Surveyor was launched in April 2004 and is currently at version 2.5, said Wade Williamson, product manager at the Sunnyvale, California-based vendor.

It’s a software tool both for pre-installation radio frequency planning and post-installation surveying of performance, he said, adding that it provides information, from how many APs will be needed in an environment to how many packets are being dropped once a WLAN is up and running.

The network management area is clearly one that’s growing within AirMagnet.

We were founded in 2001 and when we first came out, wireless was still quite new, Williamson said. Our first product, AirMagnet Handheld Analyzer, was designed specifically for detecting rogue APs.

Then in 2002 the company launched what is still its most widely deployed product, AirMagnet Laptop Analyzer, and saw that it was increasingly used not only for security (i.e. keeping rogues out) but also for co-ordinated rollouts and ongoing management.

Even so, until relatively recently the main concern has been security, whereas now people are running large WLAN networks and need to manage them, Williamson said.

At least one WLAN security vendor, Bluesocket, has responded to this trend by moving into connectivity per se, repositioning its WLAN security gateway as a controller and launching its own APs.

Meanwhile WLAN networking vendor Colubris has just unveiled an OEM deal with a smaller RF planning developer, AirTight, to offer that facility in its kit.

Even those WLAN security vendors, like AirMagnet and AirDefense, that haven’t followed Bluesocket’s example and moved into the networking side, nonetheless show signs of broadening their offering into network management.

And well they might. As WLAN becomes more widely deployed in enterprise, heavyweights like Cisco will want to offer security features in their own portfolio, essentially obviating the need for customers to have recourse to third-party dedicated security vendors.

One wonders, for instance, whether last year’s agreement between Cisco and AirDefense, whereby the latter’s sensor software can be blasted onto the former’s Aironet APs to turn them into dedicated security devices will be extended to Cisco’s new thin AP technology from its January 2005 Airespace acquisition.

It seems far more likely that the networking giant will move toward offering its own sensor technology, quite probably on only one radio of a dual- or triple-radio AP, enabling the other two to be devoted, one to VoIP and the other to data.