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Hello,

First I would like to say that I am a great fan of CWNP, especially the vendor neutral approach.

Because we are users of the Juniper wlan products we were given a Juniper Roadmap update from the Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxemburg) sales team. Given the recent annoucements of many wlan vendors (Cisco - cleanair ; Aruba - move ; Aerohive - no further explanation needed ;-) Ruckus - mediaflex etc.etc. I was inquisitive about their vision and comments on the big things happening in present times.

Past :2010 was not a good year for Trapeze when they were still owned by Belden. Innovation nearly came to a standstill and some people (e.g. Matthew Gast) left the company.

Present: Juniper / Trapeze has a good solution for enterprise wlan : the controllers (providing clustering and loadbalancing for AP's) are solid and the management application Ringmaster is one of the finest networking management applications I have ever seen (I have seen many). The solution is very scalable (we went from 1600 concurrent users max to 4000 concurrent users max in three years without mayor problems ; only adding some 40 dual band 802.11a/g/n AP's (the rest is 802.11a/g. No controller bottlenecks seen yet. The product does well in healthcare and educational market. They have a good reseller in the Netherlands with many skilled wifi-engineers.

Future : According to the sales engineer and sales manager many things have changend since the Juniper takeover: the engineering team is being / has been strenghtened and new AP models and controllers are about to be announced. They are picking up pace again. The former Juniper AP's will be embedded in the product line. Spectrum analysis using the features in the Atheros chips are currently in beta. Emphasis on voice (SIP) and video using QoS features. Enhancements on secure fast roaming. Beamforming was also mentioned as development.
They will go along with 802.11ac and ad but according to the reps there will be a long period of co-existence with legacy 802.11a/g/n and STA vendors are not expected to be very quick with mass-introducing devices with support for ac / ad.
They also talked about getting junos-aware controls in their products, fitting in the overall vision of Juniper (flattening the network instead of the three layered Ciso approach), but stressed the fact that the wlan will remain an 'overlay' solution.

Best regards from the Netherlands, RU (http://twitter.com/#!/rovinguser)