“We expect revenue in Romania and Bulgaria to double in the fiscal 2015 from $1.8 million in the previous fiscal year.”
The US company operates in Romania via partners like the local subsidiary of Austria’s Kapsch. It plans to boost local presence and increase the number of partners, as the surge in the sales of Wi-Fi enabled devices is putting pressure on companies to deploy wireless Internet access solutions for their own employees and customers.
Disallowing Wi-Fi is not the right attitude for a company because people can find ways to go around restrictions when it comes to wireless connections, as they did when they brought the personal smartphones and tablets to office, and create security risks in the process, Aruba official explains.
More and more customers of hotels, coffee shops, restaurants or passenger transportation companies are asking, “Have you got Wi-Fi? What’s the password?” and those that are unable to provide such a service risk losing revenue, Zbigniew Skurczynski said.
Demand will surge because all these new devices: tablets, smartphones need a Wi-Fi connection and companies find themselves having to choose solutions to allow them to provide secure connections and use them to analyze and generate business, he added.
Other scenarios for Wi-Fi gaining ground is use by retail networks, which resort to devices that connect to the network for inventory management but also decide to give customers access to the Internet. Such is the case of Kaufland in Romania, the largest retailer in the country, which uses Aruba Networks solutions, Skurczynski said.
Aruba Networks, whose main competitor in Romania, as everywhere else, is fellow US company Cisco, provides Wi-Fi traffic analysis, user identification and management solutions, as well as solutions to identify services used, which allow companies to understand how the infrastructure is used and what segments thereof should be optimized.
What are the growth areas in Romania? One of them is partnerships with real estate developers, which can switch from cabling a building to a Wi-Fi infrastructure, saving hundreds of thousands of euros in costs, the Aruba Networks official says.
Other industries open to such projects are retail, health care, education and even banking, he added.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)