The total enterprise wireless LAN market, including
access points and controllers, was worth $757 million in Q2 2011, with 1.6
million units shipped, according to Canalys.

The top five wireless LAN vendors in Q2 2011 were Cisco,
Aruba Networks, Motorola Solutions, HP Networking and Meru Networks.

All vendors reported strong growth, but Cisco remained
the leader with year-on-year shipment revenue up 35.6 percent and a slight
market share increase to 53.7 percent from 53.4 percent.

Aruba Networks, including sales through OEM partner
Alcatel-Lucent, was Cisco’s closest challenger, growing above average at 41.5
percent to capture 14.6 percent of the market.

Motorola Solutions, meanwhile, showed the strongest
growth among the top five, up 52.3 percent, thanks to its retail, transport and
leisure industry sales. Building on its 2008 acquisition of wireless LAN
specialist Colubris Networks and its 2010 purchase of 3Com, HP Networks
accounted for 7.8 percent of total shipment revenue in Q2 2011.

As consumers boost both public cloud investment and
mobile device adoption in the enterprise, the real winners will be wireless LAN
vendors capable of steering government and business organizations to the right
networking environments.

The need for pervasive Wi-Fi connectivity due to the
proliferation of mobile devices, especially smart phones and pads, was a key
driver of market growth this past quarter.

To support advancing app and Internet use on smart phones
and pads, expanding wireless LAN coverage in private and public environments,
such as education campuses, offices, hotels, airports, hospitals, retail
outlets and manufacturing facilities, generated ongoing revenue opportunities.

The shift to the 802.11n standard, which augments
bandwidth and access point coverage areas to support a higher density of
devices, also contributed to market growth, by driving a healthy refresh cycle
in existing wireless LAN environments.

North America and Asia Pacific were the fastest growing
wireless LAN regions year-on-year at 42.9 percent and 45.7 percent
respectively. Even the challenging EMEA market grew 30.7 percent year-on-year.
All industry sectors registered solid increases in wireless LAN networking,
with extensions a frequent source of growth.

Moving forward, the hospitality field will continue to
roll out wireless LANs to entire conference facilities and lobbies, as well as
supporting in-room services. Educational environments, meanwhile, are expected
to expand their deployments to include a greater number of classrooms,
dormitories and lecture theaters. Regardless of the industry, service providers
are progressively turning to Wi-Fi technologies to help support their mobile
users’ demand for data, as cellular networks become overburdened.

As more wireless-only devices hit the market – and
consumers bring those devices into the enterprise – building and maintaining
the appropriate wireless LAN environment has become a vital business
consideration. Canalys forecasts worldwide pad shipments will grow from 45
million units in 2011 to over 113 million in 2015, and worldwide smart phone
shipments will increase from 455 million units to 864 million in the same
period.

Without a suitable wireless LAN strategy, a business
will soon find its existing networking deployments overwhelmed,” said Alex
Smith, analyst at Canalys. There is a lot of hype around the cloud, but the
first step in taking advantage of shared resources is ensuring that the maximum
number of users and devices can access them.”

By Telecomlead.com Team
[email protected]