Not quite a year after introducing its wireless LAN switch, Legra Systems apparently has gone out of business.

The company's Web site is offline, and its Burlington, Mass., phone number now has voice message that says the caller has reached the Burlington office of NextHop Techologies, a Mountain View, Calif., software vendor that specializes in Layer 3 IP routing software.

If true, Legra would be the first failure amid a flock of startups that emerged in the past two years, all offering a central switch for managing and securing stripped down WLAN access points. Among the remaining vendors are Airespace, Aruba, Chantry, and Trapeze, although wireless controller vendors such as Bluesocket, Vernier and others have been adopting an array of switching features.

The startups are generally credited with leading the WLAN market into a new centralized architecture more suitable for large-scale enterprise deployments than the traditional approach of wiring intelligent access points into Ethernet switches in wiring closets.
Wireless industry news site Unstrung.com first reported Legra's shutdown earlier today.

NextHop executives were traveling and unavailable for comment, according to a PR spokeswoman, who would neither confirm nor deny whether NextHop had acquired any of Legra's assets.