Ekahau has launched a competitive upgrade program designed to give users of other Wi-Fi RTLS systems the opportunity to test drive and implement the Ekahau RTLS system within their organization in order to gain a performance boost over their existing systems. Ekahau RTLS provides users with the ability to track any Wi-Fi device - including tags from competing vendors.

"Many prospective customers have told us that, after purchasing and deploying another vendor's system, that they are not satisfied with the performance and scalability. The problems they encounter range from vendors that go out of business, or finding that their costs double or triple because additional infrastructure is needed," said Tuomo Rutanen, senior vice president of Marketing and Business Development at Ekahau. "Our new competitive upgrade program will enable these organizations to hold onto their current investment in tags and other ancillary devices, while simply and quickly replacing the server and software layers at a competitive price. With this upgrade, they will get the performance they expected in the first place."

Ekahau RTLS has been integrated with the leading Wi-Fi networks in the marketplace, enabling the Ekahau system to track any device that the network itself may see, whether it is connected to the network or not. This functionality allows customers to leverage Ekahau's high performance algorithms and their existing investment other vendor's tags for asset tracking, personnel safety, workflow and performance monitoring applications.

"We initially opted for another vendor, which we ultimately realized was the wrong choice for us," said Chris Cerny, manager of Enterprise Networking for Community Health Network, a 1,000-bed hospital system in Indianapolis. "Ekahau came in and demonstrated the performance of their system and within minutes showed us capabilities that our existing vendor had been trying to get working for months."

Ekahau RTLS enables users to truly leverage their Wi-Fi network for real time location tracking applications, without the need for significant proprietary hardware upgrades that add considerable cost to the project. Ekahau's innovative deployment tool - the Ekahau Site Survey (ESS) software suite - allows customers to verify the performance of the RTLS system before the final purchasing decision. ESS also allows users to confirm that the existing enterprise Wi-Fi network supports location tracking, so that performance expectations can be set and achieved.

The Ekahau competitive upgrade program is available worldwide and is backed by the Ekahau Zero-Risk System Guarantee, which allows customers to purchase and use the Ekahau RTLS system, and receive their money back if they are not satisfied with the solution's performance.