Mobile dramatically impacts WLAN market

Peter Dinham
Sunday, 18 December 2011 21:42

IT Industry - Market

Cisco and Aruba have been placed in the 'leaders' category for this year and 2012 by IDC in its first report on the global enterprise wireless local area network market (WLAN), with the analyst firm reporting that the explosion of mobile devices within the enterprise is having a dramatic impact on the market, as it continues to gain momentum with vendors and end users discovering more possibilities and growth potential with mobile enterprise applications and cloud applications and services.

Alongside Cisco and Aruba in the 'Leaders' category, several other vendors, including HP Networking and Motorola Solutions, have been  being recognised by IDC as 'Major Players'.

According to Rohit Mehra,  director, enterprise communications infrastructure at IDC, the demand for 'adaptable, robust, easily deployed wireless LAN solutions is on the rise as more and more enterprise employees access the network through smart mobile devices." 'As the market continues to evolve, the traditional controller-based model is being complemented by emerging, alternate architectures, such as cloud-based and integrated or virtualized WLAN deployments.'

The study, IDC MarketScope: Worldwide Enterprise WLAN, 2011-2-12 Vendor Analysis - is the first study by IDC for the enterprise WLAN market, and discusses both quantitative and qualitative characteristics that explain a vendor's success in the marketplace and helps anticipate its ascendancy. IDC says the study emphasis is on the new 802.11n standard along with various deployment architectures.

Mehra says that organisations considering deploying new WLAN technology need to 'take a look at how implementing the new technology will affect the current networking infrastructure as well as business-critical applications now and in the future.'  "IDC MarketScape leaders and major players are well positioned to seamlessly meet the needs of enterprise users in both the near and long term," Mehra says.

IDC says that vendors included in its first analysis of the WLAN market, are Aerohive, Aruba, Bluesocket-ADTRAN, Cisco, D-Link, Enterasys, Extricom, HP Networking, Juniper, Meraki, Meru Networks, Motorola Solutions, Ruckus, and Xirrus. In addition to Cisco and Aruba, identified as 'Leaders', a total of nine vendors were named as 'Major Players.', including Aerohive, Enterasys, HP Networking, Juniper, Meraki, Meru Networks, Motorola Solutions, Ruckus, and Xirrus.