In mid January 2010 Detecon’s Thorsten Claus met with Aruba Networks’ Head of Technical Marketing, Paul Curto on their spacious Sunnyvale campus. The open office space is bustling with engineers huddling over blueprints and pointing at exposed electronics of prototypes with cables hanging out. But more so, software developers are scanning through code, and a whiteboard is densely scribbled with schema and database information and event flows.

Within the past few years Wi-Fi networks became a pervasive commodity within the enterprise. But last year marked a turning point for three reasons: First, the much faster 802.11n standard got ratified in September 2009, and with it more data hungry applications and services will burden the network. Second, the economic downturn made many companies realize that the previous over-provisioning of Ethernet ports created prohibitive costs within the wiring closets for maintenance, software upgrades, and refresh for those ports.  And third, as applications, services, and maintenance move into the cloud, so does the network – and with it the management of its capabilities.

DMR: Hi Paul, great to talk with you. Why don’t you start with telling our readers a bit about what you do?

Paul Curto: I’m Head of Technical Marketing at Aruba Networks. While we’re part of Marketing we like to cut through the high-level marketing messages down to the very deep technical aspects of operations, applications, and benefits.

DMR: By now most Internet users have a Wi-Fi router at home, or know how to use a Wi-Fi hotspot in a café – you might have to enter a security key, you might get a login screen once you fire up your browser, etc. What’s so different between a consumer solution and Aruba Networks’ specialized enterprise mobility solutions?

Paul Curto: Let’s make sure we are talking about apples and apples: When you typically think about a user experience of Wi-Fi, you are thinking about a consumer experience at home, or a small office experience. However, typically in most of the enterprise environments that we work with, an IT department may be responsible for setting up your system, setting up the applications, setting up the identification credentials, up to a point when they hand you your enterprise-class laptop. 

What our solution is targeting is the enterprise Wi-Fi, corporate IT department, the manager of IT – the person who needs to make a decision about investing in Wi-Fi infrastructure. We go as high as the CIO-level. We have to also target the CSO-level and really kind of calm or relay to their concerns about security. There is sometimes the notion that Wi-Fi is inherently unreliable, unsecure – even though one could connect a [Local Area Network] cable in any conference room and very likely get access to a whole flood of unencrypted IP packages on that segment. With Aruba what we offer is a highly scalable, manageable, reliable, and secure enterprise class product. If you want to deploy a pervasive network across the campus this is a much different IT challenge than deploying a single access point in a home environment, where what you really only need is basic access and connecting to a DSL router…

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