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Hi Devin:

I think Mr. Orr is saying that WLAN hardware soon will be dead as a profit center for cutting edge technology companies such as his. Commodity oriented WLAN companies will have huge sales, and normal profit margins, as WLAN becomes as ubiquitous and as well understood as Ethernet. I think he would agree that there is a rosy future yet for WLAN training.

Apparently Mr. Orr's company has identified a more exciting (greater risk, potentially higher profit margin) market for security that encompasses both wired and wireless LANs, but which only exists because of a very lively WLAN industry. He calls it "secure mobility". See the extract below from the article you cite.

I hope this helps. Thanks /criss


"The security architecture for wired nets, based on using physical port-based conventions, won't work," he says. "You need specific, user-oriented identification, content and location data [to secure the net]."

This is where the emerging enterprise battleground lies, according to Orr.

"'WLAN' is, if not dead, then uninteresting," he says. "Once it's 'spec-able' by the IEEE, most of the profit goes the silicon makers. Eighteen months after 802.11n is standardized, the WLAN is no longer an interesting business. It's a very small window, and it's quickly being commoditized."

But it creates a huge hole in the traditional enterprise security model, which assumes the person at the far end of a wire linked to a specific switch port is the person who is supposed to be sitting at that desk.

What's needed is 'secure mobility' as a logical add-on to the enterprise net, he says.

This will become increasingly obvious and increasingly urgent as more enterprise workers become mobile. Today, only about 5% of workers are mobile, but that will rise to over 20% in two or three years, says Orr.