Adtran has purchased enterprise Wi-Fi vendor Bluesocket and plans to leverage Bluesocket's virtualized wireless LAN solution.
Adtran is betting that enterprises will want to add a virtual wireless architecture as they make the move to 802.11n technology. Bluesocket's value proposition is one that allows customers to eliminate the costs and overhead of hardware controllers and bolster the back end to cope with the flood of Wi-Fi devices.
Rather than using a conventional WLAN hardware controller, Bluesocket's 802.11n access points communicate with a software application that is loaded into a VMware hypervisor, thus creating a "virtual WLAN controller" that centralizes management functions such as configuration and security.
Adtran and Bluesocket argue that scaling is difficult in the conventional controller era, and the volume of Wi-Fi traffic is growing exponentially thanks to Wi-Fi smartphones and tablets.
The deal also has a number of benefits for the service provider community, which, for example, could use Bluesocket's technology to deliver WiFi-based virtual cloud services.
In announcing the deal, Adtran said that service providers "will also benefit from the unique ability to offer new cloud-based wireless services where both management and control are centralized in a secure data center."
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
For more:
- see this Network World article
- see the release
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