Last week's announcement that HP intends to acquire wireless LAN company Colubris Networks gives HP a chance to become a formidable player in the enterprise WLAN market. HP has long offered its own ProCurve WLAN products integrated with its popular ProCurve Ethernet switches - a conceptually a nice idea but also a somewhat limiting one.

Because it had no separate WLAN overlay solution, HP could really only market its ProCurve WLAN products to its existing ProCurve switch customers. That would be fine, if HP’s WLAN satisfied the needs of all ProCurve switch shops. One size rarely fits all, however. Yet there has been no standalone system alternative to sell to companies that might have found the ProCurve WLAN to their liking even if they had a different Ethernet switch vendor.

Meanwhile, HP has yet to enter the sizzling 802.11n market, still touting 802.11a as its high-speed alternative, notes Stan Schatt, wireless VP and research director at ABI Research. “ProCurve has been making enormous strides on the wireline side but has barely treaded water on the wireless side,” he says.

With Colubris, however, HP gains an 11n portfolio that it can sell to both ProCurve and non-ProCurve shops either as a standalone overlay system or with Colubris controller functions integrated into the ProCurve Ethernet switch. The integrated option will eventually mean unified management, too.

Colubris VP of marketing Tom Racca, in fact, says that Colubris controller code is already working on HP ProCurve Ethernet switch blades, a capability he says should be commercially available to customers by the end of the year. In terms of management, next-generation unified ProCurve shops will, in the near term, at least be able to “manage policy across both wireless and wired networks, without a doubt,” he adds.

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.