In case you were unaware, over the past few weeks the airwaves forum hosted a viewer-satisfaction survey, enticing our loyal community to respond by dangling a $50 amazon.com gift card in front of them. With their impending frivolous shopping spree in their sights, folks chimed in on various aspects of the forum.  And, much to my delight, there wasn’t all that much negative feedback.  In fact, some may even call it “positive.”  Go figure.

Here are some of the key stats:

• 50% of the respondents visit the forums two or more times a week; 17% visit multiple times a day
• Given a scale of horrible/poor/fair/good/excellent (horrible equaling 1 pt; excellent 5), not a single participant selected “horrible” or “poor” for any of the seven forum aspect rating questions
• Overall, the forum received a better-than-”good” rating (4.14)
• Six of the seven forum aspects received an average grade of “good” or better, with “Community Responsiveness” the only piece just shy of “good” (at 3.78, it looks like we all better pick it up!)
• Half of the forum survey respondents also read the blog; 33% didn’t know we had one
• 58% of our readers subscribe to our RSS feed

For the full details, click here (I encourage you to read the custom text sections; that’s where most of the gemlike feedback lies).

Oh yeah.  The contest winner.  I nearly forgot. :)

And wouldn’t you know it but our sole International respondent is the lucky recipient of the amazon.com gift card.  Ron of T-Systems Business Services GmbH leveraged his weekly visit to the airwaves forum to pound out his response.  Great job, Ron.  I hope they ship to Germany!

Thanks again to all who took the time to help make airwaves better.

And while the contest is over, feedback is always appreciated. 

As IT is being asked to do more with less — or at least with the same tools/resources/structure that they have today — WLAN technologies need to do a better job of fitting in. For most organizations, Wireless LAN started out as a pet project or a “nice to have.”

As is typical with these semi-half-baked deployments that are for “playing around with”, they become mission critical overnight and IT is asked (OK, demanded) to maintain and operate them with the same level of service as every other piece on infrastructure on the network. In most organizations this has meant that the poor network engineer who designed the initial deployment now has to figure out “Phase 2″ as well as keep the existing set-up in place and operational. This typically means moving to a controller-based design that automates much of the manual processes involved in tuning and updating wireless devices. This new architecture solved some of the short term issues around RF management and centralization of traffic.

Now comes phase 3: figuring out how to take this wireless LAN and truly fold it into the entire network operations environment and provide a scalable way to support it (aka ITIL).

The first step in this process involves organizations looking at how to tie in the WLAN with their existing event correlation and helpdesk systems. As an example, many organizations are using Remedy for trouble ticketing and EMC SMARTS for event correlation (there are obviously lots of other solutions on the market, these are just common systems that I run into in the field). Support for the WLAN needs to come in 2 directions, pro-active and re-active. Pro-active where the network itself tells you there is a problem and creates a process for resolution; re-active is where users call in and tell IT that there is something wrong.

For the pro-active model, IT can set up their WLAN infrastructure to send traps to SMARTS as well as all the other network components (switches, routers, authentication servers, etc.) AirWave can also send traps to SMARTS based on more intelligent WLAN events than you get from the WLAN devices themselves (too many users, too much bandwidth over x amount of time, too many authentication failure, rogue devices, etc). SMARTS is able to correlate all of this information and then generate tickets within Remedy for the IT organization to go out and solve. For WLAN specific issues this can include going in to the AirWave console to troubleshoot and resolve those problems.

For the re-active model, IT can generate a ticket directly within Remedy and then tie in WLAN specific information from AirWave (AirWave now integrated with Remedy). The helpdesk can post information about the condition of the WLAN on the spot with very little understanding of wireless LAN specific issues. If the issues needs to be escalated then all of the time relevant information gets passed on to the level 2/3 teams to resolve.

By tying these 3 systems together, the IT organization can leverage their existing investments, processes, and tool sets to now manage the WLAN.

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.