[June 28, 2016]

Mist Unveils Cloud-Based Wireless Networking Platform to Deliver Amazing Mobile Experiences

Mist, a pioneer in cutting-edge wireless technologies for delivering amazing mobile experiences for enterprises, today unveiled the first two services launched on the Mist cloud platform: Mist business-critical Wi-Fi; and Mist's patented Virtual Bluetooth Low Energy™ (vBLE). Available today, Mist products are already in use by many medium-to-large organizations around the world, including Fortune 100 organizations.

Mist is the first extensible, programmable microservices cloud architecture for the indoor wireless technologies of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). A Mist wireless network understands and adapts to each user, how they are moving, the devices they are carrying and the content they are consuming at a scale never before possible. Mist's cloud platform enables the first new approach to wireless in nearly a decade, applying data science and machine learning to transform and assure mobile user experience.

"The explosive growth of mobile users, apps, and connected devices presents big challenges for legacy wireless networks. The core technology in wireless networks today simply wasn't built to handle the rapid rate of change in the mobile and cloud era or the sheer scale of the Internet of Things," said Mist Co-founder and CTO Bob Friday. "Our products deliver an experience beyond just connectivity and allow us to drive the transition from the Connectivity Era to the Experience Era."

With businesses managing more connected devices, enterprise-level IoT implementations and location-based marketing initiatives, Mist delivers products that go beyond simple connectivity, empowering businesses to deliver better mobile experiences. Mist delivers experiences across a wide range of verticals such as corporate offices, airports, healthcare, hospitality, retail, museums, and higher education, and offers a high degree of personalization and engagement with end users. Mist technology is in commercial deployment and pilots today at more than 50 of the world's largest retailers, higher education, manufacturers, healthcare, corporate enterprises and managed service providers.

Mist Business-Critical Wi-Fi: Transforming and assuring mobile user experience

Current wireless network technologies were invented before the smartphone era, and even before BLE, making legacy networks increasingly difficult and time-consuming for IT to manage and adopt new requirements from marketing organizations based around BLE. Mist Business-Critical Wi-Fi, built from the ground up in the mobile and cloud era, brings the following key components to transform the wireless experience:

• The Mist AP41, an industry first high-performance, enterprise-grade, 4x4 spatial stream, 802.11ac Wave 2 Gigabit Wi-Fi Access Point (News - Alert) with 3 Wi-Fi radios, IOT module and an integrated, 16 element vBLE^TM (virtual BLE) dynamic antenna array.
• Mist Systems Cloud, a data-science-driven micro-services architecture for managing the Wi-Fi and BLE access points. The micro-services architecture brings the agility of Software a a Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) to wireless networks for the first time, enabling real-time network data to be analyzed at an unprecedented scale. It enables on-demand network upgrades and patches within minutes (vs. months with legacy wireless networks). The Mist Systems Cloud is built on Kafka, Storm and other modern cloud elements to enable seamless scaling and real-time responsiveness.
• Mist patent-pending Proactive Analytics and Correlation Engine (PACE) leverages machine learning to analyze user experience, correlate problems and automatically detects the root cause of problems.
• Mist patent-pending WxLAN enables identity based routing and features a built-in dynamic policy control engine for inline application analysis and policy.
• Mist Marvis virtual IT assistant, which features a built-in recommendation engine and an industry-first dynamic Packet Capture engine to automatically store packet captures for any anomaly detected by the machine learning algorithms on the network.

Location technology from Mist uses patented, industry-first virtual Bluetooth Low Energy (vBLE^TM) beacons combined with a machine learning location engine on the Mist cloud and a mobile SDK for app developers. Mist vBLE^TM enables a BLE network without the need for battery operated beacons. vBLE^TM brings the experiential benefits of individual identification for personalized wireless experiences, high-accuracy location-tracking for unparalleled indoor navigation and location-based push notifications; and in-depth analytics.

Mist's Location service is enabled by the Mist vBLE^TM enabled Access Points. The solution comprises of the following elements:

• vBLE^TM Beacons - Mist enables virtual beacons using software to give highly accurate, low-latency location intelligence with no BLE beacon hardware required. Virtual beacons don't need batteries, don't require expensive site surveys for ongoing calibration, never come loose from walls or ceilings, and can be repositioned on a floor plan through the cloud with a mouse click.
• Cloud-based Machine Learning Location Engine - The foundation of vBLE^TM is a real-time, distributed microservices architecture that provides low-latency location estimates at high scale. Unsupervised machine learning techniques eliminate the need for costly site surveys by continuously learning the RF environment across Mist access points and android and iOS based mobile device types
• Mobile Software Development Kit (SDK) - Available for iOS and Android (News - Alert), the Mist mobile SDK receives the BLE beacon signals, gathers data from the mobile device sensors, and sends the data back to the cloud location engine. In turn, the location engine returns the high accuracy location estimates.

Supporting Quotes from Mist Customers and Partners

"Current wireless network technologies are a burden on the information technology department: many are antiquated, cumbersome to deploy and maintain, and keep IT professionals from delivering true value to their companies. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that smart phones and the Internet of Things mean Chief Information Officers must become Chief Digital Experience Officers. The team, technology and vision behind Mist's groundbreaking products promise to solve that problem in one fell swoop." - Dennis Hodges, CIO at Inteva Products

"As an international managed service provider, HarborLink Network is all about customer engagement. Mist Systems is enabling us to offer business-critical wireless and contextual, location-based experiences as a service. Mist's machine learning has reduced our operational costs to deliver traditional Wi-Fi services to our customers while Mist's virtual BLE and analytics platform have allowed us to form deeper relationships with our customer's marketing and digital teams to better interact with the end users of our networks." - Rick Tangeman, President of HarborLink Network, Ltd.

Resources:

• What Mist Does
• Blog post from Arif Janmohamed, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners
• Blog post from Matt Howard, Managing Partner, Norwest Venture Partners

About Mist

Mist is a Silicon Valley based startup rethinking the future of indoor mobile services. Founded in 2014 by Cisco veterans Sujai Hajela, CEO; Bob Friday, CTO; and Brett Galloway (News - Alert), Chairman, and backed by Norwest Venture Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mist has brought wireless networking technology into the experience era by using machine learning and micro-services architecture to deliver amazing mobile experiences.

Some of the world's largest organizations in retail, healthcare, hospitality, technology, higher education and more, as well as leading managed service providers, use Mist products. For more information, visit www.mist.com and follow @mistsystems.

About HarborLink Networks

HarborLink Network, Ltd. is working with businesses ranging in size from small offices to multinational Fortune 500 companies and is utilizing Mist to provide business-critical Wi-Fi as a managed service across vertical markets throughout the United States.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160628005540/en/

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