As mentioned in our newsroom, Wi-Fi Planet reports Microsoft — in all its 800 pound gorilla gloriousness — took a bold stance on one of the more pressing issues in networking today:

To Be, Or Not To Be (All WiFi)

The bold stance at this time, of course, is to truly “cut the cord,” with Bill Gates & Co. having decided that the recent advances in RF distribution (802.11n, anyone?) and the now-80 gigabit capacity of the Aruba 6000 controllers were enough to move forward with a concept that to many is still just an idea being kicked around the heads of their IT department.

As you could probably guess, the WLAN industry is excited to see anyone cut the cord, but we get especially overjoyed to see a company like Microsoft make such an announcement. It is, truly, just a matter of time before others feel this same level of confidence, making the transition to a solution that has long been touted as a productivity enhancing, operational cost reducing, world hunger curing euphoria of a network experience.

All over-dramatization aside, the ROI results are tangible, only becoming increasingly convincing in this “next generation” of WiFi networks.

So, what’s the catch?

Well, as Microsoft can attest, it’s now management:

“The weak link in the WLAN offerings from a lot of vendors is the ability to manage these huge enterprise-wide WLAN deployments centrally, so that you have a centralized view and can drill down from that centralized view to provide information on the number of clients that you have, outages that are affecting your network in multiple client areas, the RF health of the system—all of those things still are lagging behind the Wi-Fi technology,” [Victoria Poncini of Microsoft] says. “That’s an area that, if vendors could provide the most improvement, it would really help towards providing an all-wireless office—and that’s something that we want to do with 802.11n.”

While we have a job securely lined up for Victoria after her ringing endorsement of the necessity for enterprise-grade WLAN management, the reality is she is just being frank about the issues that have arisen as organizations try to make this transition.

And if you have been around us long enough, you know the message of scaling manageability is one we’ve been preaching from our very first release of the AirWave Management Platform (AMP).

Apparently Victoria has heard our sermons:

“The combination of the AirWave platform with [Aruba’s] current offering, and what they’re trying to do to integrate the two of them together, is a really good start towards providing what we would like to see in network management,” she says.

Alas, despite our incessant ranting & raving, it is still the oft-overlooked component of a corporation’s initial WLAN investment. Note my use of the word “initial,” as typically an organization will begin feeling the “hurt” some time shortly after they’ve deployed their nebulous WiFi infrastructure, only to call on AirWave like a shamed friend needing to get picked up from jail.

We’ll bail you out, buddy. But in return, we’d like you to do a case study.

As widely anticipated that Belden’s Trapeze Networks acquisition was to those of us in and around the industry, the official announcement on Friday still produced a flurry of chatter across the wire.

Unfortunately for the parties involved, it wasn’t altogether positive or reassuring:

• Networkworld.com: “…Some might consider it a step toward vendor lock-in. And it’s not yet clear how the acquisition will affect Trapeze’s recently renewed OEM arrangement with Nortel and Belden’s with single-channel WLAN startup Extricom. Remember when Airespace was acquired by Cisco? It was a nightmarish move for Nortel and other Airespace OEMs and their customers to find alternative solutions.”
• Techworld.com: “There’s also a perception that Trapeze has been struggling - at least in terms of reaching customers. “People have been picking other suppliers largely because Trapeze does not have the market access model that someone like Cisco would have,” said the Belden executive.”
• Unstrung.com: “Between 2002 and 2004, Trapeze, along with Airespace and Aruba Wireless Networks , emerged as one of the leading startups set on managing enterprise WiFi. Since then, however, Cisco Systems Inc. bought Airespace and cemented its 60 percent-plus lead in the corporate WiFi market. Aruba and Motorola Inc. have been duking it out for the second-place spot, and other startups such as Meru Networks Inc. have been challenging for Trapeze’s share of the market.”
• Network Computing Blog: “It’s one thing to sell cables and connectors, it’s quite another to sell an enterprise networking solution with moving parts and software bits. Do enterprises typically consider buying their networking equipment from the same guys who sell them 1,000-foot spools of cable?”

While this looks to be a solid move for Belden moving forward, I have to wonder what the impact is for those who have already done business with Trapeze.

As evidenced, questions abound regarding the future of Trapeze, not only for their own customers & VARs, but for their OEM partners‘ (3Com, Nortel, D-Link, Enterasys) customers & VARs as well. What happens to their WLAN roadmap? Will they continue to receive the same support? Will Trapeze end of life (EOL) their pre-existing hardware? Will they cut their OEM relationships altogether?

These are all valid questions, and as we learned from the Airespace acquisition a few years past, it can and does get as bad as companies being stuck with gear that nobody will support.

It is with that in mind that we here at AirWave have offered everyone affected an “Investment Protection Program,” which extends discounted pricing on the AirWave Wireless Management Suite (AWMS) 6. AWMS lends folks the flexibility of a vendor-neutral management console for their legacy Trapeze/Nortel/3Com/D-Link/Enterasys gear, as well as whichever vendor(s) they eventually migrate to.

This is not the first, nor will it be the last, acquisition of its kind. And for those wary of your current hardware provider’s fate… don’t worry.

We’ll be there for you, too.