DMR: So how large are your installations usually? 

Paul Curto: They vary in size, the largest installations being in excess of 10,000 access points. Microsoft, for example, falls in this category for large enterprises. We also have educational customers, such as Ohio State University, which is the largest campus in North America. There are also very large deployments in New South Wales in Australia, for example. We had a press release on that in partnership with IBM, where I believe they have 250,000 students, each with their own laptop. And then you have classrooms with a high density of users, 40 or 50 users accessing the network at the same time. So the Wi-Fi needs to be highly scalable in very localized wireless environments like a lecture hall, but also very scalable in terms of the number of sites. We also have clients in large hospitals and retail. One of our showcase customers is Safeway. 

DMR: There must be lots of issues with management, security, deployment, processes, with authorization of devices, with shutting down compromised or rogue devices, all of these things. That sounds fairly complex.

Paul Curto: That’s accurate. And what you have to think about, too, is a lot of our customers have existing backend infrastructure that they want to integrate with.

DMR: I remember four or five years ago everyone was talking about distributing more intelligence to the edge. But what you are describing seems like you are starting to consolidate a lot of intelligence. Is that because price per access point is critical at a deployment of 2,000 access points? Or were there other drivers involved? 

Paul Curto: Price is a driver, although access points by themselves … it’s a highly competitive industry: the prices of access points have been coming down for both the legacy and new products. When 802.11n, the new standard, was announced, there was a first draft of the standard and a lot of the enterprise vendors started releasing products right away at much higher price point. We’ve already seen roughly half of the price points after only a few years having that draft standard. Now it’s a fully ratified standard. And the price point of the actual hardware tends to be dropping. But the real differentiation is in the management software.

That comes back to our controller models. We are making the life of an IT person easier by allowing small teams of people who have some knowledge of Wi-Fi without the need of a [Radio Frequency] Ph. D., to be able to operate large scale enterprise class networks and just deploy the policies that they want on the infrastructure they have the way that they are used to, like for example, their Radius server, their [Lightweight Directory Access Protocol] server. We enable them to leverage a product like Aruba’s controllers to make the deployment of access points very, very simple. The access points tend to be lightweight access points in a sense. There’s not a lot of intelligence that the access points have a priori.