A new line of hardware and software products are aiming to make it easy to manage Bluetooth beacons.
The hardware and cloud-based software network, called the Fathom Hub, was just released to the public late last month.
“After three years of research and development, we’re excited to emerge from beta and bring Fathom to market,” Guylain Roy-MacHabée, president and CEO of Rx Networks, Fathom’s parent company said in a press release. “Early customer feedback is positive and affirms that Fathom solves a very real and very painful problem for companies that have deployed and are managing beacons. Remote identification and monitoring are key challenges in scaling beacon deployments across the enterprise as is maintaining location-context integrity of those deployments.”
According to Vancouver-based Rx Networks website, the “Fathom Hub transforms existing, stand-alone Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons into a managed proximity network, reporting on the location and status of all beacons in the coverage area.”
Essentially, this proximity gateway device uses BLE (or beacons) to trigger events, particularly on smartphones and tablets. For example, a shopper walking by a store emitting a Bluetooth beacon can receive a notification on their phone saying they’ll receive a discount for making an in-store purchase today.
While beacon technology isn’t new, the company differentiates the Fathom Hub, pointing out that it is purposefully engineered to locate and position BLE devices and transform these beacons into an ecosystem. The device and software also provide businesses with valuable location data, which can be used to inform customer service improvements and targeted marketing campaigns.
The Fathom Control interface also allows users to control their proximity networks remotely, pull up live visualizations of beacon deployments, and use monitoring tools to tracks all assets and ensure beacons continue to respond appropriately.
The newly available Fathom Hub also has potential applications for large-scale beacon deployments across a smattering of industries, including retail, healthcare, advertising, manufacturing and a variety of others.
