WLAN vendor Chantry to be bought by Siemens

Chantry Networks has become the latest WLAN start-up to give up trying to go it alone.

Just 18 months after launching its Layer 3 WLAN switch, Chantry has agreed to be acquired by Siemens Communications, the $24 billion network equipment arm of Munich, Germany-based Siemens AG. The deal is expected to be final in early 2005. No transaction details are being revealed.

Barely two months ago, the conglomerate's funding group, Siemens Venture Capital, contributed to a $17 million Series B funding round for Chantry, and one of its partners took a seat on the start-up's board of directors.

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Chantry Networks has become the latest WLAN start-up to give up trying to go it alone.

Just 18 months after launching its Layer 3 WLAN switch, Chantry has agreed to be acquired by Siemens Communications, the $24 billion network equipment arm of Munich, Germany-based Siemens AG. The deal is expected to be final in early 2005. No transaction details are being revealed.

Barely two months ago, the conglomerate's funding group, Siemens Venture Capital, contributed to a $17 million Series B funding round for Chantry, and one of its partners took a seat on the start-up's board of directors.

Siemens will adopt the Chantry BeaconWorks product, a switch with companion thin access points, as the WLAN element of its HiPath product line, according to Tom Racca, Chantry's vice president of marketing. HiPath is aimed at enterprise customers, and currently is heavily oriented toward IP-based telecommunications, cellular, and converged voice-data nets.

Racca says he expects Chantry will become a "Siemens company," with the Chantry product line being relabeled, as Siemens as done with other acquisitions.

The two companies have been involved in WLAN trials with several big customers, Racca says. And Siemens had since early 2004 been extensively evaluating products from Chantry and other similar vendors, he says.

Chantry is the latest WLAN vendor to fold or be acquired. Legra Systems recently sold off its assets to two other companies, and earlier this year AirFlow Networks opted out of building WLAN products in favor of trying to license its software to WLAN manufacturers. So far, no deals have been announced.

In launching BeaconWorks in early 2003, Chantry described the device as a WLAN router, because it implemented a full range of Layer 3 capabilities. The device can, for example, route around failed nodes. Some rival WLAN switches worked mainly at Layer 2, with selected Layer 3 features such as quality-of-service controls.

The device was designed for centralized deployment, in the corporate data center, with a proprietary tunneling protocol that could be used by hundreds of Chantry access points to tunnel through an existing IP backbone to reach the switch.

In recent months, like its rivals, Chantry had been emphasizing the role its WLAN switch could play in wireless VoIP deployments. Routing features, along with traffic prioritization and bandwidth management, and fast handoffs between access points and switches are vital to ensuring high-quality voice calls over a WLAN infrastructure.

Chantry is based in Waltham, Mass., with product operations in Ontario, Canada.