Aruba, a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE:HPE), just announced a major update to their Meridian solution for indoor location services. Meridian has delivered enterprise-scale indoor location solutions for many years. Aruba acquired Meridian in 2013 and HP Enterprise acquired Aruba in 2015.
The number of indoor location solutions on the market have skyrocketed, with over a hundred companies delivering a wide variety of technologies and solutions to the market. Numerous trials of indoor location technologies have been launched in the past year, in shopping malls, hospitals, airports, stadiums and more. But these solutions have yet to truly spread into mainstream common use.
Furthermore, many companies in the area have shifted from offering full indoor location solutions to offering proximity marketing solutions. Proximity marketing systems, usually based on Bluetooth beacons, do not compute people's locations as GPS does, with a "blue dot" moving around a map. Rather, they detect only when a person is near a beacon, indicating that they are in a place of interest. These systems then send promotions, information or other content to people in each beacon's vicinity.
Aruba's Meridian solution does offer proximity, but their main focus is offering true "blue dot" location services. This can include maps, routing, location search, ordering to your location, friend-finding, and more. All of these applications need to know not only when you're near a beacon but where you are at any time. Aruba says that the majority of their customers want to deliver blue dot solutions, not only proximity.
Aruba's announcement offers a set of new features aimed at enabling larger-scale long-term deployments. One of these is the ability to automatically manage thousands of beacons deployed across multiple sites. Another is a broad set of analytics enabling sites to know where their customers or attendees are going, enabling site managers to change
