Nimans has issued a ‘Wi-Fi warning’ to help resellers capture greater levels of business and avoid any technology pitfalls.
2016 was a year to remember for Samsung WLAN at Nimans with sales rising 20% – fuelled by enhanced levels of reseller support and almost insatiable corporate demand. However, there is a temptation for too many resellers to install consumer level systems rather than business grade platforms, according to the supply specialist.
Stuart Bate warns:
“It’s a big problem and a false economy which can lead to lots of wasted time and money further down the line,”
Nimans’ WLAN Project Manager. “Domestic products are not designed for business use and can lead to lots of problems.”
Stuart cites research from Samsung that shows how an average business can lose over £70,000 each year by choosing an inferior option.
“Spend a little more upfront and resellers and their customers will benefit greatly in the future. Invest wisely, protect your customer relationship and save yourself lots of hassle. These are some of our key messages going forward. Consumer vs enterprise is like comparing chalk and cheese!”
Stuart added: “Ensuring you have the right product for your customer is essential to keeping them happy, and there can be no bigger minefield than offering Wi-Fi to your customers if you have the wrong product set.
“In Wi-Fi, 99.999 (often called “five 9s”) refers to a desired percentage of availability of a given WLAN network. Such a system would probably have what some refer to as high availability. So 99.999 availability works out to 5.26 minutes of total downtime – planned or unplanned – in a given year.
“Consumer grade products are expected to perform between two and three nines (e.g. 99.9% uptime) so your downtime over the course of a year on these products ranges between 8.76 hours of downtime all the way up to 3.65 days.
“An enterprise grade product which will be between four and five nines eg. 99.99 – 99.999% ensures users can expect between 52.56 minutes downtime for a four nines product and 5.26 minutes downtime for a five nines product over the course of a year. (Samsung WLAN is a five nines product).
“If you apply these to a real life situation where a business that costs £20,000 a day to run installs a consumer grade product then it would cost them £73,000 over a year plus the cost of the wireless deployment initially. Whereas an enterprise system in the same scenario would cost £105.20 plus the cost of the wireless deployment.”
Bate emphasised: “In addition you will usually find that an enterprise system needs far fewer access points than a consumer grade system and performance per client will be greatly increased usually by between 10 and 25 times per device. They will also offer other reliable services which can be used to even generate revenue.”
Stuart highlighted how Nimans provides free sales training at reseller premises every month combined with technical training at its Manchester headquarters.
“2016 was a year to remember as the strong sales momentum continued,” said Stuart. Nimans’ WLAN training programmes help resellers capitalise on ‘unlimited market potential’ – with demand for WLAN set to accelerate even further in 2017, as he continued: “A series of two-day engineering courses regularly take place at our headquarters where engineers can learn about site surveys, protocols, system troubleshooting and software, as part of a comprehensive overview. In addition we conduct half day sales training workshops at resellers’ offices across all four corners of the UK. Sales scripts, branded eshot campaigns and joint end user visits inspire confidence and share knowledge.”
Samsung’s cutting edge WLAN solution has been developed from the ground up based on making adoption simple. Hailed as a ‘natural evolution of voice communication’ it combines exceptional performance with ease of installation and straightforward network management. Samsung WLAN features just two main components; Access Points and their Controllers. Highly effective Air Equaliser functionality, that allocates equal air time to multiple devices, is one of many impressive features.
Stuart concluded: “We’ve already created a massive response and more exciting times are ahead. There’s unlimited potential for resellers and we’re here to help them every step of the way. End user demand for WiFi is becoming insatiable but it’s critical the system is up to the job in the first place.”