* Amid acquisition craze, who will be next?
HP’s intent to acquire wireless LAN company Colubris is one in a series of industry-consolidation moves. So who’s next? No one, if the remaining startups have their say.
Recent years have seen significant WLAN action:
* Siemens acquired startup Chantry Networks in January 2005.Trapeze Networks in July 2008.
* Cisco acquired startup Airespace in March 2005.
* Motorola acquired Symbol in January 2007.
* Belden acquired startup
* HP announced its intent to acquire startup Colubris in August 2008.
Slideshow: Hottest tech M&A deals of 2008
Such activity always prompts speculation of similar deals to come, particularly concerning networking heavyweight Juniper Networks, which has no WLAN products of its own and is rumored to have attempted to purchase Trapeze Networks last year. Yet most of the remaining WLAN startups seem resistant to getting absorbed.
Here’s what a few had to say:
* Aerohive President and CEO David Flynn, in an e-mail statement: “The companies that are being bought today are part of the last wave of Wi-Fi innovation – the controller-based architecture. Aerohive is in a very different situation…. Our cooperative control architecture is a completely new approach that has been designed from the ground up to…easily replace fat APs, [deploy] a ubiquitous wireless access layer, [support] mission critical WLANs and [migrate] to 802.11n WLANs. This represents a tremendous opportunity for Aerohive as an independent company.”
* Extricom VP of Marketing David Confalonieri, in an e-mail statement: “Extricom is seeing more and more success in all of our markets. Customer and partner adoption for our offerings is strong and accelerating rapidly, from the U.S., to Japan to Europe. This momentum gives us every reason to stay focused on and confident about growing our business organically, rather than worry about buy-outs, rumours [sic] and other distractions.”
* Meru Networks VP of Strategic Marketing Rachna Alhawat, in a phone interview: “[What’s happening in WLANs now is] similar to what happened with Gigabit Ethernet in the mid to late ’90s. The ones that had a clearly differentiated technology survived on their own. From day one we’ve been focused on technology. We weren’t built to be bought, but we’re always open to different options.”
* Xirrus Founder and CEO Dirk Gates, in an e-mail statement: Xirrus is “focused on replacing wired switching in the enterprise, and therefore [we] do not fit the product portfolio of any company looking to complement…wired switches with a meager overlay of wireless. We are well funded, having fun, doubling quarter over quarter, and have no problem finding customers who no longer want to install switches to connect intrinsically mobile laptops, but instead want high performance Wi-Fi.”
