Kontakt.io’s CEO Szymon on Kontakt.io’s Deployment and Maintenance Services

This week Victoria from our Marketing Team sat down with founder Szymon Niemczura to talk about Kontakt.io’s most recent offering: global large scale beacon deployment and maintenance services.

Victoria: Hi Szymon, thanks for your time - feeling extraordinary?
Szymon: Yes, excellent - we are having an extraordinary time both in the industry and at Kontakt.io. I am very happy about our growth in Mexico, China and Berlin. New products such as our Smart Beacon Two and new initiatives such as the Proximity Studio help us to drive the ecosystem close to the forefront.
Victoria: Right, but what I wanted to ask you about in this interview are the new services Kontakt.io has just announced. Kontakt.io is a hardware manufacturer - how does this fit together with services?
Szymon: You’re right, Kontakt.io started as a hardware producer as beacons were just emerging - in fact we were among the first. But, as we see the proximity ecosystem develop, so does Kontakt.io. Today we are building the world's leading beacon infrastructure provider and this includes a strong service offering.
Victoria: The “leading beacon infrastructure provider” - what does that mean?
Szymon: What we want to do is to allow our partners to focus on what they are best at: both Solution Providers that have developed specific software to run on top of beacon infrastructure as well as the final user of the solution.
Take the combined navigation and advertising solution within the retail sector - the solution partner is rightly focussed on how to display the most relevant ads and other services to the customers visiting the store. The supermarket works tirelessly to provide variety at a great price. Neither should have to worry about the beacon infrastructure that helps them meet their goals.
Here is where Kontakt.io comes in: we offer the software that helps keep the beacons secure and free from hijacking and we enable the supermarkets to rent out parts of their installations. Now we can also offer deployment and maintenance as a service so that our partners can focus on what they are good at.
Victoria: But why did you decide to launch services now?
Szymon: Over the last months we have seen more and more large scale deployments hitting the market. After a certain scale it becomes increasing complex to service beacon deployments - this is where we are filling a gap now.
Victoria: Overall, where do you see the beacon infrastructure moving towards?
Szymon: First of all we are very happy to see broad applications and installations of beacons pick up. 2015 was probably somewhat below the expectations. Now however, after removing another important bottleneck, we do see impressive scaled deployments - we are proud to be a part of this and hope that our services help the ecosystem to grow further.
In the medium term we see that market moving towards total cost of ownership plans. This will mean that solution providers and hardware owners can calculate their cost of infrastructure predictably and we can guarantee smooth functioning hardware.
Victoria: Thank you, Szymon. Exciting times ahead, and we’ll be watching this space closely.