Purple and Ruckus deliver NBA’s Indiana Pacers with guest WiFi, fanalytics

Purple, the intelligent spaces company, has signed a three-year contract to supply the Bankers Life Fieldhouse with Ruckus Wireless and Purple’s guest WiFi solution.

Together, the companies will combine to provide 437 Ruckus access points at the Fieldhouse’s Indianapolis home to the NBA Indiana Pacers and WNBA Indiana Fever.

Overall the Fieldhouse hosts more than 200 events annually, including college and high school basketball, concerts, the circus and ice shows.

The new technology allows Bankers Life Fieldhouse to get more attendees online during events while learning more about those audiences through fanalytics.

Purple provides real-time analytics and marketing for venues and businesses that want to engage with visitors and understand the use of physical spaces. Purple’s ‘Intelligent Spaces’ approach already helps brands to learn more about their customer base, and enables them to take action.

In this instance, Purple’s unique analytic and marketing platform helps detail fan behavior in and around the venue, including demographic data, attendance frequency and much more.

Gavin Wheeldon, CEO at Purple, comments: “It’s great to see Purple being used by such a huge name in the sporting sector. We are hoping that the results provided from our analytics platform will transform how the Indiana Pacers and Indiana Fever interact with their fans. In turn we hope that this will increase overall ticket, merchandise, food and drink sales, along with a significantly improved brand loyalty.”

Ruckus’s WLAN systems bring power and simplicity together for large-scale indoor deployment, providing extended range and adaptive signal steering for the most reliable WiFi.

Ed Frederici, Chief Technology Officer, Pacers Sports and Entertainment comments: “We chose Purple for three simple reasons: the completeness of their solution, their strong focus on innovation and their culture. They were a clear leader in the bidding process from the start. They have a consummate understanding of the market space and have developed software that is both broad and deep and brings the future to the present rather than relying on approaches of the past. They were amazingly easy to do business with and worked through our unique needs tirelessly and patiently.”