WLAN vendor’s losses are shrinking, however
Wireless LAN vendor Aruba Networks reported strong Q1 sales, and yet another quarterly net loss. But it’s edging toward profitability
Aruba Networks, which now bills itself as the second-largest wireless LAN vendor in the world, this week announced strong revenue growth for its just-ended first quarter, but another quarterly net loss.
Aruba, still the only publicly held vendor focused on WLANs, posted Q1 revenue of nearly $47 million, nearly double the $24.5 million it had in Q1 last year, and a more modest increase from the previous quarter’s $41.7 million. The Q1 loss totaled $600,000.
But the loss is decreasing. It was down substantially from the preceding quarter’s loss of $3.3 million. Last year, the Sunnyvale, Calif., company lost $4.5 million in Q1.
Aruba says it now has over 3,300 customers worldwide, and its sales, according to market research firm Dell’Oro Group, have put it ahead of Motorola’s enterprise wireless group (which is based on the former Symbol Technologies) for the No. 2 spot in market share, with 10%. But it’s still far behind Cisco, which continues to hold the majority of that market.
Earlier this month, Aruba announced new high-capacity WLAN controllers, and new access points that support draft 2 of the 802.11n WLAN standard. The heart of the controllers is a board with a field-programmable gate array and multicore network processors. Together, the hardware lets each board run an array of tasks and functions in parallel, and process up to 20Gbps of wireless traffic. Four of the boards can be fitted into the high-end Aruba 6000 controller.
Two of the new access point models have one radio, which can run on either the 2.4- or 5-GHz bands. The remaining two models have two radios, one on 2.4- the other on 5-GHz. The RF chipset can support 802.11 a, b, g, or n client devices. The Atheros chipsets support what’s called a 3×3 MIMO antenna array – three antennas for sending and receiving up to three data streams, for maximum 11n throughput. Aruba executives say this latest Atheros silicon will let the access points run with existing 802.3af Power-over-Ethernet equipment. For 3×3 MIMO in some rival 11n products, the higher-wattage 802.3at gear, which is only just now coming to market, is required.
In August, Aruba announced a deal to private label a network access control policy server from Bradford Networks. The arrangement lets Aruba offer its own policy server, dubbed the Endpoint Compliance System, as part of its net infrastructure. ECS manages users’ identities, associating them with specific media access control addresses, their roles in the company, IP address, how the device is attached (wired or wireless) and time of day.
