Wireless Expense Management Feature: Wireless LAN Market Strengthens in Q3

The worldwide wireless LAN market grew to more than $1 billion in the third quarter, according to an industry report this week that attributes the surge in large part to the increased spending in the healthcare and education sectors.

A recently published report by Dell’ (News - Alert)Oro Group also credits the market boost to a rise in sales of higher valued 802.11n products.

“Second quarter 2009 supply constraints were largely resolved, and overall wireless LAN market revenues rebounded to pre-2009 recession levels,” said Loren Shalinsky, senior analyst of wireless LAN research at Dell’Oro Group.

 

“During the third quarter, the overall market was boosted by strong growth in the enterprise segment. In particular, Cisco benefitted from strong sales in North America and HP showed strength in the hospitality sector with sales of their integrated wireless LAN and wired access device,” she said.

According to the report, product revenues for Cisco, HP and Enterasys each grew more than 30 percent in the third quarter. HP’s wireless LAN product revenues were the strongest ever, growing more than 60 percent in the third quarter.

 

Businesses are spending more money on mobile voice and data services than ever, and that trend has created a need for end-to-end mobile management services, especially in the area of wireless expense management.

 

An Aberdeen (News - Alert) Report from earlier this year showed that organizations increased their level of mobility spend even as their overall IT budgets decreased because of the productivity gains realized through effective mobility deployments.

 

According to Fernando Oliveira, director of business development of Wireless Analytics, the enterprise will continue to see tremendous expansion in the wireless LAN space.

 

“It it is not difficult to envision that as more and more devices are embedded with inexpensive chipsets that the wireless LAN will take on the similarity of a utility: robust, fast, consistent and ubiquitous,” he said. “The remote mobile users are now driving the type of devices that require large amounts of bandwidth that the wireless LAN can deliver – it does bring another layer of complexity to the IT infrastructure, but it’s unavoidable.

 

For example, he said that T-Mobile (News - Alert) has had some success with their UMA platform, or voice over Wi-Fi, and Google is planning to roll out devices that are carrier neutral.

 

“This all boils down to a paradigm shift beginning to occur in the wireless carrier/wireless LAN space. The next two to three years will be very exciting in terms of IT/telecom and the continued growth of wireless LAN and the need for managed services.”