Forum

Chris,
No offense taken that you didn't mention Ruckus. The main reason I was hired was to educate about our product line and spread the good word. In fact, are you the Accuvant that is in Dallas, TX? If you and your team are interested in hearing the Ruckus story, I can stop by your office the morning of the 24th or on Wednesday the 26th. I'll be in that area anyway and I'd enjoy coming over to meet you and your team.
With regards to RTLS, we are an Aeroscout partner. With our technology we could actually have better resolution than other vendors, but we don't use our beam forming with RTLS so we are similar to others. When the location badge is chirping, we are listening like an omni-directional antenna like other vendors.

GT

I thought the question was 'where is the market heading' not 'what does Darby prefer to run in his network'. Yes we know you want standardization Darby, but Cisco does not equal the whole market and just by virtue of this fact there are parts of the market that don't run it.

Darby,

I completely understand your perspective with regards to vendor selection. Some vendors would say that they are the right solution for you, even without knowing your requirements. At Ruckus, we know what we do well and we know what features we don't have. In fact, we purposely don't put certain features into our product. Why? Cost and complexity. Cost to us which has to be passed down to our customers. Complexity in implementation.
One theme at Ruckus is simplicity for the user. Our beam forming technology is one of, if not the most complex technologies in Wi-Fi. However, the end user never has to touch it, learn to administer it, or tweak it. Ever.
A Ruckus training course, soup to nuts, learn the product cold, is 2 days. 3 if you have never seen a Wi-Fi network interface before. Aruba takes two days to teach their GUI. Ok, that may be a bit of a go at Aruba, but it isn't too far off the mark.
If you ever encounter a potential customer that has high capacity and throughput requirements, needs ease of administration and implementation, then let us know. We are more than happy to bake off in real life situations vs. any vendor out there. Will we win? When our gear is evaluated with an open mind (no allegiance to a particular vendor) we do very, very well. And, it will cost less than any other solution out there. Fewer APs and a better price. Done.

GT

Pete,

Hopefully I've answered a few of your comments in other posts. As to the passion, I appreciate that you see passion in my posts. Ruckus is full of people that are passionate about what they do. The corporate culture at Ruckus is the kind that you hear about and wish you worked there. I'm not micro managed and I can make decisions without a committee. The atmosphere is fun and down to business at the same time. That fun reflects in our unique and sometimes offensive (Pimp My Wi-Fi) marketing. :)

GT

GT

I have no probs with offensive marketing, yeah if you gota stick a nipple on it to make wi-fi sexy so be it,

Apologies if this is edited!!!!

I have a school that I have to rip and replace, I would be interested if you could get a UK guy to drop me a line as the client has the high capacity v throughput requirement

Pete

Do we see anyone else getting bought up in the near future, going to the wall or making acquisitions to enhance ther product portfolios.

What about the smaller players like Xirrus and Entrasys, or the SOHO market place with Linksys and D-Link who else have we missed.

And what has happened to Trapeze, I used to come across them frequently as 3Com?

Pete,
Someone will be contacting you. Thanks for the interest!

There is no one that I know will be bought up in the near future. Instead of looking at it from the perspective of who could be bought, look at it as who needs to buy. HP wanted a Wi-Fi solution so they went looking to buy. Who else out there could benefit from a Wi-Fi product line?

GT

Thought I'd add my pennies worth about the products i have esperience with.

Trapeze - were bought by Belden (a cabling company) and they really seem to have lost a bit of drive, i guess there were a few very disappointed share holders. But on the upside their Ringmaster software is an outstanding piece of management and planning software. I've been involved in several deployments that couldn't have been managed any other way and going with another vendor would have been a nightmare. Lacking a bit in innovative feature.

Xirrus - Interesting technology but with limited applications. Great for areas of high density of users, not so much use to provide coverage in long, odd shaped or non-square buildings. Horrible management, web based on the controller with lots of delay between clicking buttons.

Aerohive - innovative very motivated company, lots of marketing. Very nicely designed APs. Immature management platform but i guess this will improve with time. As it's non-controller based I can imagine that troubleshooting large installs could be very timeconsuming and troublesome.

HP - I'm just back from a procurve mobilty course. Not impressed with the wireless at all. Difficult to configure, the controller CLI is unusable so it's web mangement only which seems to have been made as cryptic as possible. But with their purchase of 3Com they're now a real cisco competitor so i expect I'll be seeing a lot more of it in future.

Hi Paul many thanks for that.

Im not sure if you have used the old HP or the new HP, are the issues there trying to fit new products into a legacy GUI or just trying to fit the new products into the HP GUI solution. You say that the command line is impossible?

Also on HP, as 3Com didnt have their own wireless but used Trapeze do you think that the additional market share will get HP motivated on the wireless side enough to get it al sorted, I would have thought HP had enough market penetration with their own portfolio to get it sorted and start shouting from the rooftops.

Again HP Im afraid, I really think they should be doing better, they tell me that they have a 400% growth on wireless since buying Colubris, certainly in the UK but thats statistics, if I sold 1 ap in 2008 and sold 4 in 2009 I have 400% growth so not sure, wasnt the procurement of 3Com mainly for market share in the far east?

I can understand what you say about Aerohive, however I have not used it but I remember them presenting a preproduction product to a company I worked for and they knew they had a lot of developement work to do on just the hardware, it really looks like they did that, unfortunately moved on so havent seen the newer products. However sorting out the management platform is and iterative process and i dont see them having too many issues with that as they have good enthusiastic leadership. Unlike HP who it appears have wireless as a Cinderella product.

I think if you compare Aerohive with HP, I know its unfair but for sake of argument and no disrespect to anyone in my comments.

Aerohive is a one trick pony, and by that I mean they do wireless and only wireless, I do not mean they are not versatile etc. Aerohive will live or die by their wireless offer so are in the market being innovative and rattling the cage. I see them as a top 5 player in the future. On the scalability side I havent used them but surely you can address the hive as a single entity via each ap as the management is built into the ap or via the management platform. DOnt know not used it and I do need to.

On the other hand HP is the corporate dinosaur, huge body very small brain, just my view of corporate behemoths. OK some very good people no doubt but wireless will always be further down the food chain than their switching portfolio which is their bread and butter and will therefore always fight for marketing share internally and R&D budget.

SInce HP bought Colubris I have seen nothing of what they have to offer, on the other hand you cant escape Devin Akin doing presentations blogging etc. I unfortunately could not attend one he did in London, I won't miss the next one in the UK if I can help it.

GTHill,

I actually considered a bakeoff going forward with regard to Wireless this past year, albeit, I had never heard of Ruckus at the time, however, I had seen some brochures from Trapeze and wsa interested in their redunancy and failover models, plus we had Meru in hand (on my desk Controller + APs) and of of course we were still up in the air as to whether or not Cisco was the complete solution as far as I knew.

Well things being what they were we did not do the bakeoff we went with Cisco and that was that. Now we have chosen to stick with the Cisco lines we originally chose versus even Cisco's newest technologies.

The theme is that we control our ow destiny and not any given vendor. It permeates all of IT and it driven from the top down. It is in full effect.

I would be interested in other solutions on other playing fields.

I'm in Delaware this week to go over planning and budgets ironically and next year is a very big year for us ($$$). So lots of tech on the table.

While I'm here I'm hoping to get a glimpse at the RFID project and see how it is going.

I need to dig up the RFID ebay listings. It was rather simplistic. Tags and reader or something like that.