Enterasys has launched a new family of modular campus edge switches with its home-grown, application-smart ASIC, the CoreFlow2.  These K Series switches complement the company’s stackable switch products, which are built with merchant silicon rather than custom ASICs.

Enterasys’s CoreFlow2 ASICs are able to identify the types of applications individual users are running on the network. The chip can then apply QoS, security and other network settings to the application traffic based on policies set by the networking team.

“In a stackable switch product I can apply policy on each user that happens to be connected to my switch,” said Karl Pieper, product manager for Enterasys. “With CoreFlow2, I can apply a separate policy to every session that a user is doing. I can apply policy to an email session, to web browsing, to anything they are doing.”

Before rolling out the K Series, Enterasys’s CoreFlow2 ASIC only shipped with its S Series of data center-class modular switches. With the K Series, Enterasys is trying to offer customers a cheaper modular switch with its customer application intelligence.

Enterasys is initially offering two models of K Series, the K10 (a 10-slot chassis supporting up to 216 Gigabit Ethernet ports and 8 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks) and the K6 (6 slots, 144 Gigabit Ethernet ports and four 10 Gigabit uplinks). The K Series list at $26,685 and will start shipping in June.

As we know enterprise wireless LAN used to consist of a bunch of independent, “fat” access points that were basically islands of wireless with no centralized control. Then vendors like Aironet (now Cisco), Motorola and Aruba started introducing a controller-based WLAN architecture, which was much more scalable and (eventually) much more secure. This change opened up Wi-Fi’s potential from isolated hot spots to campus-wide, centrally managed deployments.

Now vendors vendors are pulling back the controller’s role in enterprise WLAN. Meraki has moved its controller functionality into the cloud, building access points that are smart enough to survive on their own when contact is lost with Meraki’s cloud. Aerohive has distributed most of the controller functionality throughout its access points, with a simple management and policy piece sitting on a server.

Enterasys-Siemens’ HiPath wireless LAN product line has also deemphasized its controller in recent years. The HiPath access points manage QoS, encryption and RF management on their own, leaving the controller to handle configuration and policy control and roaming.

Now Motorola has committed to smarter access points, too, with its WiNG 5 architecture. With a simple software update, all of the company’s access points will now run the same software package as Motorola’s controller appliance. Apparently Motorola’s access points have enough compute capacity to handle this new functionality.

Like every vendor that has pulled back the controller’s role in WLAN, Motorola says the speeds involved in 802.11n can lead to a bottleneck effect in the controller. Dr. Amit Sinha, Motorola’s WLAN CTO, said that backhauling everything to the controller isn’t practical, especially when it comes to voice and video communications.

In demos in Boston this week, Motorola showed that the access points are capable doing things traditionally reserved for its controllers. In one demo, an access point that was isolated from its controller was able to recognize and adjust to RF interference. In a second demo, the isolated access point was able to detect a rogue media server running unsanctioned streaming video over the wireless network and cut off the access to that server.

Finally, Motorola demonstrated that by making its access points smarter, it can boost performance. It streamed unicast streaming video from a single wireless access point to 80 laptops, which earned it recognition for a new record by an adjudicator from the Guinness Book of World Records.

What remains unclear to me: Why is Motorola keeping the controller at all. I know there’s a need for centralized configuration, policy and other management functions, but why does Motorola need to continue holding onto the standalone controller appliance. Can’t those management functions be run on an industry standard server or as a virtual machine? If the access points are able to run the same code-base as the controller, surely the access points can handle the data and control planes of the WLAN architecture on their own and leave the management plane to some simple software. Motorola probably has a good reason for this but I didn’t hear much from them about it during their announcement of the WiNG 5 announcement.

Gartner says that NAC gets a bad wrap because it’s not generating a ton of revenue and many vendors have disappeared. The most recent exit was ConSentry Networks, which mysteriously still has a live website even though it went out of business in August 2009.  But enterprises are using NAC. Guest access is a hugely popular use case, and Gartner believes the “consumerization” of IT will only drive up NAC adoption. With end users bringing personal devices into work, enterprises will need to provide secure access to them.

Gartner is actually projecting a flat market for NAC in 2010, with no revenue growth. Total adoption of NAC is increasing but the revenue is flat because many vendors are offering NAC as part of a larger product or service. As we first pointed out while covering the first NAC Magic Quadrant a year ago, There are the infrastructure vendors like Cisco, Juniper, Enterasys, HP and Avaya, who embed NAC in their switching or security products. There are endpoint security and network security vendors like McAfee, Sophos, Symantec, Check Point Software, who bundle NAC in their products. The indie vendors have to compete against all these guys, many of whom might throw in NAC for free just to close a deal on some switches or some malware protection software. (Does anyone remember how popular Netscape Navigator was before Microsoft decided to bundle Internet Explorer with Windows for free?)

So what does this crowded quadrant look like?

The Leaders

Cisco and Juniper stand alone here. These are the companies who have both excellent technological vision and the ability to deliver on that vision to their customers.  Symantec, a leader last year, was bumped into the challenger quadrant because its guess access capabilities are weak. Gartner kept Cisco in the leaders’ spot even though it says Cisco’s NAC solution is too complex and expensive. Gartner noted many Cisco customers have turned to NAC competitors recently. However, Gartner gave Cisco points for its roadmap, noting that the company will release a new line of NAC appliances later this year that consolidates many of the functions that were spread out over too many products. Gartner complimented Juniper for its early embrace of the Trusted Computing Group‘s protocols for NAC interoperability and its IF-MAP specification.

The Challengers

These are the companies that have the ability to close deals but whose technological vision needs a little refinement. As mentioned above, Symantec got bumped from into here for a poor approach to guest networking, which many industry observers see as a major use case for NAC. The only other vendor here is Sophos lost points because its NAC Advanced product, the high end choice of its two NAC products, requires agent software separate from its endpoint protection agent. Its counterparts (McAfee and Symantec) have integrated their NAC products into their overall endpoint protection agents.

The Visionaries

These are the companies who are leading the market in terms of what they are doing with their technology but don’t have the robust sales, marketing and support capabilities required for closing deals against bigger companies. Here we find McAfee, the other major endpoint protection vendor in the space, along with NAC specialists ForeScout, Bradford Networks and Avenda Systems. Avenda is new to the MQ, it’s just four years old. Gartner gave it high marks for its embrace of interoperability and its focus on guest access. Bradford scores high in these areas, too. ForeScout is known for being easy to use and having an out-of-band approach that allows companies to move from one use case to another easily.

The Niche Players

These are the companies that don’t stand out for either their technological vision or their ability to execute. There are ten vendors in this category, some with big names (HP and Avaya) and some with small names (Nevis Networks, Trustwave). Gartner says all these companies are valid options for NAC, many of them targeting their products to serve specific vertical industries.

OK, so all 18 vendors are valid NAC options for someone. But there are EIGHTEEN of them. That’s a lot of NAC. This has been the case since the very beginning. NAC vendors have come and gone, and yet the market stays crowded. Even the Great Recession failed to thin the herd by very much.

For the uninitiated, the Magic Quadrant is Gartner’s graphical evaluation tool for the technology markets it covers. It breaks down the vendor landscape into four quadrants: Leaders, visionaries, challengers and niche players. Gartner evaluates vendors via two general criteria (which in turn contain a handful of sub-criteria). The evaluation criteria are “completeness of vision” (or how much Gartner likes the direction a vendor is going with its technology) and “ability to execute” (or how much Gartner believes a given vendor has the marketing, sales and engineering resources to deliver on their promises to customers). Leaders score high in both, challengers score high in execution, visionaries in vision. Niche players score relatively low in both.

The only major change to the quadrant this year is the entry of Juniper Networks, which has quickly established itself as a big-time player in the switching industry. Gartner has named Juniper a challenger in this year’s quadrant, when last year it didn’t even meet the revenue requirements for inclusion. Gartner praised Juniper for its strong history in networking (particularly in Layer 3 routing), its aggressive pricing and its strong, young portfolio of switches. Gartner cautioned that Juniper needs to continue expanding its product line and it needs to get more specific on how it’s going to address next generation data centers. Project Stratus remains relatively vague.  Juniper also has no clear WLAN strategy, which is a concern since 60% of enterprises like to buy switches and WLAN products from the same vendor.

Cisco Systems and HP Networking remain leaders. Cisco still has the broadest portfolio of switches and WLAN products on the market. It’s introduced several innovations recently, such as StackPower (the ability to manage the power systems of a stack of Catalyst 3750s collectively) and its new NX-OS operating system for its new Nexus data center switches.  However, Gartner says Cisco has been slow in executing a unified wired and wireless product line. Cisco has also left many customers confused about how data centers built with the Catalyst product line will be integrated into the Nexus line. Gartner also claims that customers continue to be critical of Cisco’s efforts in sales, engineering and support.

Gartner says HP’s acquisition of 3Com (a visionary in last year’s quadrant)  has combined the number 2 and 3 vendors in the market into a single Tier 1 vendor that has transformed the market. Gartner says enterprises should now consider HP for all its networking needs when evaluating vendors. The lifetime hardware warranties and telephone support across most of its products lowers the TCO HP-built networks. However, Gartner warns that the integration of HP and 3Com will take time simply because the product lines are so big. And there is quite a bit of redundancy between the two vendors, which will cause some confusion. HP’s sales force is also relatively new to networking, which some enterprise networking pros might find as a turnoff if they’re used to buying network hardware from knowledgeable sales pros.

Brocade remains a visionary. Its combination of high-end switching and storage networking expertise bodes well for its vision for its data center strategy and Gartner says the customer support legacy of its Foundry Networks acquisition remains strong.

Extreme Networks, Enterasys/Siemens, and Alcatel Lucent remain niche players. Nortel (now Avaya) is also still a niche player. Force 10 Networks, which dropped off the the quadrant last year because of revenue, has not made its way back.

Although the quadrant looks very similar to last year’s, Gartner says that the networking market has transformed tremendously in the last year. Juniper and HP have established themselves as legitimate Tier 1 vendor alternatives to Cisco. The days of “Cisco and the seven dwarfs” are over. Brocade (with its Foundry acquisition) is strong in the data center, not so much in campus LAN.

Aside from the horse race aspect of the vendors, Gartner has also identified several key innovation trends that enterprises should follow closely to see how their vendors respond.

1. IP Telephony: Gartner says vendors have varied in their commitment to integrating their network equipment with IP telephony vendors. Specifically, vendors who have their own IP telephony products haven’t been as aggressive in integrating their products with competitors’ IP telephony equipment to meet customer requirements.
2. Security: Gartner says network access control (NAC) will be a mainstream requirement for enterprises within two years. It expects that switch vendors will start to embed NAC into their gear in the next couple years. Entersasys has been a leader in this area with its flow-based security technology.
3. Evolving network cores: Here is where things are changing rapidly in the enterprise LAN market. With Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) server connections becoming common, low latency, wirespeed core switches with high-density 10 GbE ports are becoming a requirement. Vendors are racing to establish a leadership role here.  Data center bridging, fibre channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and the convergence of storage and data on Ethernet are also going to become major disruptions to the market.
4. Converged access: Gartner also notes that the drive to integrate wired and wireless networks will lead to the disappearance of the standalone wireless LAN controller. Vendors are integrating controller functionality into their switches. Those who don’t have their own WLAN product lines will be partnering with standalone WLAN vendors to make this happen
5. Price: Gartner notes that the average gross margin on networking gear remains around 60% or 65%, which means there is a lot of room for vendors to come down on price in certain situations. Enterprises are more cost-conscious these days and they’re thinking more about the life cycle cost of the networks they build. This means they aren’t just interested in seeing vendors discount their products to win deals. They also want to know that managing and maintaining the networks they build won’t be too expensive.

In this blog post I’ll review this year’s Magic Quadrant for the LAN market, and I’ll compare it to last year’s Magic Quadrant for Campus LAN infrastructure, which is essentially a measure of the same market.

As I wrote above, Cisco is THE leader in the LAN market, scoring high in both of Gartner’s criteria for the quadrant: completeness of vision and ability to execute.  In their assessment of Cisco”s position, analysts Mark Fabbi and Tim Zimmerrman noted that Cisco maintains the broadest portfolio of LAN switching and WLAN technology on the market. The introduction of its Nexus switches have shown that Cisco is providing some leadership in addressing emerging connectivity demands in data centers.

However, Gartner cautioned that Cisco remains the high-priced vendor, with some workgroup switching products being twice as much as alternative products on the market. Gartner also said Cisco might be taking its customers for granted, especially those customers who believe in buying networking gear from more than one vendor. The analysts wrote:

We are hearing increasing concerns about Cisco’s presales organization taking customers for granted, and not providing expected levels of service, especially for customers that have not endorsed an end-to-end Cisco solution.

The only other leader in this Magic Quadrant is HP ProCurve, which was a leader last year as well.  Gartner described ProCurve as the fasted growing LAN switch vendor during the past two years and when clients speak with Gartner about their shortlists for vendors, ProCurve is the the second-most-asked-about vendor after Cisco. Gartner praised ProCurve’s integration into HP’s Technology Services group, which gives it access to HP’s broader sales force. It also praised ProCurve’s low cost of ownership and the successful integration of the WLAN technology it acquired with Colubris Networks.

But Gartner cautioned that ProCurve still lacks high-end core switches (An acquisition of a high end core switching vendor like Arista Networks or Blade Network Technologies would do the trick!). The company also needs to expand its channel for larger sales opportunities. ProCurve has in the past been known as a good vendor for SMBs.

A third leader from last year’s campus LAN Magic Quadrant fell down a notch in this year’s quadrant. Foundry Networks, now known as Brocade, the storage networking company that bought Foundry last year, was classified as a visionary in this year’s Quadrant, scoring high on its completeness of vision but scoring a little lower than last year in its ability to execute.

Gartner praised Brocade’s integration of Foundry but said Foundry lost momentum last year due to its U.S.-centric and data-center-centric sales focus. Gartner said it wants to see market evidence that Brocade’s integration of Foundry is successful and that Brocade can regain market momentum.  I have no doubt that last week’s announcement of a new Ethernet switching OEM agreement between IBM and Brocade will go a long way toward helping Brocade regain some of that lost momentum that Gartner is looking for.

Gartner identified three other visionaries in this year’s Quadrant: 3Com, Enterasys/Siemens and Extreme Networks.

Last year Gartner classified 3Com as a niche player, but it elevated the vendor to a visionary in this year’s Quadrant, giving it higher marks for its completeness of vision. Gartner praised 3Com’s revamped product lines and its growing market share in China and other emerging markets. H3C, 3Com’s Chinese subsidiary, has a 35% market share in China, for instance. And 3Com has a very large, low-cost R&D workforce in China. 3Com recently told me H3C has 2,300 engineers in China.  But Gartner cautioned that 3Com and H3C have been, until recently, run as two separate companies. It will be important for the two to integrate. Also, 3Com has very little market penetration outside of Asia. Gartner warned that taking products developed for China and selling them globally will be a challenge.

Enterasys, which merged with Siemens Enterprise Communications last year as part of a Gores Group acquisition, maintained last year’s position as a visionary. It drew praise from Gartner for it full complement of products from the data center to the access layer, its tightly integrated security technology, and good customer buzz around support and services. But Gartner said Enterasys’s market footprint remains small and its distribution channel is limited. Marketing has also been weak, Gartner said, as the market waits for the new combined company Enterasys/Siemens to change its name.

Extreme Networks, the third visionary in the Quadrant, drew praise for broadening its XOS-based switch line and its policy-based configuration and open architecture. But Gartner noted that Extreme is struggling to maintain revenue and it remains one of the smallest vendors in the market. Gartner also cited some support issues affecting the company’s install base.

Gartner identified two niche players in this year’s Magic Quadrant. First there is Nortel, which was downgraded from its visionary status in last year’s Quadrant. Gartner cited Nortel’s bankruptcy as an impediment to the company competing for new business. Gartner is predicting significant loss of market share and revenue for the company as it remains in bankruptcy. Gartner also said Nortel needs a new core switching platform.

The second visionary, Alcatel-Lucent, drew praise for a solid product strategy and its growing market share and revenue; however, Gartner said the company needs to invest more in R&D to keep pace with the latest innovations in data center switching and wireless LAN technology.

Force10 Networks, which was identified as a niche player last year, was dropped altogether from this year’s Magic Quadrant because it no longer meets Gartner’s revenue requirements for inclusion, whch is 1% of ports sold overall or 5% of ports sold in a specific market segment.

Gartner also noted that Juniper Networks has entered the Ethernet switch market, but it hasn’t earned enough of a revenue share to be included in this year’s Magic Quadrant. Juniper’s switches earned the company $56 million in 2008.

So there you have it, for what it’s worth. Cisco remains on top, but the other players in the market continue to make moves. ProCurve and 3Com are on the rise. Nortel and Force10 are in decline. Everyone else is looking to take a step forward.