We’ve all heard the predictions about Wi-Fi: it will someday connect everything in our homes and offices; it will gather our data and show us customized content and offers; it will help us stay healthy, safe and informed throughout our lives.
If Wi-Fi is so critical, shouldn’t corporate IT managers be laser-focused on creating and sustaining the best possible Wi-Fi systems for employees? Not always. A growing number of companies are deciding that Wi-Fi is too important not to be handled by experts and for that reason they are outsourcing it.
Consider EmployBridge, which calls itself the largest specialty staffing firm in the U.S. With more than 500 offices in the U.S. and Canada, the company is extremely diverse, as are the thousands of job seekers who enter its offices.
“We’re payrolling hundreds of thousands of people every week, and they all come in and out of the branches and we need to make sure that they can also get their Wi-Fi,” said EmployBridge IT manager Michael Ramsey.
Ramsey said company IT issues are handled by a staff of “one to two people, depending on how you carve their hats.” In addition, EmployBridge tries to staff each of its seven nationwide service centers with an IT professional, but the hundreds of branch offices around the country do not have IT support on premise.
Ramsey was already comfortable with the idea of hardware as an operating expense rather than an investment, so Wi-Fi as a service was a natural fit for EmployBridge. The company recently became the biggest customer to date for Wi-Fi startup KodaCloud, which offers Wi-Fi hardware and support as a service.
“They will open tickets on my help desk if they have identified problems,” Ramsey said. But most problems never even make it that far. KodaCloud says its cloud-controlled Wi-Fi corrects roughly 80% of network connectivity and performance issues automatically, and issues alerts to IT teams where human intervention is needed.
“I want a service that just works, so all that stuff better happen in the background,” said Ramsey. “I bought a Wi-Fi system and it better work.”
So far, so good. EmployBridge has deployed roughly 140 KodaCloud access points and plans to deploy up to 500. In many offices the KodaCloud access points are replacing SonicWall and/or Meraki, which is part of Cisco. Ramsey said some of the Meraki APs are staying, but are not connected to the KodaCloud system, which uses proprietary hardware.
KodaCloud has deployed more than 800 Wi-Fi access points to date. Customers pay a monthly subscription fee for service and hardware, which KodaCloud plans to refresh periodically.
