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Network industry watchers have been warning for months that the wireless LAN market has been overfunded and was due for a shakeout.
The tremors have started.
Investors in Legra Systems, a WLAN switch maker that was unable to convert $21 million in venture funding into a sustainable business, have sold the company to two other outfits.
Separately, AirFlow Networks' long-term prospects are looking ever more questionable. CEO Robert Machlin says the company is still in business,still trying to license its technology. But AirFlow's listed phone numbers give callers a continuous busy signal and the company hasn't issued a press release since April, when the company announced it was shifting its focus from selling boxes to licensing its switch-on-a-chip technology.
The survivors among those who reaped some of the hundreds of millions in venture capital put toward WLAN start-ups in recent years interpret these events in a way that vindicates their business acumen and product strategies or, perhaps, their good luck. But the still unanswered question is whether enterprise WLAN deployments will be an overlay to the wired network, by independent vendors such as Airespace and Aruba Wireless Networks,or an extension to the wired network, from incumbents such as Cisco and Extreme Networks.
"A lot of people have been expecting this market to consolidate relatively soon,"says Aaron Vance,senior analyst with Synergy Research Group."This is just the early stages of that."
Airespace and Aruba are generally viewed as the two strongest switch vendors. Others include Chantry, Trapeze Networks and Vivato. But there are scores of other WLAN...