Ruckus Wireless Inc. has apparently been busy since its $1.5 billion sale to Brocade Communications Systems Inc. earlier this year. The Wi-Fi equipment provider today unveiled a new hosted management platform that promises to let organizations centrally configure, maintain and monitor their wireless infrastructure from the cloud.

The service is described as a more convenient alternative to the vendor’s on-premise administration software and physical controllers. Both are relatively easy to set up but still require setting aside data center space, configuring new hardware assigning IT staff to maintain the deployment. Not every organization has the will or means to sink so many resources into the undertaking. The newly unveiled Ruckus Cloud Wi-Fi services removes this entry barrier and frees up IT departments to focus exclusively on managing their Wi-Fi endpoints.

One of the platform’s main selling points is a personalized monitoring console that filters the operational data displayed to administrators based on its relevance to their work. Logs are stored for up to six months in Ruckus’ cloud to allow for historical analysis of networking infrastructure. The vendor says that built-in analytics capabilities enable organizations to track everything from low-level metrics like radio airtime utilization to complex application behavior changes. Moreover, the information is also used by the service itself to automatically handle certain menial management tasks that would otherwise slow down the IT department.

As a result, administrators can carry out maintenance work faster and gain the ability to spend more time on other activities. Ruckus says that the service will only work with its Wi-Fi access points at first, but there are plans to add support for Brocade’s ICX switches in the future. The goal is turn to the offering into a unified platform for maintaining wireless and networking infrastructure. Users will eventually also gain the ability to manage services that use the vendor’s OpenG indoor cellular technology, which promises to mitigate the coverage issues many office buildings suffer from.

Ruckus Cloud Wi-Fi is available immediately from the vendor’s channel partners. According to the official press release for the launch, it’s already been implemented by a number of early adopters who are seeing “positive” results.

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