InformationWeek: One big theme at Interop this year is consumerization. When you talk to CIOs, how do you see that playing in to their Wi-Fi strategies?
Gates: Absolutely. That is a big attitudinal shift that we're seeing. In the past it's absolutely been about, "I'm locking down my network. I don't want to have Wi-Fi at all. If I must, I'll put it in the conference rooms, but only under duress, and if the CEO wants it I'm putting an access point in his office, but no one else."
Then with iPads and these devices that don't have RJ45s in them, people are bringing their own devices. I've got an iPad, I'm bringing it to the office. I've got my own smartphone, I'm bringing it to the office. Why is it that at home I can have coverage and Wi-Fi everywhere, but I can't get it in the office?
There's this almost revolt occurring, and you're seeing this shift in attitude where they see the tsunami, and you talk to these guys and they finally realize, "OK, I've got to figure out how to support the whole bring-your-own-device movement. I've got to make iPads workable anywhere." The difference in the past is you'd pick up your notebook and you'd go to a conference room. At your desk, you're on the wire. Conference room, wireless, but I don't need wireless anywhere else. Now with an iPad, I need wireless at my desk.
InformationWeek: All those students are coming out of college, too.
Gates: All those kids at Carnegie-Mellon, with their average of three Wi-Fi devices. As they move into the workforce, they're part of that tsunami, they're part of that revolt. So I think we are seeing more interest in our solutions from folks that have figured out they have to embrace the bring-your-own-device, they have to go from hotspots and conference rooms to pervasive Wi-Fi throughout their facility. And by the way, they don't want to bankrupt themselves by pulling millions of feet of cable and adding even more Ethernet switch ports to their infrastructure when they already know that half of them aren't used. It's a frustrating thing. They just want to pull out those old RJ45s and reuse them for APs. That attitudinal shift in the enterprise to pervasive Wi-Fi is something we're picking up on. People are saying, "OK, I've got to figure out how to do this, do it cost effectively, but I gotta make sure that those iPads work at your desk.
InformationWeek: What do you think are the chances of organizations going from wired at every work cube to going completely wireless, pervasively? And here's where it's not a softball question: Tell me why.
Gates: I don't think the wire goes away.
InformationWeek: You don't?
Gates: They're going to like ice cream, but you know, they like cake as well. But the difference is there will be less cake. So right now, [in most companies,] I'm going to venture to guess that half or two-thirds of those Ethernet taps aren't used. The constant mindset for Ethernet deployment has been over-provision. As long as I'm putting this stuff in, I'm going to pull extra cables. Why just one RJ45 to your cube when I can put in three? 'Cause that's going to go to a phone, and maybe you'll need something else.
So there's been this massive over-provision and this inflated market. That I think gets right-sized. I think that in the future we're not going to be pulling extra cable to your cube, one tap will do, you don't need three, because I've got the Wi-Fi network. So you're going to see this shift toward right-sizing the provisioning of wire and starting to go from an under-provisioned Wi-Fi approach, where people use it just in the conference rooms, or maybe the barest, thinnest of coverage in the building, to starting to think about over-provisioning Wi-Fi. I'm going to put up more radios than I potentially need today but knowing that I'm going to have increased use in the future.
InformationWeek: The benefit to the organization is?
Gates: That now I can support you bringing your own device. In the future, I don't have to be buying notebooks for everybody. I don't have to be buying iPads. I'll let you pick your own. By the way, pay for it yourself. And I can let you bring your own phone in. The phone's already gone that way. You go back a decade ago, people were supplying phones as part of the business. That doesn't even happen today. "I'm going to pick my own phone, it's going to be what I want to use, and I'm going to use it, and if you don't help me I'm going to figure out a way around you." And notebooks are sort of trending that way, and I'm sure that companies aren't giving away the best notebooks, so people are just saying, "I don't want your standard issue; I'm going to bring in my own." And iPads have just blown the thing wide open.
So, if they embrace bring-your-own-device, it can actually make their life easier in terms of not having to enforce that standardization in a militaristic sort of way. It can save them money. And, it changes the whole daily workflow for the IT guys. They're not configuring machines and handing them out, saying, "Don't change it." They're going to have to figure out how to support all the things that come in. There is a cost savings to the business, but it's a different day for the IT guy.
And, I've got two boys in college who don't know what an RJ11 is. They've never had to dial in with an analog modem. I've got two little ones that are in fourth and fifth grade as well, and I'm going to tell you that by the time they reach college, they're not going to know what an RJ45 is. They've never used an Ethernet tap in their life. The boys used to, but these two little ones, give them another five or 10 years, and they're going to be out there, like, what's an RJ45?
InformationWeek: One last question. What's your take on the swing from dumb controller to smart controller, dumb AP to smart AP?
Gates: We used to in Wi-Fi have the luxury, because we had very low speeds, of pulling all the traffic back to a controller, decrypting, doing our encryption-decryption there, doing all of our traffic-flow management in a centralized controller. And when you've got your top data rates of 54 megabits, you can do that for quite a few devices.
Now that the data rates have moved to 300 megabits, and they're moving to 450 megabits, and with the standards on the horizon you're going to be at Gigabit-plus speeds in the air, trying to funnel all that traffic back to a central controller becomes very untenable. You're going to have to have tens or hundreds of gigabits of throughput in that controller.
So just as Ethernet moved the intelligence out to the edge so as soon as it comes off the client devices, you handle it and take care of it, intelligence is going to be distributed and moved right back out to the edge in Wi-Fi. You're going to have to be able to handle that sort of traffic. We started that way from day one. We put controllers in each of our devices at the edge, we do all of the filtering and encryption-decryption, everything right there so you don't have to worry about bottlenecking at a controller.
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