Motorola aims to dominate enterprise wireless market - UPDATED

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 17 November 2009 13:30

IT Industry - Strategy

In Australia, Motorola is targeting customers across a number of different vertical industries including education, wireless Internet service providers, retail and logistics, mining and natural resources, utilities, local councils, metro transport, local and federal government, and healthcare. And it aims to be a lead player.

Fogarasi said: "We believe we will be number two in enterprise wireless in two years and we will aim to keep on growing. In unlicensed we are already number one. Our aspirations as a Motorola organisation are to be number one or two in all the markets in which we play."

To get there the company intents to ramp up its channel marketing. Fogarasi said: "We have direct touch but we largely work through sales partners. The overwhelming majority of our business would be through channels and we are looking to dramatically increase our channel capacity and the quality of our channel; recruiting and training new partners and making sure they have the skills to deploy. That will be a big part of our investment across the region."

The new products are:
- The FRS 4000. According to Wittert it is an intelligent switching device for WiFi networks that in its next release will have an integrated access point. Today it has firewall and routing capabilities and 3G backhaul capabilities;
- The AP 650 a 'thin' WiFi access point - which requires a switch in the background;
- The AP7181 outdoor wireless mesh WiFi access point;
- The PTP800 product. Motorola's entry into the licensed microwave band, offering point-to-point connectivity at up to 300Mbps;
- The PMP320 which provides increased bandwidth in the unlicensed spectrum to 20Mbps full duplex. According to Wittert, "It validates a lot of service providers being able to provide higher level services." It uses 802.11e technology but in fixed applications. It will be offered in the 3.3 to 3.8GHz bands: 3.3 to 3.5 in December and 3.6 to 3.8 in March or April 2010. This is the band that the ACMA has released for last mile access. According to Wittert, the product will operated with any 802.11e CPE.;
- The Team VoWLAN solution (WiFi phone) which "delivers cost-effective mobile access over the WLAN to PBX-based telephony, PTT, text messaging, email/PIM, Internet/Intranet and line of business applications through a single device."