Cisco has been an amazing success in wireless (and, of course, networking overall), dominating the space in much the same way as IBM once did with computers and Microsoft once did with software. Those “once did” phrases are intended to convey an important reality – it’s rare for any company to maintain a dominant role in any industry, and also rare, in fact, even to survive as a player over a long period of time. The economy is designed to work that way – newer, more innovative firms with cost structures amenable to the times and circumstances replace big, bloated, inefficient behemoths that were themselves once small and nimble relative to their era.
But Cisco’s been leading a very crowded and very competitive wireless-LAN arena for many years now. Here’s a firm that could rest on its laurels, hire a bunch of order-takers, do awareness marketing only, and continue to do quite well for the foreseeable future, with much better margins than they currently see and consequently a far higher stock price than they have today. R&D spending and good marketing people are expensive. And yet Cisco continues to invest heavily in these, as I noted above dominating WLANs but also innovating in a bid to keep things that way.
Yet another example of this strategy surfaced today, with the announcement of a number of interesting new features for their WLAN product line, centered around the new Aironet 1140 AP, a dual-radio, dual-band Draft 2.0 802.11n drop-in replacement for earlier a/b/g APs, and running on 802.3af power (there’s no longer any doubt, I hope, that .11n on .3af is possible). Cisco is also making strides in internal radio management, along the lines of Aruba’s ARM 2.0 and Meru’s Virtualization approaches, with “M-Drive”, an umbrella term for a new set of features improving both performance and management. And Cisco is also now offering beamforming (under the name “ClientLink”), pioneered in the WLAN space by Ruckus Wireless’ BeamFlex but which I believe will be a key feature of many WLAN products over the next few years as the chip guys build this into their components. Beamforming is complementary to MIMO, and allows an AP to use two or more antennas to focus (and, indeed, steer) energy in a particular direction. This provides a little more gain even in indoor applications, and thus higher throughput, improved range, and greater reliability.
It’s also surprising that, here we are, on the order of 20 years into the WLAN revolution, and there’s still this much innovation, this much competition, and (OK, unsurprisingly) this much demand for new products. I’m still thinking this year we’ll see a falloff in demand of perhaps 5% for wide-area wireless products and services as enterprises make do with what they have now, but WLANs will, I believe, be relatively unaffected by the current economy, other than in terms of expected price reductions that may accelerate a little. I mean, with new products like these, how can one ignore the advantages they bring?
