Over the past two to four years, venture capital investors have funded dozens of startups that aimed to provide large organizations with the infrastructure they need to transform their wired LANs into wireless LANs.
As a result, not only are there a multitude of companies fighting for market share but also at least three different architectural approaches vying for supremacy.
And though the architectural debate shows no signs of resolving itself, it does appear that the market is maturing. Big players are jumping into the fray through OEM relationships and products of their own, and the much-anticipated market consolidation seems to be getting under way.
Waltham is home to three enterprise WLAN startups, and each has taken a different architectural approach.
Colubris Networks sells a so-called “fat AP,” an architecture that places most of the intelligence in the access point itself, though the company also sells a software appliance for centralized management of the network. The advantage to this approach, said Colubris’ chief executive Barry Fougere, is that the APs easily plug into the company’s existing wired network.
“We want to extend the network that’s already there,” Fougere said.
The company claims more than 1,000 enterprise customers, including The Boeing Co., which is installing wi-fi networks inside its passenger planes, and Minute Maid Park in Houston, which hosted the Major League Baseball All-Star Game this year.
Legra Systems, also in Waltham, took a switched approach. In this architecture the APs are relatively “dumb,” with intelligence centrally located in a WLAN switch.
Legra, however, appears to have run into difficulties. Despite repeated phone calls requesting comment, a Legra representative could not be reached.
Though the company’s website still listed David Tolwinski as its CEO as of last week, in fact Tolwinski left the company more than a month ago, according to published reports that were confirmed by a receptionist answering the phones at Legra.
The company eliminated 15 to 25 positions, according to published reports and a source within the company. Legra is shifting gears. Industry sources say Legra is moving toward licensing its intellectual property, perhaps as a chipset product. Neither Legra nor its venture capital backers would comment.
Nevertheless, the switched approach shows no sign of disappearing. Marlborough-based 3Com Inc., for instance, last month announced an OEM deal with Trapeze Networks, a California-based startup that uses a switched architecture.
The advantage in a switched environment is manageability, say proponents.
“The real key here about the standalone access point is that as the number of APs grow, the operating expenses begin to dwarf the capital expenses,” said Dan Simone, vice president of product management and cofounder of Trapeze Networks.
3Com sells and will continue to sell a line of fat APs but believes that most of the market is moving to a centralized approach.
Finally, Chantry Networks, the third Waltham WLAN company, is advocating a routed approach. The advantage to using a WLAN router, said Chantry’s vice president of marketing Tom Racca, is that users can maintain an IP address between APs as they roam and that one can easily manage the WLAN from a central point.
As long as the two offices are connected to the same Intranet, a manager in Boise, Idaho, could add to her network access points that are managed by a WLAN router in Boston.
The company’s initial customers include the six-acre campus of the Toronto Convention Center and Cornell University, whose network spans 400 buildings. Chantry expects to make further customer announcements soon, Racca said.
“We’ve been doing pretty well with customer traction,” Racca said. “We got a little slower out of the gate, but we were the first to build an IP-routed solution, and it’s more difficult to build a layer 3 approach.”
There doesn’t necessarily have to be a single architecture that wins out, said Craig Mathias, principal at Farpoint Group, a wireless consulting firm in Ashland.
“I believe that a centralized architecture will eventually win, but there are some deployments where you need a fat AP,” Mathias said.
They’re particularly appropriate for public hotspots, Mathias said. But for the large enterprise, he believes, some sort of centralized approach will likely emerge as dominant.
The race among startups, however, is by no means over. Cisco Systems, as in any enterprise infrastructure arena, is a formidable competitor. And though it entered the market with a fat AP, it has since released a routed solution with the Cisco Catalyst 6500 WLSM.
Likewise, other infrastructure vendors — 3Com, Nortel Networks, Alcatel and NEC — have all signed WLAN original equipment manufacturer agreements, and, historically, waves of OEM agreements have usually presaged a wave of acquisitions.
Mathias sees two California companies with a switch-based WLAN architecture — Aruba and Airespace — as having the lead for the moment.
“But I’d caution that it’s still early,” Mathias said. “Things could change dramatically in the lightning round.”
