Wi-fi wars: Battlelines for the branch office

ICT Networks and UXC Connect

As ICT Networks chief executive, Rob Kingma oversees a solutions provider that has relationships with Juniper, Aruba and Chinese networking vendor Huawei – all historically competing with HP.

“There’s questions about how that [HP-Aruba acquisition] will roll through; how independent will Aruba remain?” Kingma says. “Their channel programs and introduction of HP product behind it; it brings up questions that we have to keep an eye on.”

Although HP is silent on its plans, Kingma says, “Aruba has been very forward in communicating with the channel.”

But he looks for vendors to define a vision: “[No] vendor has nailed the product set, especially [802.11ac]. Over the next three to five years, enterprises won’t be rolling copper out to desks. Their LAN will be wireless. And while there’s a great set of features in Aruba and Meraki and native HP, there’s not necessarily a perfect answer as yet.”

He reckons Aruba is a Trojan horse: “[HP] will use Aruba to introduce other products into that customer base.”

Meantime, other vendors are kickstarting conversations. Huawei and Juniper were very forward with ICT Networks and it “had some discussions with Aerohive”, he says.

Kingma predicts a flurry of M&A activity among networking vendors, especially security-centric providers like Palo Alto and F5 Networks, with which he partners. “In the last 12-18 months, they went from very few partners to partnering with everyone.”

UXC Connect also has a longstanding Aruba relationship, says chief executive Ian Poole. He says Aruba technology is “very strong” and HP’s acquisition is a “smart move”.

“Enterprise mobility is a very high-growth market,” Poole says. “Picking up Aruba will enable HP to have a very strong mobility position, add a strong partner model and integrate mobility into their own offerings.”

UXC partners include Airwatch, Alcatel-Lucent, Aruba, Cisco and Riverbed but Poole says its ‘customer-first’ policy means it partners with the best vendor. So he sees little channel conflict despite being a Cisco partner. “We’ve done work with HP [but] compared to Aruba, not as much. Most of our networking is with Cisco.”

Poole says HP’s network management software will give Aruba a leg up. “The service levels you now need to meet when managing client networks are tighter and no longer technical service levels; they’re business service levels. Now you need a far better knowledge of what’s on the network. With more cloud traffic, [the network] has to be smarter and that’s where SDN [software-defined networks] comes in. You need a strong and intimate knowledge of what your customers are doing.”

Alliance and acquisitions: wi-fi history

1939 Hewlett-Packard (HP) founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in Packard’s Palo Alto garage.

1984 Cisco Systems founded by Leonard Bosack and Sally Lerner. Grows to 70,000 employees in 2015

2000 Fortinet founded by Michael and Ken Xie to compete in the unified threat gateway segment

2002 Meru Networks founded by Vaduvur Bharghaban, Srinath Sarang. Joseph Epstein and Sung-Wook Han

Keerti Melkote and Panjak Manglik found Aruba Networks

2006 Meraki founded by Sanjit Biswas, John Bicket and Hans Robertson

2012 Cisco completes US$1.2b buy-out of Meraki that joins Cisco’s Cloud Networking Group

2014 June Juniper and Aruba announce collaboration

2015 February Meraki founders quit Cisco

May19 HP completes buy of Aruba for US$3b

May 27 Fortinet announces intention to buy Meru Networks

June Juniper and Ruckus announce technology collaboration

July 8 Fortinet closes acquisition of Meru Networks