If you are a Business to Consumer (B2C) enterprise, you want to know more about the visitors in your venue, how long they stay and what they do in the venue. These insights can help you create more relevant customer engagements, maximize promotional activities, as well as optimize venue operations.

Cisco Connected Mobile Experiences (CMX) Cloud is a new cloud-delivered Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offer. It delivers these customer insights and experiences in a matter of minutes, with the simplicity, flexibility, and affordability provided in a cloud solution. Simply point your Wireless LAN controller based on-premises network to the cloud to get started.

CMX Cloud is built upon the same CMX platform that has been available as an on-premises solution and has been very effective for improving guest experiences and building insights. This business need is equally critical across nearly all industry verticals, regardless of the size of your organization. Many Cisco customers have looked to CMX to address this need across retail, hospitality, healthcare, education, and more. Check out additional CMX Case studies here.

However, organizations with smaller wireless network or thin ITmay not have in-house technical capability or IT resources to invest in technology and personnel to establish and deliver mobility services on an on-going basis. With CMX Cloud, now it can be economically and operationally more efficient for these deployments.

Economical Benefits:62% of U.S. organizations are already using or planning on implementing cloud solutions*. By going to the cloud, you can reduce upfront capital expenditure (CapEx), a fixed cost, and move to operational expenditure (OpEx), scaling as your network grows. With smaller networks, these benefits are quite apparent compared to the on-premises alternative -not only do you reduce upfront capital investment, but also total cost of ownership. CMX Cloud for example can be 60-70% cheaper for a 100 AP deployment compared to the on-premises options.

Operation Benefits:Many B2C enterprises have a thin IT model, which is already stretched with increasing demand on the network. With CMX in the cloud, it removes the need for the IT to manage additional hardware and software deployment, as well as ongoing maintenance. Customers with larger deployments also benefit, as CMX Cloud is faster to deploy, scale, and maintain. Across the board, it enables business to save on the energy, personal and infrastructure costs and deliver business outcomes more simply and quickly in matter of minutes than days with on-premises solution.

Business Outcomes: CMX Cloud currently offers two tiers of licensing options.The basic tier of CMX Cloud providesCMX Connect, which is an intuitive guest access solution that helps deliver guest experiences through captive portal or mobile app. With easy drag-and-drop components and without requiring any web programming skills, you can create custom guest portals that support a variety of device types and languages. Multiple access methods are supported -simple registration, SMS, social login etc.

The next tier of CMX Cloud providesCMX Connect with Presence Analytics. This allows you to gain insights on visitor count, dwell times, peak traffic hours and more, based on proximity around groups of access points (called sites). Captive portals can be specified on a per-site basis and deliver location-based targeted guest experiences.

You can expand customer experiences with CMX Cloud even more, via application programmable interfaces (or APIs) with a CMX Ecosystem Partner or your in-house development team.

Join us for a live webinar on February 23, 2016 to get your CMX Cloud questions answered.

If you're ready to give CMX Cloud a try, simply sign up for a 60-day free trial at http://cmxcloud.cisco.com. Just go to your WLC and change the redirect URL of the Guest WLAN and pre-Auth ACLs to securely connected to cloud. That's all you need to get started with CMX Connect as a guest access and experiences solution in the cloud.

*Don't Get Left Behind -The Business Benefits of Achieving Greater Cloud Adoption, IDC Country InfoBrief, August 2015.