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.