WLAN switch execs come to dinner

LAS VEGAS - At last year's Network World dinner with top executives from some of the leading wireless LAN switch start-ups, the talk focused on access points, chipsets and radio frequency beams. This year, the conversation centered on partnerships, the channel, horizontal markets and, of course, an 800-pound gorilla called Cisco.

Yes, the WLAN switch market has grown up over the past year. From the vendors' perspective, technology concerns, such as standards and security, have been largely addressed. Products are shipping. Now the task is building a sales infrastructure that can win business in this highly competitive market.

Toward that end, two of the vendors from last year's NetWorld+Interop dinner - Aruba Wireless Networks and Trapeze Networks - recently brought on sales-savvy industry veterans as CEOs. The new faces in our private dining room at Canaletto's in the Venetian Hotel were Aruba's Don LeBeau (formerly of Data General, IBM and Cisco) and Trapeze's Jim Vogt (formerly of Bay Networks, Nortel and Ingrian).

Airespace CEO Brett Galloway returned for a second year, as did AirFlow Networks CEO Bob Machlin. But AirFlow recently dropped out of the WLAN switch derby and is now a component vendor, selling its VoIP-centric "switch on a chip" technology to other systems vendors. "In the last year a lot of things were sorted out," Machlin said. "One of the things we discovered was that our value-add was really embedded in core technology."

In a second-floor room overlooking a Vegas version of Venice's St. Mark's Square, the vendors were upbeat about the way the market is responding to their products and passionate about the idea that WLANs will revolutionize corporate networks. And despite the fact that they compete for customers, they never sniped at each other - they saved that for Cisco.

After ordering wine and chatting for a bit, we closed the windows to muffle the singing of the gondoliers and got down to business. Here are highlights of the wide-ranging conversation.

None of the privately held companies would talk about revenue numbers, but they all maintained that the market has grown significantly. "A lot of people were evaluating technology last year, and this year they're actually buying," Vogt said. "The pace is definitely picking up in terms of companies spending real money."

Galloway identified two major trends that occurred over the past year. First, customers began moving from pilot projects to enterprise-wide deployments; and second, the market moved from narrow verticals such as education, medical and retail, to a broad horizontal market.

He said the vertical markets were a good proving ground for wireless technology. The vendors identified and addressed weaknesses such as scalability and management feature. Today, technology is less of a focus for these CEOs.

LeBeau said his top priorities are building "a distribution model that is an extension of our service and support model" and putting together a business infrastructure that can scale.

Vogt said partnerships are at the top of his list.

Speculation has been rampant that Cisco and other wired switch vendors would gobble up some of these start-ups. They all refused to bite, however, when asked if Cisco had approached them. They did point out that the universe of possible suitors goes far beyond the usual suspects.

"There's a tremendous opportunity for partnerships and not just with data and voice infrastructure vendors," Vogt said. "The endpoint is personalized services, being able to deploy services to a person vs. assigning network attributes to a port. It's much more intense when you have mobility mixed into the equation, where you identify a user and assign a policy and services, and those policies and services travel with users as they traverse the network. If you view it that way, it's not about wireless, it's about mobility, and there are huge opportunities on multiple levels in terms of partnerships."

As the dinner progressed from insalata to pasta, the conversation inevitably turned to the meat of the issue: Cisco. All of the vendors acknowledged that Cisco is the market leader, with somewhere about a 60% share. But they maintained that when it comes to wireless, Cisco just doesn't get it.