Motorola on the Move

Two big OEM deals within one week - how did they do it?

Motorola's Enterprise Mobility Solutions business unit, whom I noted recently for completing an interesting OEM deal with Brocade (which, as you will remember, now includes Foundry Networks), has done it again, this time with a similar deal with Extreme Networks. That's pretty amazing - the two OEMs in this case are big firms and are competitors. Forget the Peace Prize controversy - is there a Nobel Prize in sales?

I think, all kidding aside, though, that what's going on here is indicative of the beginning of an important trend in wireless LANs: it's no longer necessary or even important, in fact, to own the wireless technology itself. With the completion of .11n, while not a commodity by any means, the wireless part of the solution achieves a certain maturity and the focus of WLAN technology shifts to other equally-important elements in a particular implementation, most notably system architecture (from which performance really derives, even though such is essentially transparent to users) and, even more importantly, to management functionality, which is essentially software and thus easily customizable to meet particular technical and marketing objectives. It's a sure bet, then, that Motorola, Brocade, and Extreme, while all using the same underlying technology, will ship products that look very different from one another and place respective emphasis on the markets and applications most important to each firm. So a move that might have generated significant friction is instead of little consequence to Brocade and likely any other possible OEMs that Motorola may or may not have in mind (and I know at present of none, BTW, but, given this development, it's probably best from an analytical perspective to leave that door open!).

There's also another unified networking message here, meaning that blended wired/wireless networks have also taken another step forward. This, too, is a key trend, and one that all players in the WLAN space need to be carefully considering, IMHO, going forward. And, finally, convergence was also mentioned in both the Brocade and Extreme releases. Sure, .11n is done, but the wireless patent office is likely to remain pretty busy for some time to come.

• Wireless / Mobile
• Brocade
• convergence
• Extreme Networks
• Motorola
• unified networking
• wi-fi
• wireless LANs
• WLANs