* Market for enterprise-level WLAN gear up, Dell'Oro says
The enterprise wireless LAN market grew a whopping 48% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2006, according to a recent report from Dell’Oro Group.
The increase pushed the market up to $290 million in the quarter.
Interestingly, Dell’Oro says it has noticed a major transition to newer WLAN equipment, equipment that fits into an enterprise architecture of dependent access points managed by switches or appliances. This segment grew 54% during the first quarter to $173 million.
Meanwhile, equipment that corresponds to an earlier WLAN architecture dropped dramatically. Sales of autonomous access points and servers/appliances declined 22% in the quarter.
The new architecture is more scalable, since the deployments can be more easily controlled, according to Dell’Oro. That would seem to indicate that large-scale WLAN deployments are really starting to take off.
Dell’Oro also notes that networking giant and WLAN market leader Cisco more than doubled sales of dependent access points and switches in the first quarter, which demonstrates that the company has leveraged its acquisition of Airespace a year ago.
Meanwhile, the small office and home office market saw a modest growth of 3% from the fourth quarter of 2005 to the first quarter of 2006. The research firm says SOHO products based on the draft IEEE 802.11n specification have started to ship, but won’t affect the market until later this year.
Dell’Oro Group also indicated that the Ethernet switch market represented $3.7 billion in sales in the first quarter of this year, a double-digit percentage increase over the same period a year ago.
