The announcement by the two Californian companies comes only days after Trapeze competitor Aruba Wireless said it was open-sourcing the boot code for its APs, thus enabling vendors from the previous generation of so-called fat APs that do not talk to WLAN switches to transform their installed base into Aruba-compliant products and thus let them be managed by its switches.
Indeed, Michael Coci, director of product marketing and business development at Pleasanton-based Trapeze said he suspected Aruba’s move had been something of a pre-emptive strike after the latter company found out Trapeze was planning to unveil the OEM deal with D-Link.
This is, in any case, not the first such relationship unveiled by Trapeze, it having entered into a deal with 3Com late last year whereby three APs representing 98.9% of the latter’s existing installed base of products can now have a Trapeze image blasted onto them for central management. Another deal is in place with Asian manufacturer Senao International.
The deal with D-Link appears to have gone further, however, Trapeze having worked with the Fountain Valley-based APs vendor to add its hardware reference design to the latter’s economies of scale and come up with a lower-cost, Trapeze-compliant product.
Interestingly, D-Link inked a very similar deal in February last year with Airespace, the other member of the triad of WLAN switch vendors and arguably the most successful in the consumer market, so much so that it was acquired in January by networking giant Cisco Systems. Informed sources said that deal, designed to take its LWAP boot code to D-Link APs, never got off the ground, resulting in a frustrated D-Link seeking out Trapeze instead.
This move and Aruba’s both highlight the current stage of the enterprise WLAN market, in which the switch vendors have emerged to resolve the problems caused by the proliferation of unmanaged APs, but now face the problem of communicating with the large installed base of these products.
They currently communicate with their own APs in a proprietary manner, and though there are efforts underway to achieve a standard for the purpose, such as the Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Points initiative underway within the IETF, the process is slow and fraught with contention, as each of the vendors participating seeks to make the final protocol look more like its proprietary one.
In the meantime, as Aruba open-sources its boot code and Trapeze strikes bilateral deals with individual AP vendors, informed sources told ComputerWire that a number of other names are set to follow D-Link in the coming weeks, particularly among the OEM partners of Airespace, disgruntled with the changes since it was acquired by Cisco.
