables enterprises to operate their own cloud services, or partners to offer cloud services to their end customers.

When WiNG EXPRESS is the perfect fit for a business:

  • There is no in-house IT department
  • There is no one on the staff who is officially certified to manage WiFi
  • They need to manage their own network internally
  • They don't want to pay additional licence fees – they just want a standard WiFi solution at a fixed cost
  • They need simplicity, with the option to scale as the business grows
  • They need enterprise-level security
  • A dedicated controller is not required: if they need fewer than 26 Access Points, of the same type, on a single site
  • The customer needs more than 26 but less than 1024 Access Points, multi-site or different Access Point types

Click here for more information about WiNG Express and Zebra's full range of wireless products.