Plume introduces WorkPass for small businesses

Personalised smart home services provider Plume has revealed the next stage in its smart services growth strategy with WorkPass, a suite of intelligent services and management tools purpose-built for the needs of small business owners (SBOs).

Fuelled by the work-from-home movement, coupled with consumers’ keen appetite for hyper-connectivity and personalisation, Plume says its portfolio of advanced smart home services and communication service provider (CSP) applications have been deployed by more than 180 CSPs across more than 23 million homes globally.

And this market is expected to grow quickly over the next few years. “We are forecasting exponential growth in the smart home market with yearly revenues from connected devices and associated services reaching nearly $263bn by 2025,” said Anirudh Bhaskaran, senior industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan. “We believe service providers are best placed to capitalise on this market opportunity and evolve beyond providing connectivity alone, to build compelling offerings inside the home.”

WorkPass is intended to tap into the new paradigm of work and builds on Plume’s HomePass smart home services suite. “The specific needs of small businesses have been ignored for way too long,” said Fahri Diner, co-founder and CEO of Plume. “CSPs have been trying to serve Main Street either through residential offerings or through enterprise campus-focused systems, both of which are square pegs in round holes.

“Until now, there has been no purpose-built solution to provide rich data-driven tools and analytics for SBOs and the CSPs that serve them, and one that can be installed, managed and operated without an IT guy. Our goal with WorkPass is to bring new services to enable always-on managed connectivity, massively increased productivity, unprecedented security, and insightful marketing, accessed right from a single pane of glass by the SBO.”

The company also cited research from Omdia that showed 42% of small businesses plan to increase their spend on Wi-Fi management. “Managing and securing the plethora of LAN-attached devices is an important investment driver and two-thirds of businesses expect to connect more devices over the next two years,” said Camille Mendler, chief analyst, service provider enterprise at Omdia. “Wi-Fi is also helping small businesses thrive by enabling new services such as guest analytics, building security and environmental control.”

At its heart, WorkPass offers a suite of services that help SBOs meet their networking, cyber security, guest analytics, business insights, marketing and advertising, and employee management needs, unified under a common app and web portal, without the need for IT infrastructure or multiple point solutions.

Described as being purpose-built from the ground up for the specific needs of SBOs, WorkPass services such as Concierge provide guest analytics to generate actionable insights, while Keycard is designed to help managers understand employee behaviour in order to improve workplace safety and engagement. These can be installed and managed through the WorkPass mobile app.

WorkPass also works with the suite of cloud-delivered back-end support, operations, analytics and marketing tools that Plume provides to CSPs.