Written by: Sathyaraj R
Manager: Girish Solanki
Frost & Sullivan’s Excellence in Technology Award is bestowed upon the company that has pioneered the development and introduction of an innovative technology into the market - a technology that has either impacted or has the potential to impact several market sectors. This Award recognizes a company’s successful technology development that is expected to bring significant contributions to the industry in terms of adoption, change, and competitive posture. It also recognizes the overall technical excellence of a company and its commitment towards technology innovation.
Research Methodology
To choose the Award recipient, Frost & Sullivan’s analyst team tracks technology innovation in key hi-tech markets. The selection process includes primary participant interviews and extensive primary and secondary research via the bottom-up approach. The analyst team shortlists candidates on the basis of a set of qualitative and quantitative measurements. The analyst also considers the pace of technology innovation, the potential relevance or significance of the technology to the overall industry. The ultimate Award recipient is chosen after a thorough evaluation of this research.
Measurement Criteria
In addition of the methodology described above, there are specific criteria used to determine the final rankings. The recipient of this Award has excelled based on one or more of the following criteria:
AirWave’s platform allows businesses to accurately plan their RF environments, monitor increasingly mobile users and network utilization, detect RF interference and other common problems, configure networks properly to guarantee security and performance, and identify unauthorized wireless devices in the network. But AirWave is unique in its ability to support multiple hardware vendors’ products, providing administrators sophisticated RF management functionality while avoiding vendor lock-in. Unlike vendor-specific solutions based on proprietary hardware platforms, AMP is a flexible software solution that integrates seamlessly into any network environment and scales to support the largest wireless LANs on multiple campuses worldwide.
AMP gives administrators a single, integrated browser-based console from which to manage their geographically distributed, heterogeneous network infrastructures. AMP delivers: (1) reduced wireless LAN support costs, (2) superior WLAN performance for mission-critical applications, (3) uniform application and enforcement of security policies across the network infrastructure, (4) vendor flexibility, and (5) seamless integration rather than duplication of existing network infrastructure.
AirWave has come a long way from its first commercial version of the AMP software that it shipped in early 2002. Since then it has made several changes to its software to meet the needs of clients. In August 2004, AirWave released version 3.0 of the AirWave Management Platform. Today, AirWave software is used by IT organizations in a variety of enterprise environments, including Fortune 500 companies, hospitals, universities and other institutions, and wireless Internet service providers. The company has achieved 100%+ annual growth in sales for the past two years, and is garnering the interest of organizations, resellers and integrators across industries.
The major challenge for AirWave technology is the rate of adoption of wireless within the enterprise. Through much of 2003 and early 2004, many enterprises have delayed large-scale Wi-Fi deployments over concerns related to security or Total Cost of Ownership. But now that vendors and standards bodies have addressed many of the issues surrounding first-generation Wi-Fi technology, organizations are moving forward with large-scale WLAN deployments. WLAN management solutions such as the AirWave Management Platform are the key to reducing support costs and network TCO.
Most enterprise IT staff has little or no experience managing RF networks: measuring coverage areas, detecting RF interference, monitoring mobile users, etc. Specialized solutions like AMP give experienced ethernet administrators the ability to efficiently manage RF networks to deliver predictable, reliable, and secure Wi-Fi service. Of these solutions, the AirWave Management Platform™ (AMP) is perhaps the only network management software that provides an easy-to-use, web-based console that gives network administrators a single point of intelligent control from which to automatically monitor, analyze, and configure complex, multi-vendor wireless network infrastructures in real-time. AMP is a 100% software solution that installs on standard PC server hardware, typically in one or more Network Operations Centers (NOC).
With corporate managers eager to realize efficiencies and reduce network costs, the IT mandate is usually quite clear: find a way to integrate multiple existing networks rather than treating their networks as stand-alone “islands.” Enterprises will increasingly come to view all their networks – wired and wireless, voice and data, local area and wide area networks -- as part of one seamless network infrastructure. AirWave Wireless will play a leading role in helping organizations achieve this “one network” vision by giving them flexible, standards-based tools to manage the wireless infrastructure while integrating seamlessly into an overall management solution.
AirWave will help lead the wireless industry away from proprietary, single-vendor solutions that lock organizations into proprietary, single vendor solutions that deprive them of the opportunity to take advantage of important gains in security, throughput, and manageability.
AMP has been designed from the ground-up as a standards-based, vendor neutral
management solution with an efficient Common Object Model for multi-vendor
management at its core. The software today supports Wi-Fi hardware from leading
vendors like 3Com, Artem, Avaya, Cisco, Colubris, Enterasys, HP ProCurve, Proxim
ORiNOCO, Symbol, and others. AirWave constantly implements support for new
manufacturers and models, giving it the ability to manage the broadest range of
vendors. Such broad excellence in innovation and product development has helped
AirWave Wireless Inc. maintain a technology leadership position in the industry and
this is why the company has been recognized with Frost & Sullivan’s Network
Management Solutions Excellence in Technology of the Year Award.
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