I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Gagandeep Singh, CEO of RaGaPa, to update us on where they are with their guest Wi-Fi solution. Enjoy.
Question: Give us a background about who RaGaPa is for those readers who are not familiar with you?
Answer: We are a Silicon Valley-based company with a strong team of veterans in the network security and software development field. RaGaPa’s mission is to provide a secure and engaging guest Wi-Fi experience. We are focused on a two-prong approach of providing both a secure Wi-Fi experience and being able to engage the Wi-Fi users when connected to guest Wi-Fi in any location–big or small.
Q: What problem(s) are you helping to solve?
A: Our goal is to provide all the essential Wi-Fi features in a single software bundle that has turn-key features. We are trying to solve the problem of having multiple appliances/devices in a network by packaging them into a single software bundle. For example, for the SMB market we deliver a Pi3 based solution that works as an access point, has a built in captive portal, content filtering, content insertion and basic firewall features. If you really look at the feature list each feature could be an appliance of its own – so, we not only reduce the number of devices in the network but also enable easy and cost effective management of the whole deployment.
Q: Tell us about your CaptiveXS platform.
A: We have combined all the essential Wi-Fi services into a unified platform managed through our cloud based dashboard with our CaptiveXS solution. With CaptiveXS, our out-of-the box [internet of things] security and engagement/monetization tools can help businesses of any size provide a safe and engaging guest Wi-Fi experience. The key CaptiveXS features include IoT discovery, management and security, captive portal with social login, content filtering, content insertion, deep user analytics and user management.
Q: What differentiates it from other captive portal solutions?
A: The key to our success has been our ability to provide our customers with an engaging and secure Wi-Fi platform. CaptiveXS has turn-key features, that are managed through an easy and intuitive cloud-based dashboard. Our content insertion solution allows venues to engage users beyond the captive portal and our IoT discovery/management and security features give venues the ability to better understand their network.
Q: Who are your flagship customers?
A One of our flagship customers is Cedar Fair. Attendance at Cedar Fair’s parks was a record 25.1 million guests in 2016, making them one of the largest amusement parks company in the world. We are live in all their amusement parks (U.S. and Canada) including the latest addition of Great America and Kings Dominion. Other notable customers include Telecom Fiji and Gloria hotels and resorts.
Q: Can you share an example of a deployment you are really proud of?
A: That certainly has to be Cedar Fair. We were able to remotely enable five parks with our CaptiveXS solution in less than 30 minutes working across three teams–Cedar Fair IT, Deep Blue Communications (one of our preferred partners) and us. Everything was done very smoothly and quickly and so, definitely is one we are proud of.
Q: Tell us about your roadmap? What exciting features are you working on?
A: Security and seamless on-boarding are the two biggest problems to solve in the IoT space. We are putting a lot of work on the IoT side of things where we are continually enhancing the security by using machine language and [artificial intelligence]. Our goal is to have non-policy based auto-action, where the venue owner doesn’t need to contribute to the decision making, with the platform is smart enough to either suggest or simply trigger the required action. For example, auto-quarantining a device that is misbehaving in the network, or slowing the speed of a device due to it downloading/uploading large amounts of data, or adding a device in the watch list. The network visibility component, especially, with the growing number of IoT devices is something we are focusing quite a bit.
