The Aruba – AirWave ‘Merger’

After last week’s announcement of the Aruba–AirWave merger, many are asking what’s in store for the newly-acquired AirWave. I mean… merged. (This word tends to bring to mind a really big tail and a really small dog).
If you’re not familiar with AirWave, they make the AMP product, which is a vendor-neutral wireless management solution for handling all the first-string WLAN players – Cisco, ProCurve, Trapeze, Meru, Enterasys, Motorola/Symbol, Proxim.. and yes… Aruba. Light, heavy, dumb and mesh- they do it all. We’d been watching AirWave for a couple of years and fell in love with their solution when we finally saw it in action. Of course, as soon as we become an AirWave partner and start singing it’s praises to our customers they ‘dun went and got themselves acquired’.
But, we’re not worried. Aruba saw the great value and advantage of a vendor-neutral management platform and they intend to keep it as such. To drop the 3rd party support would be extremely disadvantageous for all, so I feel pretty comfortable saying we can all expect to see “AirUbaWave” continue on down it’s current prosperous path.
Even better yet- I think the acquisition will give AirWave the shot in the arm they need to add support for even more vendors’ APs. They’re keeping the full AirWave team, including a group of very knowledgeable SEs and developers.
So, I think we can expect great new things from this new marriage… and it’s likely our customers will soon be seeing an Aruba logo on our site once the deal is sealed in March.
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