NEW YORK, Jan. 11, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Max2, a Smart platform company with a focus on Smart applications, will unveil a groundbreaking IoT Edge Server at NRF 2018 (booth #734), marking the technology company’s entrée into a category predicted to grow at warp speed by the end of this decade.  Called VeeaHub, it provides for edge computing and communications as a direct extension of retailers’ data center or cloud services. It offers a unique software architecture that enables retailers to run their applications dynamically and most efficiently at the edge in retail locations, in the private data center or the Cloud, or both. Employing VeeaHub IoT edge servers advances distributed computing to deliver a wide range of new or enhanced services at retail locations, in commercial or residential buildings, or on campuses.

IoT devices, including all large and small computing devices such as smartphones, tablets, computers, routers, residential gateways, game consoles, sensors and others with one or more wireless capabilities such as WiFi, Bluetooth, 3G/4G/5G, Zigbee and others, are expected to reach 50 billion by 2020, presenting enormous opportunities and challenges for retailers. But to date, their full functionality has not been realized while the challenges persist. The VeeaHub platform cost-effectively addresses the challenges of IoT in a highly secure manner, allowing for a range of Smart Retail applications such as connectivity, communications, security, intelligence, scalability, automation, and enhanced in-store operations including omnichannel sales, CRM, Converged Supply Chain Management and Marketing (CSM) and others.

“The era of edge computing is here, bringing with it the ability to transform retail spaces with richer, more reactive, and more personalized customer experiences,” said Michael Salmasi, Founder, Director and CEO of Max2. “Because VeeaHub is so versatile, it can simply be dropped into any existing IT infrastructure either as an adjunct overlay deployment or fully integrated, putting the benefits of IoT and edge computing into retailers’ hands in an easy, scalable and secure way.”

Salmasi continued: “What’s more, VeeaHub automatically creates an intelligent wireless mesh across all commonly used wireless standards, which allows retailers to easily extend WiFi coverage combined with other types of wireless connectivity solutions to provide for connectivity to IoT devices cost-effectively anywhere in retail locations, without the need for new structured wiring or complex network management. This is a very common and costly problem for many businesses.”

While all major industries today have been disrupted by technological advancements, few have had their relationships with customers impacted to the same extent as brick-and-mortar retailers. VeeaHub, which is currently in multiple pilots in the US, South Korea and France, bridges offline retail with online and omnichannel retail by making the in-store experience smarter, more personalized, and more convenient. With VeeaHub, retailers gain the ability to instantly enhance customer experience and automate workflows.

Among the various benefits to retailers are:

• Capturing and analyzing real-time data to get in-store analytics and visibility into customer behavior, such as footfall, dwell times, product engagement, and conversions, as well as business operations by running machine learning applications on VeeaHub nodes closer to where data is collected, allowing use of significantly more and higher quality data for delivery of relevant Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) to the edge applications;
• Improving omnichannel operations by enabling and empowering a connected and collaborative mobile salesforce. It provides real-time service status that modernizes retail business with transaction tracking across systems and subsystems along with context-aware services on an end-to-end basis through the retail locations;
• Updating in-store product information easily and remotely with electronic shelf labels with built-in beacons;
• Realizing an optimal solution for blockchain applications with selective endorsements;
• Rewarding shoppers through in-store gamification and customer experiences;
• Receiving timely information on when shelf stock is becoming low or when the temperature becomes sub-optimal for product storage;
• Engaging customers through targeted advertisements and information on nearby products; sales or service offerings along with live interactive displays that change depending on who is viewing the display. High-speed instantaneous delivery of cached content from VeeaHub nodes and local management of beacons are key differentiator of the VeeaHub platform for such proximal marketing applications.

Typically, distinct stand-alone networking and computing solutions are employed for the implementation of Smart Retail applications. VeeaHub substantially overcomes the typical inadequacies of stand-alone wired, wireless and computing solutions with a unique hybrid connectivity technology with a unified wireless/wired mesh, with open IoT framework, that creates a high-performance, self-healing and self-organizing integrated mesh, called Vmesh, among most commonly used wireless and IoT technologies, namely 3G/4G, WiFi, Bluetooth classic, Bluetooth Low Energy (“BLE”) and 802.15.4 encompassing ZigBee PRO, ZigBee RF4CE, ZigBee IP, WirelessHART, ISA100.11a, Zwave, 6LoWPAN and Thread.

In this architecture, retailers’ applications are running on VeeaHub nodes at the edge, in the data center or in the Cloud based on a number of business rules that have evolved over time with machine learning and AI, such as reducing communications latency for large data applications, offering application privacy, minimizing communications with cloud resources, providing for backhaul resilience, ensuring business continuity through running mission critical applications at the edge with cloud back-up services, and resource availability on various VeeaHub edge nodes versus those in the Cloud. Other product capabilities include:

• A software architecture that provides for container-based virtualization, with portable Docker containers ensuring isolation between apps and constrained access to the OS kernel, providing for highly balanced computing, storage and network capabilities that optimizes running of edge applications;
• Best-in-class Vmesh technology that provides for seamless in-store wireless coverage, including private and public access WiFi with always-on managed network access through multiple backhauls;
• Highly advanced end-to-end and link layer security for wired and wireless connections, along with an IoT device manager and firewall at every node providing for the ability to easily secure, monitor and manage IoT devices;
• A CR-21 application provides for out-of-the box PCI-compliance for peripheral management and communications (e.g., printers, scanners, display poles, cash drawers, etc.) with existing retail POS and payment solutions along with the ability to run fully redundant POS applications in a cluster from VeeaHub nodes out of one or multiple retail locations;
• An SDK and API are available to retailers who prefer to integrate VeeaHub’s proximal marketing feature into their own consumer app.

The VeeaHub platform is further complemented by a white labeled consumer app, called Veea; a merchant app, called VeeaConnect; payment services, called VeeaPay; POS solution, called VeeaPOS; 3G/4G MVNO services with CloudSIM, called VeeaWireless.  

As the demand for edge computing skyrockets, Max2 is seeking to cultivate a developer community. It offers a software development kit, for its open software development platform, and has established a unique enterprise application store facilitating delivery of a wide range of innovative solutions and applications by third party developers to retailers without being bound by exclusivity, thus creating an open ecosystem.

“At Max2, we believe that an open platform will unleash the creativity of the developer community, ultimately yielding the maximum benefit to all those seeking edge computing solutions. We invite developers to get to know our platform and turn their creativity into valuable enterprise solutions,” said Salmasi.

About Max2 Inc.

Max2, based in New York City, is a platform company with a suite of innovative products and services for Smart Retail industry. Its VeeaHub Platform allows businesses of all sizes to extend their data center or cloud computing operations to the network edge and, while improving their operational efficiencies, machine learning and AI capabilities, provide for IoT applications that can deliver a feature-rich omnichannel e-commerce environment. This platform is further complemented by solutions that augment the real world, providing seamless in and out-store experiences that lets businesses engage and retain customers, collect analytics to grow their businesses and provide for more cost-effective and frictionless delivery of services. Max2’s solutions include payment services, intelligent wireless edge servers with software applications, as well as Point of Sale (POS) systems, 3G/4G MVNO cellular services with CloudSIM, and mobile applications for both businesses and the consumer. Headquartered in New York City with several offices in the US, Europe and Asia, Max2 is run by an experienced and tenured management team including former board members and senior executives from leading technology, payments and telecom companies.

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SOURCE Max2