No matter how the relevant vendors may portray the issue, reader polls from both our recent and earlier wireless IDS reviews clearly demonstrate that users want one system to solve all their wireless needs. During discussions with overlay vendors, one continually reiterated point was that the marketplace for customers who are willing to pay for and manage a separate overlay solution will remain small, just a few single-digit percentage points of all deployed WLAN infrastructure systems. According to Dell'Oro Group, this year's worldwide revenues will be $1.1 billion. A quick calculation shows that overlay solutions will likely be less than $50 million this year, a figure that falls in line with customer counts and average sales numbers shared with me by AirDefense, one of the market leaders. To break this possibly revenue-limiting cap, all three main vendors have announced partnerships or technical integration to insert their intellectual property into existing WLAN infrastructure systems.
The first to break into the game was AirDefense, with its announcement last year of a partnership with Cisco. AirDefense's solution began by extracting data from Cisco's WLSE (Wireless LAN Solution Engine), feeding it into its own enterprise product, and then circulating some of the data back to WLSE. More relevant to this discussion, though, is the fact that Cisco APs can now serve a secondary purpose as a sensor that provides monitoring information back to AirDefense's enterprise product while still servicing wireless clients. According to AirDefense marketing personnel, joint customers of Cisco and AirDefense were demanding this functionality to eliminate an overlay wireless IDS network. Since Cisco's software APIs have been made available on a non-exclusive basis, both AirTight Networks and AirMagnet have performed similar integration with Cisco's WLSE, although only AirMagnet has incorporated its software into Cisco's APs.
AirMagnet also recently reached agreements with Colubris Networks and relative newcomer Xirrus to roll its technology into these companies' access points. Both enterprise WLAN vendors had minimal wireless IDS functionality in their products at the time, so it made sense to partner with a leading player rather than reinvent the wheel.
The most recent announcement is from Network Chemistry, which revealed its "Open Agent Initiative." The company has OEMed its specialized hardware sensor to the likes of Newbury Networks and WildPackets for some time, but this initiative will provide a royalty-free sensor software agent on Cisco and Symbol platforms, expanding to others in the near future. Despite the amalgamation of its software into the access point, the backend still requires the purchase of Newbury's wireless IDS solution with the accompanying separate management interface. So cabling work has almost been eliminated, but space is still needed in the data center.
In many ways, integration of wireless IDS sensors into enterprise APs was inevitable. It serves the customer by eliminating a duplicate overlay network and provides an opportunity for the wireless IDS vendors to expand their market share. Separate overlay solutions may still be appropriate in certain circumstances, but it's clear, moving forward, that the vast majority of WLAN deployments will be able to take advantage of the highly developed features available from wireless IDS vendors without removing a ceiling tile or pulling one more cable.
