HW088: Scaling Your Wireless Team with Ekahau SaaS (Sponsored)

Keith Parsons (0:00)

Welcome back to another episode of Heavy Wireless, part of the Packet Pushers Podcast Network. My name is Keith Parsons, and today we have a sponsored episode from Ekahau, Ukla, Accenture. We have Matt, Starling and Troy Martin with us.

Matt, did I get your name right? Not your name, Ekahau's name.

Matt Starling (0:19)

Well, my name, yes, you definitely got right. And I suppose that is how you can refer to us now. Ekahau by Ukla, by Accenture, perhaps. I think most likely people will just say Ekahau by Accenture, I would guess. What do you think, Troy? Is that probably the right way to refer to us?

Troy Martin (0:34)

That's probably the official way to refer to us, but it gives us flexibility to play to our audience. Whatever name resonates with who we're talking to is probably the name that we use when we have our conversations.

Keith Parsons (0:43)

Well, to make it simple, I'll just call you Ekahau for now.

Troy Martin (0:47)

That works for us.

Matt Starling (0:47)

That's good.

Keith Parsons (0:48)

Well, Matt, Ekahau has had some pretty big announcements come out lately. This is your chance to tell the world what's changed.

Matt Starling (0:57)

Well, thank you, Keith. First of all, thanks for having us on here. And yeah, we're pretty excited about our recent announcements to transition to an additional way of accessing Ekahau tools, which we're pretty excited about. Maybe we can just quickly recap the way that our licensing model has been working for the last however many years in cases people listening that are not quite familiar. So what we offer currently is what is called a perpetual license to our AI Pro software. Then we also have a Ekahau Connect subscription, which you then pay annually and that gives you access to our mobile applications, cloud support, feature updates and things like that. Then we have our hardware, which is the Sidekick 2 that measures everything in Wi-Fi from 2.4, all the way up to 6 gigahertz.

We're going to be launching a completely new additional way of accessing the tools. But maybe Troy, you can tell us a little bit about what even is SaaS and what are the new things we're going to be offering.

Yeah.

Troy Martin (1:56)

I don't think SaaS is anything new for our audience. I listened to this call to software as a service. It's a pricing model that's been available for years and years, if not decades. It may be relatively new to wireless tool sets, but the wireless hardware model has adopted SaaS for a long time now.

What we've found is that there's been growing teams that have matured where we have different roles across these teams. You'll have a senior wireless architect, a designer who typically sits back at headquarters. They're the wireless guru, let's say, within the organization. To scale the team, there's more junior members that end up being more of the hands and feet. These are the ones maybe earlier on in their career, they have a little bit more flexibility. These are the ones that are sent to remote sites to travel, to collect the data, perform site surveys. But they may not be doing the initial design of the wireless network. So to accommodate these different roles that we've found with a lot of different partners and customers that we work with, we've introduced the SaaS model for the Ekahau product tools that allows more flexibility for users in their specific roles, just to buy the tools and features that they need access to. That's our SaaS model that we're bringing into the market, that's available for purchase today.

We can break down the different models that we have available.

Keith Parsons (3:18)

Well, let me just reemphasize something that Matt had said earlier. You're not getting rid of the old CapEx, if you want to call it model, where you buy it and you own it and you just pay a subscription license. This is in addition, correct?

Troy Martin (3:31)

Absolutely correct. Giving users, customers the flexibility to choose a subscription OPEX based path or continue as they always have with a CapEx purchase.

Keith Parsons (3:41)

So is that just old users who you had old customers who had the CapEx model or you continue selling a new customer or the CapEx model?

Matt Starling (3:51)

Correct. So the existing customers that already have invested into the AR Pro software plus the Connect subscription, they can just continue to pay the Connect subscription. And actually that is our recommendation. We're not going to be trying to transition or move someone from the Connect subscription over to our new full Ekahau software suite.