Airespace ventures into Euro Wi-Fi market

Airespace, the San Jose, Calif., developer of Wi-Fi management and switching solutions, has announced its first European customer and reseller partners, along with an intensified strategic focus that reflects the rapid growth of enterprise wireless LAN market opportunities on the continent.

The company said the customer is Imtech Telecom, a Dutch network systems integrator that specializes in building fixed and mobile networks in the European, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) market region. Imtech actually was impressed enough while evaluating Airespace’s AireWave Director, Control System software, WLAN switch, access point and other products that it decided to deploy the technology in it own corporate network, Imtech officials said.

Airespace also announced new partnerships with other systems integrators and resellers--Softway in France; Avanet in the Netherlands; Applynet solutions, NBAserv and Sigma in the United Kingdom; and worldnet21 in Spain.

"In Europe, whilst much of the attention has focused on the WLAN hotspot market, the immediate opportunity is in the enterprise WLAN market," said Marcel Dridje, general manager of EMEA at Airespace and a 20-year veteran of the pan-European networking industry.

In fact, the European enterprise WLAN market is being seen by some market watchers as having more near-term commercial opportunities for vendors than the U.S. enterprise WLAN market, in which deployment is widely acknowledged to be progressing slower than had been expected.