IT Research Blog
Posted September 3rd, 2010 by Info-Tech
Organizations 
are increasingly funding and building more complex IT systems and finding it more difficult to:
- Develop a long term IT strategy
- Keep these expensive systems aligned with business need
- Avoid project collisions
- Implement and enforce standards
IT Leaders are looking for a holistic system of IT projects and solutions that denotes business processes, information stores, applications, security and technical infrastructure. EA provides competitive advantage and significantly lower delivery costs.
Enterprise architecture can take a significant investment in time and money and the economic value can be elusive. However, the payoff ensures the organization’s growth proceeds in an organized, progressive and cost effective manner with potential IT cost savings of up to 30% in as little as two years.
Our Advice
Organizations that successfully employ EA can realize up to 80% cost savings in project development, operations and cost avoidance attributed to reuse of IT and business solution components. However, full adoption of enterprise architecture in small and medium sized businesses is virtually zero.
Small and medium sized businesses will benefit from a modified implementation of enterprise architecture and can realize up to 30% savings from implementation of standards and governance and reuse of design components.
Impact and Result
- Provide an unambiguous definition of EA.
- Demonstrate the value of EA for your organization.
- Assess whether your organization can benefit from EA and what prerequisites you need to put in place before proceeding.
- Prepare for key objections by quantifying the economical value of EA.
- Plan your adoption with confidence, knowing that requisites and success factors have been considered.
Get to Action (Associated Research)
1. Explore enterprise architecture, its benefits and economic value
Develop a strategic roadmap for implementing enterprise architecture into your organization.
2. Prepare the organization to start out on the enterprise architecture journey
Identify the criteria and conditions that need to exist in the organization in order to tackle an enterprise architecture initiative.
3. Progress to higher levels of enterprise architecture value for greater cost savings and efficiency benefits.
Assess the level of enterprise architecture maturity in your organization and create a customized roadmap for getting to the next level.
Tags: alignment, business, business-alignment, business-and-it-alignment, business-it-alignment, businessit-alignment, ea, enterprise-architecture, enterprise-architecture-strategy, information-architecture, it-alignment, it-architecture, it-business-alignment, it-strategy, itbusiness-alignment
Posted in Infrastructure, Research | No Comments »
Posted September 2nd, 2010 by Info-Tech
Who would have guessed when Apple introduced the original iPhone in 2007 that it would become the most valuable technology company in the world a mere 3 years later. That’s right
, Apple is more valuable than Microsoft, Google, IBM, Cisco, HP, or any other tech company you can name. In fact, my math tells me Apple is the second most valuable company in the world right now behind only Exxon Mobil. More valuable than Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Berkshire Hathaway – again, any other company you can name.
How did this happen? How did a company that was completely failing 10 years ago reinvent itself in a way that made it the most valuable tech company in the world? I’m going to tell you, but I understand there are a lot of Apple naysayers out there – I was one of them. Until 2008 Apple was a mere blip to me. A nothing. An annoyance. When I laid hands on an iPhone 3G I realized that the world had changed. I had to have one. It was an immediate and overwhelming reaction I couldn’t resist. It was my gateway drug. I went out that day and bought one. I loved it – it was a mobile device like I’d never seen or used. I had an HTC Touch running Windows Mobile 6.1 at the time, and I thought that was pretty cool when I got it. Once I laid hands on an iPhone it became an abomination – I hated it.
As I said, the iPhone 3G was my gateway drug. Since then i have had an iPhone 3GS, now an iPhone 4, a 13″ MacBook, a 15″ MacBook, and an iPad. My wife bought a 15″ MacBook, a 21″ iMac, and she too has an iPhone 3GS. Did I drink the Kool-Aid? Clearly I did, but why? How does a 20 year PC user change his stripes and buy into Apple? It’s really pretty simple – the industrial design, engineering, and user experience are vastly superior to anything else I’ve ever tried – and I’ve tried pretty much everything.
Apple hardware is fantastic – it’s stunning in every way. It’s taken 3 years for other hardware manufacturers to catch up, but they still haven’t caught up in terms of OS, software, and user experience. I think it’s all about apps, and Apple clearly rules in this respect. Even with the complaints about the App Store and it’s nominal shortcomings, Apple blows all competitors out of the water. iOS is far and away the best mobile OS on the market. Is Android coming along? Sure it is. Will HP make something of Palm’s WebOS? Count on it. Nokia’s Symbian is out of the running, Windows Phone OS is questionable right now – and in my opinion too little, tool late, and RIM is struggling to keep up with the usability of iOS.
Steve Jobs is a super-smart guy. He knows what’s going on. The line between personal and corporate mobile devices is blurring – and it’s happening very quickly. I can’t keep up with the requests from clients asking for help managing iOS devices. Thankfully, they have licensed Microsoft ActiveSync so you have a pretty decent mobile management suite built in to your Exchange/Active Directory infrastructure.
One thing IT leaders need to understand – and they need to understand it now – is that Apple isn’t going away anytime soon. Get used to it, figure it out, and embrace it. Info-Tech will help along the way with some important research coming in the next couple of months.
Posted in News & Analysis | No Comments »
Posted September 2nd, 2010 by Info-Tech
The Situation. 
“The Cloud” has become a major hype area as cost conscious enterprises explore the potential of renting IT services (infrastructure, applications, development platforms) to save costs over internal provisioning (i.e. buying and maintaining infrastructure).
The Opportunity. Where Infrastructure as a Service, for example, is a version of the cloud for infrastructure managers (how I can deliver infrastructure with less CAPEX and OPEX), Platform as a Service is the cloud for application development managers (how will it enable more rapid and agile application development services to the enterprise over and above CAPEX/OPEX savings?).
The Challenge. Info-Tech has found that interest in the cloud is at least as strong throughout the business as it is within IT. The application development manager may well be interested in exploiting the potential of PaaS (internal initiative). They may also be under pressure from the business to show why or why not PaaS should be used.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Info-Tech predicts that of the three types of external cloud-based services – Infrastructure as a Service, Software as a Service, and Platform as a Service – PaaS will show the most growth in 2010/2011. This is due to both internal and external factors.
- More enterprises are evaluating, but fewer have adopted a PaaS solution. Though all types are in early stages, PaaS is the most nascent.
- On the market side in 2010, vendors have debuted powerful PaaS offerings including Microsoft (Azure) and VMware/Salesforce.com (VMforce).
- In Platform as a Service – like other cloud-based services – cloud computing impacts the economics of the solution. Low CAPEX/OPEX barriers to entry and rapid deployment are the highest ranked positives of the cloud. However the App/Dev manager’s first concern is with how PaaS will enable delivery of applications that are more responsive to business requirements and better serve the end user.
- The first issue is whether the platform meets the needs of your development methodology and programming framework. Though the business benefits of any cloud-based offering can be sold to business (low costs of entry, rapid and streamlined implementation) the app/dev manager must also be sold on the benefits of the cloud for PaaS. They will be the ones working with the PaaS solution and they will be held accountable if anything goes wrong.
Impact and Result
- Determine if PaaS offerings can meet the organizations’ development needs.
- Determine the most appropriate projects for PaaS hosting.
- Document the business case for PaaS that makes a go/no go recommendation and clearly explains both the benefits and potential risks in business terms.
Get to Action
1. Get the whole picture of PaaS as one of the services that can live in the cloud.
Determine how PaaS and software can enable agile strategy and clear infrastructure hurdles.
2. Assess whether PaaS is a fit with your app/dev strategy.
PaaS is a no go if there isn’t an app/dev strategy that it suits.
3. Document a case for or against proceeding with PaaS evaluation.
Communicate to the app/dev strategic benefits and risks as well as the business benefits and risks of the cloud.
Tags: app-dev, app-dev-services, application-development, cloud, cloud-compuing, external-cloud, PaaS, platform-as-a-service, saas, saas-applications, the-cloud, web-development
Posted in Infrastructure, What's New in Research | No Comments »
Posted September 1st, 2010 by Info-Tech
| Microsoft’s Active Directory (AD) is the primary administrative engine for both systems and users in use by enterprises of all sizes. Establishing an appropriate architecture for AD (including distribution of Forests, Domains and Organizational Units) can be challenging, particularly when the functions of these administrative units is so poorly understood.Migration to AD 2008 is often delayed because enterprises have difficulty justifying the expenditure of time. There are some clear cases where migration makes sense however, given the advanced feature functionality that the latest version offers. |
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Critical Insight
Microsoft has added some significant feature/functionality to the latest version of Active Directory, but few organizations will find them sufficient to stimulate a dedicated migration project; upgrade efforts should piggy-back on other projects such as Win 7 adoption or Domain Controller hardware refresh efforts.
Get to Action
- 1. Establish AD strategy and plan for 2K8 migration
Build the AD deployment that best represents enterprise user and system management.
2. Assess enterprise readiness for 2K8
Ensure an appropriately timed upgrade to the latest version of AD.
Tags: active-directory, ad, domain, forest, organizational-unit, ou
Posted in Research | No Comments »
Posted August 31st, 2010 by Info-Tech
Organizations 
are increasingly leveraging collaboration tools in order to enhance team work, but only 6% of organizations are seeing high usage.
Selection of a standard collaboration platform and toolset used to be easy: Microsoft or IBM Lotus. But now there are many competitors in this market, fueled by the rise of Web 2.0 collaboration paradigms, requiring organizations to know what the problem is they are trying to solve.
We can help you understand and identify collaboration opportunities that exist within your organization, identify leading vendors and compare capabilities, and select the right solution to implement.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Teams and communities collaborate differently, therefore organizations must ensure they understand the target audiences they are designing for before selecting products.
- Expecting the infrastructure to grow organically is wishful thinking. Put strategic intent behind the tool by defining specific use cases or risk spending money on a tool that users ignore.
- Microsoft SharePoint enables collaboration around content, but it is not a complete collaboration toolset. Don’t eliminate the niche vendors out of the gate – many of them built their platforms with specific collaboration goals in mind and may provide an improved experience over the more established vendors.
Impact and Result
- Plan and select a collaboration solution that brings distributed people and information together to get more done in less time.
- Use Info-Tech’s Vendor Landscape to compare the major collaboration platforms available and prepare a vendor shortlist, saving time and money in the selection process.
- Use Info-Tech’s collaboration platform RFP template and demo scripts to prepare solid requirements for vendor finalists and select the right product.
Get to Action
-
1. Plan the selection process first
Ensure smooth collaboration platform selection project execution.
-
2. Understand and identify collaboration opportunities
To determine if a formal collaboration platform will deliver value to my organization.
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3. Compare collaboration platforms available and arrive at shortlist
Understand the dynamic vendor landscape for collaboration platforms and narrow the product selection.
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4. Select a collaboration platform
Finalize on a set of tools, based on their ability to support your defined collaboration strategies, and providing the most value to your organization.
Tags: 37-signals, basecamp, collaboration, collaboration-tools, community, google, google-apps, ibm, jive-software, microsoft, microsoft-office-sharepoint-server, microsoft-sharepoint, office-sharepoint, online-collaboration, open-text, opentext, quickr, sbs, sharepoint, sharepoint-server, team-collaboration, teamware, webex, windows-sharepoint-server, windows-sharepoint-services
Posted in Research | No Comments »
Posted August 30th, 2010 by Info-Tech
As I write this HP has again upped the ante in its bidding war with Dell over 3par. The whole thing started with Dell offering just over a billion dollars for 3par. Then HP made a counter offer, Dell countered the counter, and now it $2 billion on the table for 3par.
What is going on here? For Dell it’s about building large enterprise data center cred in storage. For both companies it is about the cloud.
A few years back there was a curious anomaly with storage offerings from both Dell and HP. Both companies had been champions and beneficiaries of distributed processing based on industry standard (ie x86/x64) servers. Yet when organizations wanted to have storage shared between networks of Windows or Linux servers Dell and HP were offering storage solutions that had more in common with larger scale computing – “little iron” versions of big iron fiber channel storage arrays.
If you were interested in putting together a processing pool of virtualized industry standard servers and, and wanted to marry that to a concurrent storage pool based on a industry standard building blocks in some kind of virtualized grid, you had to go to iSCSI clusters from the likes of EqualLogic and LeftHand Networks.
This anomaly was resolved when Dell and HP bought EqualLogic and Lefthand respectively. Now the standardized building blocks for both storage and servers were coming from the same companies. It was a good move. In August 2010 earnings reports Dell had storage up 13% and revenues from EqualLogic sales up 63%.
Another item of note from the earnings reports of both Dell and HP is that all the growth right now is in the corporate space. Consumer spending on PCs (bread and butter of both Dell and HP) is flat. Dell has been aggressive in trying to expand its presence in the data center beyond commodity servers. In this they need and want an enterprise class storage product.
HP and Dell are following the money. Where is the money going? Increasingly it is heading to the clouds – both internal and external compute clouds. Those commodity servers that can be clustered together and virtualized for processing pools have evolved to ever larger grids in compute clouds.
Enterprises building clouds need a ton of storage. Traditional big iron storage is seen as too expensive. They want something more cloud-like, more like a utility, a virtualized grid of storage building blocks to match the grid of processing building blocks. But they also need something higher up the food chain – a utility model but something more enterprise class in terms of performance and capacity.
This is where 3Par comes in. 3Par has always had a good storage story to tell – a scalable virtualized storage grid that maximizes utilization of physical storage assets. What has impressed me further over the years is 3par’s ability to leverage that story for the tech trend du jour.
For example, 3par was a pioneer of thin provisioning, the ability to present a storage volume of adequate size to a server but only use the amount of storage required to actually store data. So a server might “see” a required terabyte of space for an application but on disk it is only taking up say 300 gigabytes.
Thin provisioning was and is a solid feature for maximizing utilization and reducing waste. Less actual storage behind the veil of storage virtualization means less disk required. When “green” became the data center buzzword of the day a few years back, 3par’s lower waste, higher utilization storage became “green storage”. Less spinning disk means lower power consumption per terabyte stored.
Similarly today we are in the era of cloud buzz. From virtualization to server consolidation what we were calling in the past a utility infrastructure is now being re-branded as cloud computing. 3par has always had a model that was ideal for utility infrastructure, or at least the storage component of utility infrastructure. So just as boring old storage utilization became buzz-worthy green computing, utility storage is now an essential ingredient for building a cloud.
Who will 3par end up with? I think that Dell needs 3par a little more as they have more work to do to prove themselves a legitimate data center player. But they can both certainly use 3par. The winner will get a solid piece for their cloud business. The consolation for the loser will be knowledge that they made the other people spend a huge amount of capital for the privilege.
Tags: 3par, cloud-storage, Dell, hp, storage
Posted in News & Analysis | No Comments »
Posted August 30th, 2010 by Info-Tech
Telecommunication expenses represent one of the largest IT operational budget categories for most enterprises – IT leaders are constantly pressed to optimize expenditure in this area.
Due to a lack of expertise and guidance, IT units commonly overlook some basic telecom expense management practices. Pursuing even a subset of these key activities will deliver tangible cost savings for enterprises.
Telecom Expense Management (TEM) encompasses a range of practices that aim to reduce and streamline telecom costs – more specifically, telecom expenses relating to voice, wireless and data. Despite the opportunity to cut telecom costs by ~10% or more, TEM is often overlooked because:
- Managing telecom expense is not considered a priority for many organizations.
- IT departments at many organizations are resource-constrained.
- Long-term telecom contracts limit enterprise flexibility to change service features.
- Telecom service needs are often not a part of organizational planning and provision.
Telecommunications represents 14% of the IT operational budget on average, yet almost half of organizations have a very informal approach to Telecom Expense Management.
A closer investigation of voice, data and wireless usage may reveal that the organization is incurring major hidden costs due to over-provisioned connectivity, carrier billing errors, and monthly overages.
Have You Overlooked Telecom Costs?
Companies overlook telecom costs because of resource limitations, uncoordinated planning, and contractual issues:
- Basic service levels are being met. There won’t be enough pressure from the business to make changes to existing service if telephony & data service levels are being met.
- Resource constraints in IT. IT departments usually do not have enough time, resources and trained personnel to commit to detailed analysis of ongoing telecom expenses.
- Long-term telecom service contracts. Many telecommunications services are provided through long-term contracts. Organizations have less flexibility when it comes to cost cutting measures.
- Minimal provision and planning. During high growth periods or acquisitions, not much focus is placed on future IT plans. Companies end up being serviced by multiple vendors and/or receive overlapping services.
Telecom Expense Management continues to be a key area for cost optimization:
- The industry is very fragmented and crowded, driving pricing to go down while client satisfaction is being improved
- Organizations of all sizes can benefit from using TEM applications or outsourcing TEM to capable third parties
- TEM outsourcing refers to engaging third parties to manage telecom expenses on an on-going basis, or to consulting a firm in order to establish TEM practice within the organization
Telecom Expense Management services include:
- Disaster recovery
- Inventory management
- Contract optimization
- Invoice management and audit
- Wireless TEM
Additionally, some outsourcers provide on-going outsourcing and TEM consulting engagements.
Where do I Start?
Here’s how to get started with optimizing your telecom spending:
- Collect & assemble key materials, including telecom invoices, customer service records & contracts
- Perform an inventory of current voice & data services at each site to identify surplus connectivity
- Complete an accurate inventory & consider reducing – or outright eliminating – any underutilized telecom services
Once you’ve got a proper telecom inventory, be sure to review your monthly invoices to identify billing error and other areas of variance. A remarkably high number of telecom invoices contain errors – failing to identify these mistakes and challenge service providers is a missed savings opportunity. Be sure to verify charges and usage, identify patterns in calling activities and ensure that there is actual activity on all mobile devices.
Tags: audit, audit-telecom, auditing, billing, connectivity, contract, cost-reduction, data-connectivity, ip-telephony, it-cost-reduction, policy, telecom, telecom-costs, telecom-expense-management, telecom-planning, telecomm, telecommunications, telecoms, telephony, voice, wireless, wireless-cost-control, wireless-costs
Posted in Infrastructure, What's New in Research | No Comments »
Posted August 27th, 2010 by Info-Tech
IT budget 
negotiations usually result in fewer dollars than IT leaders think they need. Preparation for budget negotiations is essential – a well-informed IT leader with valid reasons for budget requests is more likely to get what they need.
Invest the time to understand what resources will be required to meet current service levels, the changes required to support organizational unit plans, and the changes to IT needs. As budget levels are always constrained:
- Understand what the constraints are early; don’t wait to have a budget proposal trashed
- Find ways to reduce expenses on adjustable non-discretionary expenses to create capacity for new initiatives
- Negotiate priorities with the business units; not all demands can be met
- Back-up estimates with evidence of likely costs; be credible
- Provide detailed documentation
Approved budgets determine IT’s capacity. Getting what IT needs to deliver required services should be the objective of the budget process.
Six Simple Steps
Follow these steps to ensure your budget includes resources needed to meet organizational goals:
- Calculate Current Costs
- Expenses to date
- Year-end forecasts
- Pricing changes
- Determine Required Changes
- Volume changes
- Dropped activities
- New initiatives
- Contingencies
- Cost increases
- Develop Estimates
- Budgeting scope
- Cost-saving opportunities
- Changes to current costs
- Cost of projected changes
- Create and Submit Budget Proposal
- Constraints
- Capital vs. operating
- Discretionary vs. non-discretionary
- Effective rationale
- Negotiate
- Prioritize projects with business units
- Negotiate with executives to close the gap between the requested amount and the approved account
- Deal with Final Approvals
- Adjust scope and priorities
- Find further cost-reduction opportunities
- Reduce contingencies
Formal proposals may be tedious, but with accurate projections, IT is better equipped to support and argue their case for cash. 93% of IT leaders surveyed believe budget proposals are necessary for ongoing success in setting and meeting realistic expectations.
Streamline the Process
Most IT leaders (80%) think a workable budget is difficult to produce, but it doesn’t have to be. Streamline estimation, prioritization, and communication to simplify the process.
- Take the time to understand the market and economy, as well as factors specific to the organization, in order to maximize and simplify the budgeting process.
- Use historical data and get vendor quotations to make estimates more accurate.
- Get management to set overall organizational priorities (e.g. increased sales over cost reductions) to frame priority-setting.
- Keep user management informed as to what initiatives are safe and which are threatened by expense reductions.
Five Budget Questions Answered
Understand the organization’s accounting approach before budget preparation.
- Cost centers: where does IT fit? IT cost is generally budgeted in its own cost center. If IT costs are separated across multiple cost centers (e.g. one for applications and one for infrastructure), a distinct budget must be developed for each. If the IT budget is part of a larger department budget (e.g. administration), IT should provide input into the budget for that cost center.
- Revenue and expenses: should I worry about both? While organizational budgets involve both revenue and cost, IT budgets usually include only expenses. Even when IT costs are allocated to various user departments, these allocations are usually not set by IT or tracked as IT revenue.
- Multi-year projects: how will I ensure future funding? Budgets are generally set for one fiscal year. Ensure that management is aware of the multi-year implications of any projects or contracts that span into future fiscal years. Where funding is uncertain, break projects into shorter independent phases.
- Non-discretionary and discretionary events: what do I need to know? The distinction between non-discretionary and discretionary expenses differentiates those parts of the budget that are essential for normal operation (and must be approved) from those that are investments in new solutions or are to improve internal IT performance, and are not required for normal operation.
- Capital expenses and operating expenses: does it make a difference for IT? All organizations distinguish between capital costs and operating costs. However, while some organizations treat the budgeting of IT capital costs in a special way, others consider all IT dollars to be the same.
Three planning factors differentiate budget success from failure: completeness, thoroughness, and inclusiveness. By exerting more effort on detailing all purchases, reviewing all expenses, and meeting with departments to set expectations, your organization is more likely to be successful.
Tags: budget, budget-allocation, budget-management, budgeting, budgets, capacity-planning, capital, discretionary, discretionary-spend, discretionary-spending, expenses, financial, financial-analysis, financial-metrics, financial-planning, financial-reporting, forecasting, it-budget, it-budgets, operational, resource-planning
Posted in Governance, What's New in Research | 1 Comment »
Posted August 26th, 2010 by Info-Tech
From fat access points (APs), to thin APs, to intelligent APs; WLANs have evolved to handle more mission-critical traffic.
The evolution looks like this:
- Fat, standalone APs. The first generation of APs were expensive, disparate, and hard to manage. Adoption was lo and primarily in areas where running Ethernet cable was impractical or unfeasible. Fat APs were deployed to maximize coverage, not capacity.
- Centralized WLANs. Next generation introduced appliance-based controllers, switching traffic to the LAN and better WLAN control. Central control made it easier to deploy wireless intrusion detection solutions (WIDS) and firewalls. Primary use was to allow laptops to roam and make guest access easier.
- Distributed control. APs now have the ability to self-configure channels, switch traffic amongst themselves and handle basic security. Software0-based management on-premise and in the cloud are now available. WLANs now replacing wired LANs and delivering mission-critical apps like voice over WLAN (VoWLAN).
Pros and Cons of WLAN Models
Options for controlling WLANs at branch offices have improved, though some vendors still only offer standard fare. We’ll take a look at three different ways to deploy a WLAN.
Hub and Spoke Model:
Although innovation has made deploying and controlling WLANs at branch offices & retail locations easier than in the past, some solutions still require the deployment of WLAN controllers at each office/store where there will be an AP. Other, newer methods require fewer controllers or no controllers at all.
Pros and cons of the traditional hub and spoke architecture include:
- PRO: This architecture allows for redundancy should the WLAN controller at headquarters (HQ), or the connection between HQ and the branch, go down.
- CON: This architecture prevents new clients from signing onto the WLAN unless authentication is done locally, and is also more expensive than other WLAN architectures.
Central Hub Model
The central hub architecture can reduce upfront costs, but brings its own inherent risks to the table.
The newer central hub architecture requires less cost, but also introduces less fault tolerance in the network. Here an AP is configured to connect to a controller at HQ over the internet or a VPN.
The pros and cons of the central hub architecture include:
- PRO: The central hub architecture requires less hardware, redundant controllers can still be deployed at branches in case the WAN goes down, and overall it should require less administration thanks to centralized control.
- CON: If the WAN goes down and there are no redundant controllers deploying, the WLAN will maintain any existing client connections but cannot authenticate new users on the WLAN unless authentication is performed locally.
Controller-less Model
The controller-less model eliminates the need for physical controllers, but a stable internet connection is required.
The most recent WLAN architecture contains no physical WLAN controllers. All of the APs have the ability to “talk” amongst themselves to handle radio frequency (RF) management, authentication, traffic switching, security, etc. A software-based network management system (NMS) or cloud-based NMS at the vendor’s data center provides the administration interface required.
The pros and cons of the cloud-based model include:
PRO: Less hardware to purchase and install, APs self-configure the network, typically lower TCO.
CON: Internet connection must be available and stable to provide administration over the WLAN, relying on vendor’s data center uptime.
Standards Don’t Solve Every Problem
Vendors aim to differentiate themselves through unique security, management & vertical integration capabilities.
Every vendor providing enterprise WLAN products is using at least a small set of IEEE standards to do so like 802.11i (security), 802.11n (transmission/receiving), and 802.11r (QoS) being the most popular. Given the robustness of the IEEE standards, there is little reason to develop new intellectual properly on the capabilities handled by the standards.
To help differentiate their products, WLAN vendors are instead putting emphasis on integrating value-added applications like RTLS and enhanced security. Many vendors are also developing strong, vendor-agnostic NMS software that can be used in place of existing NMS solutions. This translates into a more effective WLAN solution that is easier to purchase, deploy and manage.
We can help you select the right WLAN Vendor for your situation – check out these tools:
- Enterprise WLAN Vendor Shortlist Tool
- Enterprise WLAN RFP Template
- WLAN Evaluation and RFP Response Tool
- WLAN Product Demo Script Template
Tags: 80211, 80211n, access-point, access-points, ap, benefits-of-wireless-lan, benefits-of-wlan, broadband-wireless, coverage, deploying-wireless-lans, deploying-wireless-lans-for-business-benefit, mobility, networking, networking-equipment, networking-solutions, networking-tools, optimize-wireless-lan, optimize-wlan, radio, rf, voip-over-wlan, wi-fi, wireless, wireless-access, wireless-lan, wireless-lan-business-benefit, wireless-lan-implementation, wireless-lans, wireless-networking, wireless-strategy, wireless-technology, wlan, wlan-benefits, wlan-tools, wlans
Posted in News & Analysis | No Comments »
Posted August 25th, 2010 by Info-Tech
Enterprise wireless local area network (WLAN) deployments continue to propagate, with new wireless standards enhancing performance, reliability and security. Most enterprises have deployed a WLAN and many have deployed, or intend to deploy, an 802.11n-based WLAN.
The majority of enterprises deploy WLANs to complement to existing wired networks, but wireless-only deployments are now in double digits (11%).
Continued WLAN market consolidation has led vendors to focus on differentiating in terms of management, security, integration and application support. Aruba Networks, Cisco and Motorola deliver the strongest overall WLAN offerings but competitors may offer more compelling value depending on company size, industry and application requirements.
Standards ratified since the introduction of 802.11g have made enterprise WLANs much faster and more reliable:
- 802.11n. The final 802.11n standard was ratified and published in October 2009, bringing a much faster theoretical maximum throughput of 300 Mbps per spatial stream
- 802.11k and 802.11r. 802.11k effectively introduces load balancing to a WLAN, ensuring the client is always connect to an access point (AP) that can handle the load instead of the AP with the strongest signal. 802.11r makes the transition to a new AP quick and seamless.
- 802.11i and 802.1x. Full implementation of 902.11i includes AES encryption, and a four way or group key handshake for authentication. 802.1x ensures a client cannot access the protected side of a network until it has provided the appropriate credentials. Both make a WLAN more secure.
- 802.11w. The 802.11w standard introduced protected management frames. Previously, frames controlling applications using the 802.11e Quality of Service (QoS) standard could be disassociated or deuthenticated, kicking those clients off the WLAN.
Wireless Jitters No More
Several vendors began producing 802.11n network hardware as early as mid-2008 based on the 802.11n draft standard available at the time.
Consumers and businesses have been eager to implement WLANs. According to a recent survey, 120% more businesses have deployed a WLAN compared to survey respondents in 2006. Of those with a WLAN, 11% have replaced their wired LANs with a WLAN.
Recent reports have indicated that the enterprise WLAN market is worth over $5 billion, and many vendors of enterprise WLAN equipment are posting record quarterly revenues as 802.11n adoption jumps. 802.11n’s performance, reliability and range have led to increased WLAN deployment.
Enterprise WLAN deployments have grown by 120% since 2006, and 47% of current deployments now support the current 802.11n standard
According to a recent survey, 47% of businesses have deployed 802.11n WLANs and an additional 29% are deploying 802.11n WLANs in the next 24 months. WLANs also enable a new set of services to be deployed, including real-time location systems (RTLS), wireless point-of-sale (POS), and voice over WLAN (VoWLAN).
All three applications should experience at least modest growth over the next 24 months as many organizations look to derive more value from their WLANs.
Large vendors like Belden, Cisco and HP have sought to get a foot into the WLAN market by introducing their own products and acquiring pure play WLAN vendors. In the meantime, companies like Aerohive and Meraki have attempted to gain market share by making WLAN deployment and management easier, introducing cloud-based management interfaces to prospective buyers.
Improved industry standards and vendor innovations have made enterprise Wireless LANs (WLANs) significantly faster, more reliable and secure. Today, enterprises should focus on 802.11n as the basis for new WLAN deployments.
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