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ShareBluesocket Voices Metamorphisis With Pingtel Acquisition
Posted by
Frank Bulk
August 13, 2007
Enterprise Wi-Fi vendor Bluesocket signaled a significant change in the company's direction with the acquisition of SIP PBX vendor Pingtel for an undisclosed sum. As the company would have you understand it, a shift of this magnitude and direction has been in the works for some time, but it's not unprecedented. Almost all the Wi-Fi vendors have been moving up the stack: Cisco has a locationing appliance and announced a more vertically focused sales strategy for its wireless networking business unit; Aruba has shared and made some measureable progress on its FMC (fixed mobile convergence) initiatives, and Trapeze offer a Wi-Fi location appliance. That's not to speak of the Vo-Fi rhetoric from all the enterprise Wi-Fi vendors, including Meru Networks.
Bluesocket CEO Mads Lillelund joined the company in April, ostensibly to turn the company around. Bluesocket's legacy lies in Wi-Fi enterprise gateways, primarily serving the higher education market who were early adopters of stand-alone APs but needed a way to manage access, enforce security, and control traffic flows. Vernier Networks was also in this space but changed direction towards NAC several years ago, as was ReefEdge. With the advent of wireless switch vendors such as Airespace, Aruba, and Trapeze, alternative deployment and management mechanisms came into play that diminished the role for enterprise gateways. More than a year ago Bluesocket introduced its own access points, including a MIMO-enabled one. But Bluesocket never has always been in the 'Other' row of analyst reports and it was unlikely that would change. In the meantime, it has succeeding in diversifying its customer base and at least one-third of their customers are enterprises and another 10% and growing are in the healthcare space.
Bluesocket claims that their synergy as single company has already won them deals on both Wi-Fi and PBX sides of the house, and in Q4 they plan to announce a more formal FMC strategy with product in the first half of 2008. With no stated plans to partner with other PBX vendors, Bluesocket's potential FMC customer base will likely remain as narrow as the number of customers willing to buy their Wi-Fi and/or PBX solution. It may be a case where one plus one does not quite equal two, but that this will give te company what it needs to remain relevant.
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