Who says you cannot teach an old do new tricks? If you could, this would be important, especially when the old dog cost a lot of money. Businesses would be delighted to know that Aruba and Airwave have teamed up to offer businesses with unmanaged legacy WLAN infrastructure a way to move to a centralized, switch-managed WLAN.

When WLAN came on the scene, the emphasis was on distributed, stand-alone, thick APs. There is a limit to what this type of architecture can deliver, and the tide has turned toward centralized, switch-managed design. Trouble is, many businesses have invested in the distributed scheme, and moving to a centralized system would be costly and disruptive. Aruba's Gary Singh says: "This tie-up is designed to protect firms' investments in second-generation legacy access points. We're offering to manage what you have in place this minute, giving a much smoother transition to a centrally managed architecture. This solution is not limited to any type of deployment." 

It is estimated that there are about 5 million stand-along APs (some have taken to calling them "orphan" APs) around the world, and the Aruba-Airwave solution would offer the owners of these APs a vendor-independent migration path toward centralized switching. Infonetics predicts that enterprise WLAN sales will more than double by 2009 to reach $2.4 billion. Cisco is the leader in enterprise WLAN equipment, followed by Symbol, Aruba, 3Com, and Trapeze.

For more on Aruba-Airwave solution:
- take a look at this press release