Hi Devin, You want some honest feedback??
Aerohive is a yet another typical startup (YATS) from my point of view: Really neat products, highly proprietary, no market share. Let's take look at the last significant enterprise wireless LAN vendor with neat technology. Meru appeared to have made it to the #4 spot in the enterprise market share just a year or two ago has now dropped to #6? Cisco is #1 in market share for enterprise wireless LAN (for a long, long time). Motorola (Symbol) and Aruba in close race for distant #2 (the other is #3)? HP (Colubris) is #4? (Colubris is a good example of a startup with neat technology that survived through acquisition by a brand name - so it's not all bad news for startups :). Alcatel-Lucent appears to be #5?.(although who know how much is really rebranded Aruba) Meru appears to be dropping to #6? It's really hard to be sure about the above except that Cisco is the clear market share leader by a *huge margin*. So where does Aerohive really fit?? The world of wireless LANs has gone from open standards in the early-mid days to a sludge of highly proprietary soup on the back end. Aerohive pushes this even further because the intelligence is distributed. From a technology perspective, that's really interesting but let me put technology aside for a second... As implementers of the technology, few of us ever "mixed and matched" our WLAN infrastructure so it could be argued that going proprietary isn't a big deal after all but it is because all your eggs (APs) are in one basket. With WLAN, you are tied in to a vendor like no other network technology we typically deal with. That has to have an impact on purchasing decisions - you *really* need to worry about the basket you put your eggs in.... You can have the best eggs on earth but the basket is as important (if not more important). Since we are forced to go proprietary on the infrastructure, one of the primary goals that I have is to ensure that we can support standards-based client. Thank goodness that we aren't proprietary on the client side (except for optional "extensions"). The other goal is to make sure that the business (basket) supporting the "proprietary soup" stays in business. For example, one knows that Cisco, Motorola and HP will be around. They are profitable and have significant market share. Cisco might transition between technology but they are fairly good at slowly integrating the technology. Vivato was a good example of a small vendor with *really neat technology* but where are you today if you implemented Vivato? Probably with Vivato equipment in a closet gathering dust and wasting space. They went from the top "neat wireless technology vendor" in 2003 to completely "out of business" in 2006! The problem with Cisco (the clear market leader in this space) is that if you are a small organisation buying Cisco, you'll end up paying for things that you can negotiate if you are big (things like the silly Smartnet on each APs for example, why do you need smartnet when most organisations of any size can carry their own spares? That's a major reason people hate Cisco. I can see if you are smaller organization Cisco might not be a good choice because Cisco might not see the smaller institutions/clients as strategic (and the account managers generally don't care about smaller orgs because it gets them nothing substantial).. But if you deploying any significant size wireless LAN, you need to love risk if you go anything but Cisco, Motorola or HP. Take Meru, they went public, are still losing money and appear to be dropping in market share... Would I consider Meru for a large scale deployment? What about Xirrus for that matter? My decision would not be based on who has the best technology. My questions to you Aerohive, since you put out the question as a vendor trying to promote your products: 1. What's the market share for Aerohive in relation to other significant players in the space and what's your biggest deployment? 2. Is the company well funded and how do we know you are going to be around in XX months? Smaller vendors aren't publicly traded so it's impossible to know how healthy they really are. From the press releases, Vivato appeared to be very well funded just before they closed shop... 3. Is there any effort from the Aerohive side to team up with other smaller players to help develop standards? For the wireless-lan space, it's really difficult it's split between IEEE802 (at layer 1 and 2) and IETF (layer 3) but smaller vendors pushing for standards is what really scares the market leaders so it's a "good thing" to keep everyone honest :-) The other issue is that the "neat' proprietary soup is what differentiates you in the first place - pushing for standards could be difficult because it directly impacts this in a negative way. Any other vendors up for some "open honesty" on this traditionally non-vendor mailing list :) PS I'm happy with my current vendor because: 1. It works well 2. I know they will be in business in X years. PS2 For a small deployment with smaller expose, I would consider Aerohive, Xirrus and others smaller players with neat technology, the only challenge there is you can't buy these things through CDW, Tigerdirect and other distributors smallers orgs would use. So I'd day, focus on your distribution channel and fix your "how to buy" page on your website!! :-) Jonn Martell, Director of Technical Operations with an EDU (but not speaking on the behalf of this EDU, just based on my experience with various large scale wireless LANs) [email protected] On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 9:26 AM, Devin Akin <[email protected]> wrote: > I've been pleasantly surprised at all of the pro/con discussions on various > vendors on this list. I think it's wonderful for everyone to be sharing > their experiences (both positive and negative) about each vendor. That kind > of open honesty helps everyone in the end. To that end, I would love to > pose a completely open-ended question to this group. > > What has everyone's experience been with Aerohive? > > Please feel free to do the pro/con thing, the "my experience" thing (for > better or worse), and any other 'things' that might come to mind. I've > learned quite a bit by reading everyone's posts, and I appreciate the > openness...you just don't see that much anywhere else. > > I'm in large part responsible for Aerohive's customer advocacy, and so in > order to do my job well, I need to know the goods, bads, and uglies of how > we're doing, even if it means asking for people to air our dirty laundry in > public. I'm sure I'll get a good "talking to" by the powers-that-be soon > enough, but sometimes it's easier to get forgiveness than permission. ;) > > If you just can't bring yourself to say something publicly, my contact info > is below, and I'd love to hear from you...even if it's just to yell at me. > :P Feel free to use the email alias [email protected] which drops right > in my inbox. > > Thanks for any positive or negative feedback. Your time is very much > appreciated. > > Devin K. Akin > Chief Wi-Fi Architect > Aerohive Networks > E: [email protected] > C: +1.404.483.2681 > O: +1.770.854.8554 > W: www.Aerohive.com > ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE > Constituent Group discussion list can be found at > http://www.educause.edu/groups/. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
