Nextivity CEO discusses key in-building wireless dynamic
As vendors look to drives sales in the vastly underserved in-building wireless segment, a key variable is proactively making work easier for the system integrators and installers that will ultimately engage with building owners and commercial real estate decision makers on deploying a system, Nextivity CEO Werner Sievers told RCR Wireless News.
“The reality is that our sort of primary objective in life is to be able to touch the market and be included in the deal flow that’s out there today,” Sievers said. “We need to align ourselves as well and as accurately as we can with our resellers, our integrators and our installers.” What that means in practice is, “We work to continuously make it easier for them to install. We can definitely empower integrators with easy of install.”
For Nextivity’s middleprise-facing product, the Cel-Fi Quatra, ease of install is a design and architectural machination. “It’s the fact that we’ve moved to an RF-over-Ethernet, an all-digital environment,” Sievers said. “It’s simplifying the number of calculations and considerations that they need to work through in the design, firstly, and then in an install situation. From there, depending on who the integrator is, their level of experience versus the complexity of the building, the trajectory is somewhat different.”
He noted the importance of supporting iBwave, an industry-standard indoor network design and planning tool that’s required in many RFPs and RFQs, as well as providing an estimation tool that helps integrators quickly establish project costs and timelines.
Sievers also described what he described as a “metamorphosis” among in-building integrators in that firms historically focused on very large venues like stadiums and airports, are now having to expand the projects they work on to include smaller facilities.
“We have a lot of respect for their skills,” he said or large venue integrators. “You need integrators like them to sort of lead the metamorphosis. Some of those teams are deploying Quatra in the most creative fashions. They can be very creative in their installation capability. The challenge we have as a company with that group is we have to get credibility with them. They don’t just accept you can do that with Quatra, you can do this with Quatra. They won’t just buy it. You have to move this tanker along. There’s an in-built reluctance, but they’re facing price pressure like never before. They’re being forced to take deals, building sizes, building complexity, types of enterprises they’d have ignored or turned down.”
