Life Fitness, best known for gym equipment, is getting into the software business via a cloud facility management system called the Halo Fitness Cloud.
The effort comes as fitness players are increasingly connecting gym experiences to virtual training and integrating with wearables such as the Apple Watch. Gym management software can provide a health club with more touch points to compete with virtual rivals such as Peloton.
Life Fitness' cloud venture also highlights digital transformation as well as industry-specific cloud offerings from companies that traditionally aren't software providers. In this new world, Life Fitness becomes a cloud ERP system and a office furniture player like Steelcase becomes a facility productivity IoT vendor.
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Halo Fitness Cloud[2] has a variety of plans, but the overall aim for Life Fitness is to provide more touch points and personalized digital experiences to gym members. Life Fitness noted that gym members cancel memberships at a rate of 30 percent a year. That churn is brutal and the bet is better fitness management tools can improve retention.
Jason Worthy, vice president of digital solutions at Life Fitness, said the Halo effort comes out of the company's digital ventures group. Halo, which runs on Amazon Web Services, is designed to aggregate a member's data to give gym operators more insights to goals and lifestyle choices outside of the health club.
"There are 2 million workouts a day happening on Life Fitness and we can enable a conversation that's different with a hybrid of software, hardware and relationships," said Worthy.
As for the business model, Halo has annual plans that run from $3,500 to $7,000 and add-ons that are