Motorola just announced that they are buying AirDefense, one of the leading IDS/IPS vendors in the WLAN space and arguably the company that invented the field to begin with. AirDefense has been around for a good while now, and they have a large installed base of customers across many industries and markets. And they've been working with Motorola for some time; the two products lines integrated to a good degree, and more is promised in this announcement.
But this combination is an especially powerful indicator of a very important trend in the wireless LAN space, also illustrated by Meru's announcement of their AirFirewall earlier today. And that is that customers of the end-user variety just hate to be systems integrators and (for smaller firms, especially) have a general inclination against significant systems-integration work in assembling their specific solution. Now, no single equipment supplier has everything that might be needed in any given case, but the less work that an end-user has to do to get to the solution they need, the better. And while true one-stop shopping might not be possible for some time, the more a given WLAN systems vendor can offer, also the better.
A number of the major WLAN vendors have pursued the acquisition path to robust products lines. Aruba Networks, for example, last year bought Network Chemistry, an AirDefense competitor. And we may be seeing here the beginning of a significant amount of merger and acquisition activity in the WLAN space as the big players scramble to fill out their product lines and avoid getting left behind in the race to have the most complete, integrated product offering. There is still a good number of juicy properties out there, perhaps not waiting by the phone in every case, but all nonetheless happy to talk should it ring.
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Mathias is a principal at Farpoint Group, a wireless advisory firm in Ashland, Mass.
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