The software giant would have been a prize win for Sunnyvale, California-based Aruba even it Microsoft hadn’t been a Cisco customer, given the fact that it currently runs some 5,000 APs around its campuses and now plans to serve 25,000 simultaneous users at 227 buildings in 60 countries.
Such a contract puts Aruba firmly in the Big Time, no matter how big the volume discounts and publicity discounts Microsoft must have demanded to sign on the dotted line.
Ousting Cisco’s first-generation fat APs with its switched architecture and thin access points only serves to sweeten the taste of victory still further, particularly as San Jose, California-based Cisco snapped up the largest of the WLAN switch vendors, Airespace, at the beginning of this year, arguing at the time that it had cherry-picked the most successful of the three (the other is Trapeze).
Aruba started out at the high end in WLAN switching and, to this day, it has the support for the largest number of APs on a single switch (512, in fact). This is certain to have influenced Microsoft in its choice, given the sheer volume of APs it intends to deploy.
One wonders, however, whether the growing competition between Microsoft and Cisco in areas such as network security (NAC vs. NAP) and VoIP may not have swayed it towards Aruba, giving the latter a massive fillip and potentially turning it into a more serious competitor to Cisco/Airespace. And a potential partner for Microsoft in breaking into enterprise accounts into the bargain…
