* Cisco leads WLAN charge into enterprise environments
Wireless LANs continue to increase in importance as a LAN technology in both enterprise environments and at home, as Cisco increases its domination in wireless.
Dell’Oro Group this week said the IEEE 802.11WLAN market grew 9% in the most recent quarter, to $457 million. The market for enterprise-class wireless access points alone increased 25%, to $121 million.
This last figure prompted the research firm to state that some momentum seems to be shifting from small-office, home-office environments to enterprise firms. These larger companies are starting to accept WLANs as a bona fide network option – and the reasons stem from new high-speed WLAN technology and from new vendors getting into the action.
Synergy Research Group had slightly different figures, saying that enterprise WLAN equipment increased 17% during the third quarter.
Both firms agreed that Cisco by far leads the enterprise WLAN market. SRG says Cisco has a 44% market share, and Dell’Oro notes the company also grew its revenues by a stunning 44% from the previous quarter.
Meanwhile, Cisco just released its first 54M bit/sec 802.11g technology for its access points, updated its IOS software and introduced a client adapter that can work with several different WLAN technologies:
https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/1112ciswlan.html
Symbol Technologies is a distant second, with 15% share, according to SRG. Third is Proxim, at about 7%.
Dell’Oro says SOHO wireless LAN equipment is still selling well, but revenues only increased by 11%, a fact the firm attributes to aggressive price cutting.
