WowClowd cabling tester begins shipping October 6

At the BICSI Fall Conference, which took place September 28 through October 2 in Anaheim, CA, WowClowd announced that Monday, October 6 will be the date it begins shipping its cabling-test platform. Accu-Tech and Anixter are stocking distributors of the test system. WowClowd originally announced, and demonstrated the concept of, its cloud-based test capabilities at 2013’s BICSI Fall Conference. In the months that followed the company lined up 50 organizations to beta test the system, and those beta testers “have been beating it up for eight months,” remarked WowClowd vice president of product, Carey Gille, at a meeting during which she announced the October 6 ship date. She added, “As a team, we are absolutely committed to the voice of the customer. They spoke and we listened and as a result, certain areas of our solution were reinvented. This took time and resources but the end-user experience is much improved.”

In an official statement announcing the ship date, Gille also said, “When researching this, we spoke with so many technicians who complained about the clunky testing process, project managers who went on and on about the hassle of hard copies and the pain of lost test results and most importantly, end customers who are frustrated with contractor services that fail to provide their own infrastructure records. In light of this new technology delivering such tangible benefits for other industries, we knew we could do better.”

The company noted, “Other industries are utilizing the newest mobility cloud technology platform to revolutionize consumer product offerings every day. We now monitor our homes, our health, order our food, pay our bills, even select our driving music all via this new technology now on our smart devices—in our cars, at the restaurant, almost everywhere. The WoW team set out to bring this same technology to our industry in an effort to eliminate costly time-consuming limitations of the current process—a process currently dependent upon severely outdated methods like paper floor plans and locally stored test results.”

The WoWClowd system uses the test technician’s mobile device, an application designed specifically for the task of cabling-testing, and cloud technology “to gain access to real-time test results, project management tools and customer floor plans,” the company explained. Through Bluetooth wireless technology, the WowTester connects to the technician’s mobile device. The WoWTester App is able to initiate and run cabling tests, allowing onsite technicians to view test progress and results in real time via their mobile devices. The platform also allows technicians to upload photos and videos from the testing site, to accompany the test results.

Steve Kanne, WowClowd’s chief executive officer, said, “Our mobile cloud capability significantly improves productivity, collaboration and profitability as owners, project managers, field personnel and end-customers will now have real-time access to the cloud where test results, project management tools, customer floor plans, and other project documentation are updated, collected, time-stamped, stored and backed up. The WowClowd Solution will be an affordable, game-changing product that will revolutionize the cable-testing industry.”

This original test hardware, which WowClowd characterizes as “Version 1.0” is a cabling-verification tool; it performs tests including continuity and wiremap, and can verify a copper link’s ability to support the transmission of Ethernet packets. At the BICSI Fall Conference, Gille provided a window into the company’s roadmap for it. WowClowd’s plans for Version 2.0 is to produce a “qualification”-type tester, with the ability to test more electrical-performance characteristics than this original version does. The eventual “Version 3.0” is earmarked to be a full certification tool for copper and fiber cabling circuits.