In the wake of wireless LAN start-up Airespace's acquisition by Cisco, announced in January, competitive start-ups Aruba Wireless Networks and Trapeze Networks haven't let much grass grow under their feet.

In addition to the development partnerships with access point vendors reported here last week, the start-ups have now also announced that they'll be taking over key OEM and development deals that Airespace had in place with Cisco enterprise networking rivals Nortel and Alcatel. Trapeze has hooked up with Nortel and Aruba with Alcatel, each in OEM, cross-licensing and co-development agreements.

The big guys will eventually embed the start-ups' wireless technologies into their LAN switches and routers, for example, while the startups plan to leverage the long reach of the established companies' channels to establish strong customer bases.

The relationships are similar to one Trapeze announced last summer with 3Com, which is also modifying its legacy base of intelligent APs to be manageable by Trapeze software - a step that should be complete "very shortly," according to Brent Nixon, 3Com's director of product management for wireless systems.

Meantime, Nortel will begin reselling Trapeze gear as the newly announced Nortel WLAN 2300 Series around midyear. This time around, Nortel built covenants into its OEM deal such that Trapeze would continue to support Nortel customers if it were to go public, get acquired, or something else of that nature should happen, said Trapeze president and CEO Jim Vogt.
 
The pending acquisition of Airespace by WLAN market leader Cisco - which has traditionally offered fully intelligent, standalone APs - more or less validated the centralized, switch-based approach to WLANs. The thin-AP/switch architecture was initiated by industry veteran Symbol Technologies and was further innovated upon by Airespace, Aruba, Trapeze and several other startups.

"Airespace punched a big hole in the market [by getting acquired], and we're filling it," said Vogt. "They left the dance early. We're going to make $450 million [the amount Cisco paid for Airespace] look small," he vowed.

Vogt added that he expects several more Trapeze partnerships of varying natures to become public during the next 90 days.

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