Fluke to Acquire AirMagnet
Eric Hal Schwartz8/14/09
Everett, WA-based Fluke Networks, a network service provider company, announced today in a press release that it will acquire Sunnyvale, CA-based AirMagnet a wireless LAN service provicer. Fluke provides for the installation, certification, testing, monitoring and analysis of networks including fiberoptic and wireless. According to the release, adding AirMagnet’s technology will improve the services provided by Fluke for wireless LAN networks, an increasingly popular option for computer networks. Financial details were not disclosed.
Eric Hal Schwartz was an intern in Xconomy's Seattle office.
Mikko Kaarela
8/17/09 4:18 am
This acquisition reflects the on-going trend to gradually replace cable-LAN with Wi-Fi (don’t forget Motorola/AirDefense deal either). That in turn requires robust End-to-End Quality of Service monitoring.
The specific challenge in this area relates to the radio communication between the Access Point and the wireless client. In particular, intermittent radio disturbancies cause a lot of headache and cost to IT Network Support and lack of 7×24 QoS monitoring effectively prevents use of WLAN for business critical applications, not to mention migration from LAN to WLAN.
Anyone interested in these trends should also take a look at the Finnish Red Herring Gobal 100 Award winner 7signal (see http://www.7signal.com).