Meru Networks Ranks Second In Worldwide Market Share For 802.11n Enterprise Wireless LANs, Dell'Oro Report Says

(Business News & Technology News, 2 Jul 2009)

Market research firm Dell'Oro Group has ranked Meru Networks number two in the worldwide enterprise 802.11n wireless LAN market. According to Dell'Oro's "First Quarter 2009 Wireless LAN Report", Meru logged 12 percent of total vendor revenue – second only to Cisco and ahead of third-place Aruba – for equipment based on 802.11n, the high-performance standard that represents the fastest-growing segment of the WLAN market.

"802.11n is recognized as the future of wireless networks and as such constitutes the only meaningful measure of success for WLAN vendors today," said Rachna Ahlawat, Meru's vice president of marketing. "Through the pioneering use of wireless virtualization techniques, Meru has created a full line of plug-and-play 802.11n solutions that outperform the legacy 'micro cell' products of other WLAN vendors yet cost less. Enterprises across all major industry segments – education, healthcare, hospitality, entertainment, retail, manufacturing, construction and government – are adopting Meru's 802.11n-based virtualized WLANs, which is driving our accelerated 802.11n market share growth."

According to the report, the position of 802.11n access points as a percentage of all 11a/b/g/n access points has tripled over the past year, from six to 18 percent. The enterprise WLAN market is expected to grow to $1.9 billion by the end of 2010, with 802.11n accounting for the majority of total access point shipments.

"Since Meru brought the first enterprise 802.11n products to market in 2007," Ahlawat said, "802.11n technology has gained broad-based acceptance, with over 600 client devices now certified for interoperability by the Wi-Fi Alliance. With its greater range and performance akin to Fast Ethernet, 802.11n is allowing enterprises for the first time to consider wireless LAN as their primary communication medium. Organizations that previously deployed legacy 'micro cell' WLAN architectures – which mandate that all access points be placed on different non-overlapping channels – are realizing that adaptive channel-planning techniques make networks too unreliable for critical business communication. Many are taking advantage of the current technology upgrade cycle to migrate to Meru's 'virtual cell' architecture, which allows them to derive strategic competitive value from their wireless LAN and concentrate on their business rather than the stability of their infrastructure."

In a Novarum 802.11n benchmark test earlier this year, Meru 802.11n APs outperformed equipment from both Cisco and Aruba – consistently exceeding 170 Mbps throughput – and maintained high performance under heavy data and voice traffic loads that made other vendors' APs suffer "performance collapse."

Products based on 802.11n allow wireless access at more than five times the speed of the legacy 802.11a/b/g standards. Meru's 802.11n solutions use WLAN virtualization techniques to let organizations deliver information, applications and business processes in a personalized way to individuals, while enabling network managers to roll out large-scale secure WLANs at a fraction of cost of legacy solutions. Using Meru's Air Traffic Control technology, the company's products deliver full 802.11n draft 2.0 performance at the highest possible wireless client densities while offering full backward compatibility with 802.11a/b/g devices. All Meru access points automatically select a single channel for use enterprise- or campus-wide, layering additional channels when more capacity is required. This approach provides network stability and predictability, minimizes co-channel interference, and eliminates the need for both time-intensive initial channel planning and ongoing channel adjustments following deployment.