WBA Member Purple are a leading SaaS provider of Wi-Fi marketing and analytics who deliver to market through a global partner network. They work with most of the world’s largest Service Providers and IT Resellers to give best-in-class guest WiFi and analytics to their customers, from SMB to Enterprise. We recently sat down with Purple’s Director of Partnerships Kerry Sutcliffe to learn a bit more about Purple, their involvement in the Wi-Fi industry, and how they’re approaching the current COVID-19 pandemic.
- Tell us a little about Purple and your involvement in the Wi-Fi industry
Purple helps businesses transform their physical venues into intelligent spaces. From data capture, predictive analytics, and engagement via the use of WiFi, to helping customers quickly navigate complex venues.
Our WiFi product is deployed over the top of existing wireless networks, it delivers state-of-the-art guest wifi for our customers. It handles the guest’s interactions with the venue, gives back detailed analytics and has sophisticated marketing capabilities.
Purple’s latest product, ‘Purple Wayfinding’, assists with indoor navigation for large complex buildings such as hospitals, stadiums, venues and even offices. This wayfinding technology uses CAD drawings of a building, geomagnetic technology, and BLE beacons to create a recognizable user-interface that guides guests, turn by turn to their desired indoor location.
Both products empower businesses to make more customer-centric decisions, tailor hyper-personalized marketing campaigns, build better customer profiles and improve the way visitors interact with the venue.
- Enterprise verticals are a focus area for Purple. What challenges are currently facing this space, and at the same time, what is being done to address them?
There is a growing obligation for companies to handle their customers’ data responsibly, with huge consequences in place for those who don’t. Lawmakers across the globe have enacted strict regulations to serve towards the control and protection of data. Purple has responded to these changes by ensuring that we are going the extra mile.
Purple removes the risk for our customers by handling data protection on their behalf. Our platform is built on the principle of protecting our customers, and all data is stored in a secure data centre, ensuring that data privacy and security is consistently upheld.
When users access our service, we protect our customers by ensuring terms and conditions, privacy policies and marketing options are agreed to in a compliant way, without sacrificing on an easy and pleasant user experience.
Users can access their own data portal at any time and manage all of the data collected about them, supplying them with complete transparency throughout, which provides users with the peace of mind.
- You recently joined the Wireless Broadband Alliance – what were your reasons for doing so, and what do you hope to get out of your membership?
We have been to many WBA events over the years, as speakers, exhibitors or simply attendees. With our recent renewed focus on the Service Provider world we wanted to formally become members in order to send key staff to the global events, and be able to communicate across a much wider global network of service providers.
North and South America is also a focus for us this year and we have recently hired a new Head of Americas, Shaun Bossons, who will be leading the charge in the Americas and attending the events. Bill Williams remains our VP Sales for EMEA and APAC.
- With COVID-19 creating a landscape of uncertainty, how are you approaching this and how is 2020 shaping up for Purple?
COVID-19 has affected us all, especially those of us who provide a service to the industries that are currently closed due to lockdown. But every significant change, however tough, can also bring new opportunities and it’s important to be agile and innovative at this time.
First and foremost, we have put a large focus on our existing customers, ensuring they are getting all the support that they need from us, and getting them better equipped to face the world once doors open again using the tools that they have at their disposal within our platform. We are also working on additional reports and tools to assist customers with social distancing, which we believe will be around for some time to come.
Secondly, being one of the world’s largest global wifi analytics companies, we are in the position to be able to monitor footfall across a large percentage of the world’s venues and have produced a public dashboard where anyone can track the impact, which can be accessed here. As soon as the crisis broke, we immediately got to work on monitoring that data using our data science team, to be able to show whether lockdown was actually happening – and which geographies and demographics were the most responsive to it. We hope to be able to be the ones to chart the recovery as well! Some articles on that can be found in our blog.
Finally, we were also fortunate that we had recently gained the new product on our portfolio – Purple Wayfinding. The sophisticated indoor navigation system plays a large part already for many healthcare customers in North America. We have been in a fortunate position to be able to support and help those healthcare venues during this crisis. A case study from one healthcare customer can be found here.
To learn more about Purple and their services, please visit their company website.
