Extricom

Extricom: We’ll live free or die hard

We haven’t touched on Juniper’s WLAN acquisition aspirations in a while, so I’m happy to throw out another tidbit: Extricom, publicly at least, loves the single life as much as Aruba.

“I’ve made my opinions vocal before,” Mike Doheny, director of corporate marketing for Extricom. “I think in general, in this macroeconomic climate that we’re in, no company wants to sell itself voluntarily. Valuations would be dismal. Anyone whose selling out now through these acquisitions is not doing it because they want to do it, they’re doing it because they have to do it.”

Fighting words from Mike, but he said he sees this time as an opportunity to grab some marketshare.

“Even as we watch the macro-economic news get harder and harder, we had quarter over quarter growth,” he said, adding that the wireless LAN’s potential to seriously cut op-ex could make the technology counter-cyclical.

“We’ll worry about ourselves,” he told me. “And we’re not going to worry about consolidation.”

Background Reading:

• Wireless LAN acquisition by Juniper might make sense in down economy
• Juniper on the WLAN acquisition prowl?
• ElimiDate: Aruba, Meru come clean about acquisition dream dates
• A Shot at Love with Juniper Networks?

A Shot at Love with Juniper Networks?

When it comes to enterprise Wi-Fi, the industry’s got enough drama for an MTV reality series, with constant bickering over what WLAN architecture’s better, or which .11n product truly supports PoE, or which skeezy AP went home with a stranger last night.

All this is to say it’s not surprising there’s a lot of back and forth about a rumored Juniper acquisition of Aruba or Meru. Mergermarket.com reported that two analysts and another source think a Juniper purchase is looming, and these two are the likely targets.

Chris Silva, Forrester analyst, had his own theory: Juniper, indeed, was ready to bite, but Aruba is too expensive and Meru might be too weird:

So, there it is, I’m drawing a line in the sand that the acquisition target is not Aruba, perhaps Meru and potentially another, even smaller vendor. Nothing short of hedging on my part, I suppose, but I will say this: WLAN is a logical line extension for Juniper, and I’m not ruling out - but rather expecting - at least one more acuqisition before the year is out.

We followed up with Chris to name names, and he kindly got back to us.

“It’s a tough call,” he e-mailed. “Bluesocket seems to be one of the last men standing. Aerohive is too small and too new and Extricom, while likely a cheaper buy than Meru, is the same technology without the customer list.”

Aruba, however, doesn’t seem to be sitting at home waiting for Juniper’s phone call. They’ve teamed up with Foundry to form a “co-marketing relationship between the companies’ wired and wireless LAN products for Federal customers.” A small step for LAN, to be sure, but maybe signaling a future giant leap (acquisition?) for LAN-kind?

Straight from Aruba’s announcement of the “relationship”:

“This collaboration affords Aruba and Foundry the opportunity to target a sizable Federal market in need of new and replacement secure networking infrastructure,” said Keerti Melkote, Aruba’s co-founder and chief technology officer. “We have steadily enhanced our suite of wired products, including wired remote networking technology, to complement our industry-leading wireless LANs. As Foundry’s first wireless LAN vendor to be designated an Ironpowered Technology Partner, we’re now in a unique position to co-market our products, together with Foundry switches and routers, across a broad range of Federal applications.”

Sounds awfully cuddly to me.

‘Fourth Generation’?! Cisco responds to Wi-Fi whippersnappers

A few hours after posting my story on Extricom’s and Meru’s approaches to wireless networking, I got an e-mail from Cisco expressing their disappointment in not getting to tell their “side of the story” on fourth generation wireless. Setting aside the fact that I e-mailed them for comment the morning before, I was curious about their take. Michael King, a research director with Gartner, had speculated that Extricom or Meru might be ripe for a Cisco acquisition within the next several years.

That possibility sounded pretty remote when I spoke with Cisco this afternoon. Ben Gibson, senior director of mobility solutions marketing for Cisco, said the company views channel layering/blanketing solutions (like Meru and Extricom use) as different, but not necessarily in a good way. He said these implementations, while they may or may not explicitly break standards, break the standards spirit and this has been shown, he said, to cause problems for other nearby networks. “I think it also introduces a lot of questions about such an approach to really scale properly,” he said. Cisco has been touting their Duke case study as the world’s largest .11n network, so it would seem they have scale down pretty well.

Cisco also wasn’t too happy with the designation of “fourth generation.” Gibson said most of the problems these systems solve have already been solved better by traditional players (namely Cisco). Sub-50 ms hand offs. Seamless VoIP calling. Ubiquitous, consistent wireless access no matter where you are or or how the wind is blowing. All with what they tout as better, more complete security.

“The next generation to me is, how do you turn it from a wireless network to a true mobility application network?” Gibson said. He said it was Cisco, not Meru/Extricom, who was paving the way for this fourth generation with integrated device chips that can boost wireless performance, with VoIP handsets, with location-aware applications.

So no love lost between Cisco and the new(er) kids on the block, but then again both Extricom and Meru didn’t particularly seem to enjoy being lumped together when I talked to them. It’s a pretty cut-throat industry, not the least because it appears primed to get much bigger over the next few years as enterprises start to look at the real possibility of going almost 100% wireless, meaning huge opportunities for the winners.

Enjoy watching the back and forth? Cisco’s mobility blog has posts that explain why they’re better than Aruba and, more amusingly, draw networking lessons from pre-marital classes. I couldn’t find blogs for any of the other wireless vendors.

As for me, I honestly couldn’t say who has the best approach, but feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments or, if you’ve had first-hand experience with some of the platforms, e-mail me at  mmorisy at techtarget.com. Who knows, maybe there will even be a CCNA Video Mentor in it for you if you’re interviewed.