There has been a hive of activity within the New Zealand business of wireless vendor Aerohive over the last 12 months. Below is a round up.

In the last year alone the company has appointed two new staff members to its Auckland branch. Rhys Taylor has been appointed regional sales manager and Geoff Mason has come on board as systems engineer.

Continuing with the theme of new appointments, a new distributor, Sektor, was appointed to sit alongside existing distributor Connector Systems. This provides a significant opportunity for Aerohive to expand outside its traditional vertical markets of education and healthcare and gives it a new focus in the retail sector.

A recent roadshow held by Sektor in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, at which Aerohive had a presence, focused on system integrators selling to the retail industry.

Sektor's experience lies in the distribution of all the components of a retailers point of sale solution. This partnership also complements Aerohive's global focus on selling into the retail industry.

The AeroHive Wi-Fi access points themselves include a clever retail analytics system that can provide details on the number of people walking past a store, the number who enter, duration of stay and number of repeat visits. The data is collated using the Wi-Fi signal from the customer's smart phone and, as it simply uses the Wi-Fi signal and doesn't gather data, there are no privacy issues.

With retailers worldwide struggling against the technology available to online competitors – for  example Amazon's app that allows customers to scan a product's barcode, find the price on Amazon and buy it immediately. Aerohive is hoping its retail analytics system puts the ball back in the store-based retailer's court with its ability to push personalised messages out to the smart phone user when they enter the store.

Aerohive recently expanded its range from pure wireless to include network switches and has also won a major contract in the public sector that will be announced shortly.

And in another coup for the New Zealand arm of the business, the company's US-based chief Wi-Fi architect, Devin Akin, is coming to New Zealand in early July. We will announce the details shortly.

Although the company won't comment about market share, anecdotally TechDay estimates it Aerohive has approximately 25% of the local Wi-Fi access point market and believes over 80% of school Wi-Fi projects are choosing Aerohive.

For more information about selling AeroHive equipment contact the New Zealand distributors Connector Systems or Sektor.