Wireless networking

The future of enterprise networking is no more networks

At Burton Group’s Catalyst Conference, I chatted briefly with speaker Matt Lavallee about how the conference was going, and he asked me this question: “Have there been any surprises for you?”

In short, my answer was “yes.” But in long, if the title of this blog post is any indication, I was quite taken aback by what I heard from Burton Group senior analyst David Passmore in his first session on the “wireless everything” era.

When I spoke to Passmore last week in an interview on computer networking trends for 2009, I hadn’t quite realized that his future of networks meant the extinction of them.

In the first point of our interview Passmore stated, “Wireless is one [networking trend of ‘09] because there’s an increased use of mobile phones for both data as well as for voice. We’re also seeing enterprises using wireless LANs (WLANs) often as a substitute for wired Ethernet.” From these trends, he suggested that we would some day no longer need networks.

Consider this tongue-in-cheek dialogue between Passmore’s explanation of this at Catalyst and the audience’s reaction:

Passmore: For longer-term networking trends, we may actually see the disappearance of enterprise networks.

Audience: Blank, saucer-eyed staring

Passmore: You’re probably thinking, “How can that be?”

Audience: Those not nodding vehemently to his question are doing so internally, thinking “Yes, how can that be?”

Passmore: Well, we’re already seeing a shift from wired Ethernet access for the use of wireless LANs.

Audience: OK, but that’s still a network — hence the “n” in wireless “LAN”…

All kidding aside — what he meant was that Ethernet is very surely being replaced with wireless, which will then be replaced by 4G mobile cellular data. Does this seem probable? I think he has a valid point, but how soon will a transition like this occur? Will the network engineer have to move into wireless telecommunications in his lifetime? Who’s to say?

Are wireless LANs reliable and secure enough for the healthcare industry?

Persistent, reliable and secure wireless LANs (WLANs) remain the top concern for networking professionals across all verticals. However, John Gaede, Director of Information Systems at El Centro Regional Medical Center (ECRMC), has presented a compelling case to use it in the health care industry – safely and reliably. In this Q&A video below, I speak to Gaede at Burton Group’s Catalyst conference in San Diego to address these concerns and gain insight into how next generation WLANs could contribute to healthcare reform in the United States.

Dell’Oro will adjust reporting after WLAN market share squabble

Earlier this month I wrote a story about how Aruba and Meru were both claiming second place in the 802.11n enterprise wireless LAN market based on the same numbers from Dell’Oro Group. There were a variety of claims made by the vendors over the issue, but the central discrepancy appeared to be how OEM sales were counted towards market share. Aruba has a significant OEM channel through Alcatel-Lucent. Dell’Oro reports market share based on brand, so Aruba wasn’t getting credit for the sales Alcatel made.

Today Dell’Oro sent a letter to Aruba, which I peeked at today. In it, Tam Dell’Oro wrote that her firm will “add a section to our Enterprise WLAN Vendor Tables with our 2Q09 report which reflects the data by manufacturer. That is, those shipments that are produced by Aruba, regardless of which distribution channel it flows through, will be reflected as Aruba.”

Based on that, Aruba’s market share in 802.11n access points appears to be significantly higher than Meru. Aruba moved 15,000 802.11n APs in the first quarter of this year (both Aruba and Alcatel-Lucent branded products)  versus Meru’s 10,000.

It’s not clear to me at this time wheter Dell’Oro will start reporting OEM sales data in this way for other markets beyond wireless LAN.

This week in WLAN adoption: John Marshall Law buys Aerohive, Virginia Union Univ. buys Aruba

In a new semi-regular feature on The Network Hub, I’m going to provide a quick run-down of newly announced wireless LAN projects. I get a lot of press releases from WLAN vendors about customer wins. I don’t get to write about all of them, but I can at least offer you a quick summary of the latest decisions your peers have made.

First up is John Marshall Law School, which is deploying an 802.11n wireless LAN network from Aerohive Networks on its Chicago campus. The school is replacing a legacy WLAN from Airspace (acquired by Cisco in 2005).  The old system was presenting interference and attenuation problems within the school’s century-old buildings. Centralized management was also an issue. The school chose Aerohive from a short list that also included Aruba, Meru and Xirrus.  The school chose Aerohive for its ease of deployment, controllerless architecture and wireless mesh capabilities, according to the case study.

Also this week, Aruba Networks announced that Virginia Union University has chosen their 802.1n wireless LAN to retrofit the wireless network on its 84-acre campus in Richmond (Click on this link for more information on Aruba’s specific solutions for the education market). The school had a network of independent, “Fat AP” access points that lacked centralized management capabilities and performance. Robert Gray, the schools IT director, said he chose Aruba’s AP-125 access points for their coverage and range. He is also using some of Aruba’s advanced management technologies, such as Adaptive Radio Management, Aruba’s policy-enforcement firewall and the AirWave Wireless Management Suite.

Meru and Aruba both lay claim to second position in 802.11n WLAN market

Would the real second fiddle please stand up and take a bow?

This week both Meru Networks and Aruba Networks have issued press releases claiming that they hold the second biggest share of the 802.11n wireless LAN market. Not only that - both vendors are citing the same research: Dell’Oro Group’s “First Quarter 2009 Wireless LAN Report.”

Yesterday, Meru announced that it had earned 12% of total vendor revenues for 802.11n products, ahead of Aruba (the long-standing second-place WLAN vendor).

Today Aruba sent out its own press release refuting Meru’s claim. Aruba claims a 15.5% market share. In his email, Aruba Head of Strategic Marketing Michael R. Tennefoss wrote: “Yesterday Meru issued a press release claiming that it had displaced Aruba from the #2 position, a statement not born out by the facts as Meru neglected to include Aruba’s substantial OEM sales.”

I’ve left a message with Dell’Oro’s president, Tam Dell’Oro for some clarification on this. I’ll update later with her response.

Trapeze opens new sales channel for wireless LAN

Belden, which bought wireless LAN vendor Trapeze Networks last year, is trying to open up a new sales channel for wireless infrastructure. The company announced exclusive distribution agreements for Trapeze WLAN products with Graybar and Anixter International, two of the leading distributors of network cabling in the world.

When Belden purchased Trapeze some experts were left scratching their heads about the deal. Belden is a leading manufacturer of cabling and other signal transmission technology. Many analysts have been predicting consolidation in the WLAN market, but they were expecting switch vendors like Juniper and Foundry to do the buying as networking vendors looked to build out a unified wired and wireless product strategy. HP ProCurve’s acquisition of Colubris seemed to fit in with this trend. Just look at a company like Cisco, which can sell its switches and WLAN access points to the same people. It makes sense from a marketing perspective.

But Belden is trying something completely different with Trapeze, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out. Graybar and Anixtar already sell Belden cables, and now Belden is trying to expand those relationships through Trapeze.

Belden is hoping that when companies are designing the basic infrastructure of a new building, such as network cabling and power, they will also design wireless infrastructure at that stage as well. If this happens, it would make sense for companies to buy their cabling and wireless technology from the same distributor as they prepare to build a new building.

Aerohive comes up with a new approach to WLAN airtime fairness

When I have conversations with network managers about whether they plan to upgrade to 802.11n wireless LAN technology, many say they’re in no hurry. They’re still getting plenty out of their existing 802.11a/b/g infrastructure, they say. And besides, all the legacy clients in their organization would just slow down the 802.11n clients, preventing users from enjoying the benefits of a faster wireless network. Access points are usually shared by multiple clients and clients can only transmit to an access point one at a time. This often means that faster 802.11n clients are stuck in a queue behind slower legacy clients that take much longer to transmit the same amount of data.

Several WLAN vendors, such as Meru Networks and Aruba Networks,  have developed technologies to solve this problem.  For instance, Aruba’s Adaptive Radio Management software can shift WLAN clients to different radio frequencies and can analyze the 802.11x protocol used by the client. If the client is a faster 802.11n device, the software gives it priority

Aerohive Networks, a start-up known for its controllerless WLAN architecture, has found a new way to tackle this problem. In the latest version of its operating system, HiveOS 3.2, Aerohive has introduced a new feature called Dynamic Airtime Scheduling.  Rather than making airtime decisions based on protocol, Aerohive actually examines the airtime of the client’s packets to determine how fast it is. This is relevant because the farther a client is from an access point, the slower its transmission. So an 802.11n client which is much farther away from an access point than 802.11g client is could actually be slower. The Aerohive AP will give priority to the .11g client since its signal is closer and thus faster. With this technology, Aerohive can also give priority to a fast 802.11n client over a slower 802.11n client.

Dynamic Airtime Scheduling also applies policy to the clients as well. For instance, a company can give airtime priority to employee devices over guest devices,

Niall Pariag, senior network administrator at Riverside Health Care Systems Inc., a network of hospitals and clinics based in Yonkers, N.Y., is in the process of replacing legacy Cisco infrastructure in his facilities with Aerohive 802.11n access points. He said Dynamic Airtime Scheduling solves a problem he’s been worried about ever since he decided to upgrade to 801.11n.

“It solves the only quirk we had with the wireless network, that slow clients basically slow down fast clients,” he said. “That’s a concern we kept ignoring, because we knew we were going to cross that bridge when we got to it. We don’t have that many clients connecting now, so it wasn’t a concern.”

Pariag said that in the future his company will be adding more and more clients to the wireless network, and airtime scheduling will become critical to him.

Aruba courts Nortel customers with multivendor WLAN management suite

Aruba Networks has joined the growing ring of vultures circling above Nortel Networks’ Toronto headquarters, where executives are busily trying to restructure Nortel while under the cover of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Aruba announced an “investment protection” program for customers of Nortel wireless LAN (WLAN) technology. The vendor is offering Nortel customers a discount on Aruba’s AirWave Wireless Management Suite, a WLAN management technology that can work in multi-vendor environments.

Nervous Nortel customers, who are worried that Nortel might not be around a year or two from now to support their wireless infrastructure, might find this offer from Aruba appealing. It gives them a a way of managing legacy Nortel infrastructure.

And Aruba no doubt sees this as a potential foot in the door with Nortel customers who will likely give new WLAN vendors a good luck when it comes time to refresh or expand their infrastructure. Today, Aruba can sell them AirWave. Next year, Aruba will have a better chance of selling them access points. Now if only Aruba had a wired networking division as well, they could attack Nortel on multiple fronts.

Trapeze not flying high over Magic Quadrant

Every year Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for wireless LAN infrastructure has some winners and some losers. One or two vendors will emerge from the crowded quadrant of niche players to become a market leader, a visionary or a challenger. And one or two other vendors will slip back into the crowd of niche players. This year, one of the vendors who came out on the losing end is accusing Gartner of having, at the very least, an appearance of a conflict of interest.

Brian Johnson, director of public relations for Trapeze Networks, called me last week and implied that Meru Networks is receiving favorable coverage from Gartner over Trapeze. Gartner placed Meru in the visionary quadrant for the second year in a row, while Trapeze slipped from visionary status to niche player.

Johnson revealed to me that Tim Zimmerman, one of the Gartner analysts who wrote this year’s Magic Quadrant, is a former employee of Meru Networks. I checked around and indeed Zimmerman was director of industry marketing for Meru Networks from Octbor 2007 to January 2008. Johnson also pointed out that Gartner’s former research director for wireless LAN technology, Rachna Ahlawat, is currently the vice president of strategic marketing for Meru.

Johnson explained that Trapeze has had a good year and is a superior company to Meru. He said it “stretches the imagination” that Meru could be ranked higher than his comapny.

“We have a higher market share than Meru,” Johnson said. “We have more OEM relationships. And we are a public company with a large bankroll behind us while Meru is a private company that is rapidly burning through its cash… In terms of ability to execute, I think that Trapeze has a higher ability to execute than Meru can.”

Johnson also told me that Trapeze brought eight products to market this year and three of them won awards (I looked through a list of press releases on Trapeze’s website and didn’t see that many product releases, but perhaps I missed a few). He also pointed out that Trapeze won the largest wireless LAN deployment in the world this year when it closed a deal with the University of Minnesota.

Johnson was reacting to a story about the Magic Quadrant which I wrote last week. When I talked to Mike King, Zimmerman’s coauthor, for that story, he told me that Trapeze’s downgrade was reflective of its relative silence on the market since it was acquired by Belden over the summer. He suggested that things have slowed down at Trapeze while Belden goes through the process of absorbing it. And he predicted that Trapeze could lose some key OEM partners when its deals with those expire in a few months. All this can be fairly typical for mergers and acquisitions. Motorola experienced a similar decline on the Magic Quadrant when it bought Symbol Technologies, but it has since rebounded and is now identified as a market leader by Gartner.

Now any industry veteran will tell you that analysts take jobs with vendors all the time and research firms like Gartner commonly hire analysts from the vendors they cover. Ahlawat left Gartner for Meru in June of 2007 so it’s been well over a year since she’s had any relationship with the firm. However, Zimmerman left Meru less than a year ago, so it was worth my talking to Gartner about this issue.

First I talked to Andrew Spender, Gartner’s vice president of corporate communications. He said Gartner employs a variety of measures to ensure that its analysts are independent and objective.

“First we have our principals of ethical conduct and our code of conduct which all our analysts sign up to as soon as they join the company,” he said. “They have very intensive training in what that code of conduct means and how they need to adhere to it. It’s very specific in terms of accountability.”

Spender also said that no piece of Gartner research is ever the work of one single analyst.

“When you buy a piece of research or become a Gartner client, you obtain the research from Gartner, not from an individual analyst. Each piece of research is peer reviewed. Our community of 650 analysts have a formal obligation to do peer reviews of other analysts’ research to ensure that any kinds of inconsistencies, any errors of data collection or any errors of conclusions are challenged and corrected before the research sees the light of day.”

I also spoke to Larry Perlstein, Gartner’s ombudsman (Gartner is the only analyst firm I know of that employees ombudsmen), about this matter. He has already conducted an investigation of Trapeze’s complaint.

“Basically I didn’t find anything that made me concerned that there was any real fact in Trapeze’s issues. The analyst that they expressed a special worry about, who was formerly at Meru, was there for only a very short period of time, about three months. It wasn’t clear that anything in that involvement was going to dramatically influence this particular piece of research. Most of our analysts come from vendors. As part of our hiring process we try to ensure that people have the capacity and potential to be balanced and objective.”

On the same day that I spoke to Johnson at Trapeze about this issue, I happened to chat with David Callisch, vice president of marketing at Ruckus Networks. Ruckus is another niche player in this year’s Quadrant, ranked a little lower than Trapeze.

“Tim Zimmerman and Mike King are both very stand up guys,” Callisch said. “I thought we had a pretty mediocre spot on the Quadrant, but to be quite objective, who are we to say? Vendors always think they deserve a better spot… But Tim and Mike did a lot of due diligence. I think they did a good job even if we got a lousy spot.”

He said that Gartner placed Meru high probably because the firm likes the innovative single channel approach Meru takes with its access points, which solves voice roaming very well. He said he has doubts about whether this approach can scale as well as more mainstream wireless LAN technologies, but he doesn’t fault Gartner for giving Meru high marks for their technology.

Callisch went on to call out Trapeze for its acquisition by Belden. He said Trapeze has a very good product line, but it had marketed its technology poorly, driving down the value of the company.

“They ended up being sold to Belden for pennies on the dollar and that hurt the valuation of other [wireless LAN] companies” he said.

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?