Symbol Snatched by Motorola for Enterprise Mobility

On September 19th Motorola and Symbol Technologies announced a definitive merger agreement, under which Motorola has agreed to acquire all outstanding shares of Symbol. The transaction has a total equity value of approximately $3.9 billion. Symbol will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Motorola.

Recommended Competitive Responses

► Direct WLAN competitors to Motorola/Symbol should refresh themselves on the weaknesses in the Symbol WLAN solution and refresh their resellers and channel partners in the next four months.

► Competitors with more complete connectivity solutions that include wired access should approach sales situations against Motorola/Symbol with the attitude that having only one vendor for your infrastructure needs is an advantage in service and reliability.

► ProCurve by Hewlett-Packard should increase its existing partnership with Symbol once the acquisition is completed. Motorola will need a strong wired infrastructure partner and ProCurve is in a good position to be that partner. Motorola can help ProCurve continue its rise in the infrastructure market.

Recommended End User/Customer Responses

► Current Symbol customers should not be worried about the acquisition by Motorola. If anything, it should give current customers a wider selection of products and a stronger company in the long run.

► Customers that are considering a Symbol solution should not shy away because of the acquisition. It will not have any effect until it is final and even then it is unlikely that Motorola will seriously disrupt Symbol’s operation.

► Customers that have not considered a Symbol solution in the past should at least evaluation a solution once the transaction is complete.

More Competitive Intelligence/Enterprise Mobility - U.S.
Motorola Buys Symbol, a Potentially Big Boost to Its Enterprise Initiatives

► Current Perspective: Slightly positive on Motorola’s planned acquisition of Symbol Technologies, a leader in the market for ruggedized enterprise digital assistants (EDAs) as well as WLAN-based retail and factory floor asset management, data capture, and transaction/payment systems. The acquisition not only opens up opportunities for both companies, but it also signals a possible blending of WLAN and WAN devices and data applications for the enterprise (beyond receiving e-mail from hotspots).

Cisco Steps Up to the Plate in WAN Optimization with WAAS Solution

On September 5th Cisco announced its Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) and Wide-Area File Services (WAFS) strategy for the branch office. Cisco also introduced a network module for running WAAS software on the Cisco integrated services router (ISR). The Cisco WAAS solution includes the Cisco WAAS software and the Cisco Wide-Area Application Engine (WAE) appliance family as well as new network modules (WAE-NM) that integrate with Cisco's popular 2800, 3700, and 3800 Series Integrated Services Routers.

Recommended Competitive Responses

► Competitors need to wipe their existing competitive knowledgebase clean and prepare new collateral to compete with Cisco. Due to the comprehensive changes that came with Cisco WAAS, competitors need to ensure that salespersons and channels are clearly aware of which competitive bullets remain relevant.

► Competitors need to take immediate internal actions to form a technical competitive response to Cisco’s new WAAS solution.

► Competitors need to prepare to fight a battle over transparent vs. tunneled architectures. Cisco, with its router-integrated technology, is strongly asserting to customers that a tunneled architecture compromises network visibility and limits functionality.

► Competitors need to look for opportunities to embed WAN optimization technology in other branch office appliances, such as integrated firewall/VPN devices, to combat Cisco’s push to deliver WAAS as an ISR module.

► Competitors with a viable asymmetric WAN optimization solution, most notably Citrix/Orbital Data, need to fast-track their efforts to deliver a “clientless” solution for the branch office.

Recommended End User/Customer Responses

► Customers that have overlooked Cisco WAFS in the past should revisit Cisco’s offering with the WAAS release, as Cisco has significantly improved its overall functionality.

► Customers should evaluate Cisco solutions against Juniper WXC, Riverbed, Citrix (Orbital Data), Expand Networks, Silver-Peak, Packeteer, BlueCoat, and F5. Customers should closely consider performance as well as manageability, total cost of ownership, and ease of deployment in their environments.

► Customers need to clearly understand the pros and cons of a transparent deployment versus a tunneled deployment. Transparent deployments offer greater flexibility in managing and making decisions about traffic after compression, but typically require more network changes than a tunneled solution.

Matisse Networks Commercializes Optical Burst Switching

On September 18th, at Optical Expo 2006, Matisse Networks announced availability of the EtherBurst optical switch consisting of the SX-1000 Ethernet Switching Node, the PX-1000 photonic Node and the MatisseView management system. The vendor positions the EtherBurst system as the first optical burst switch that is purpose built for scaling metro aggregations network from 10 Gbps to 640 Gbps of capacity.

Competitive Concerns

► The success (or failure) of Matisse’s OBS-based solution is based on the notion that carriers will be willing to accept fundamental changes in their current metro Ethernet transport and switching architectures.

► Although OBS technology is well known in the optical R&D community, the fact is that it will require network operators to accept a fundamental change in their optical network architectures.

► Matisse Networks is a small start-up that might not have the resources to maintain an expanded scale of operations.

► The trial that Matisse Networks announced was with a research network operator. It is no secret that research networks are much more progressive than commercial telecom carriers in terms of the technologies that they are wiling to deploy.

Fall VON 2006: Sylantro Makes a Strong Move toward the Mobile Market

On September 12th Sylantro Systems announced enhancements to the Sylantro Synergy application servers that allow wired and wireless phones to seamlessly interoperate to deliver business phone features to enterprise workers. The new software release allows carriers and network equipment vendors to fully integrate mobile handsets into business VoIP delivered by the Synergy hosted application server.

Competitive Concerns

► While the Synergy 4.1 release ushers in the ability for mobile operators to offer many of the features on the Sylantro application server to mobile handsets, the actual delivery of those features is dependent on the sophistication of client software. Sylantro is not in the client software business, making it dependent on its handset partners to exploit the full capabilities of its application server.

► Sylantro’s announcement, though it offers competitive differentiation, is likely to be greeted by a chorus of “we can do that, too” from Sylantro’s competitors.

► Sylantro needs to be more definitive regarding the feature transparency between mobile and wireline-connected handset. Given the low bandwidth of some 2G access technologies and shortcoming of processing resources on most mobile devices, relative to a PC, it is likely that many PBX-like features will not be immediately available from a mobile device.

► As Sylantro continues to add partners, distributors and resellers, it risks alienating existing partners that might feel that it can no longer effectively differentiate its offering from those offered by Sylantro’s other partners.

CTIA Wireless IT: Ubiquisys Teams with Kineto on Femtocell Integration

On September 12th Ubiquisys and Tatara announced their collaboration on a femtocell solution leveraging Tatara’s Mobile Services Convergence Platform. Where Ubiquisys will supply 3G femtocells, Tatara will supply an IMS-compliant tool for integrating these femtocells into existing 3G networks. Separately, Ubiquisys announced a similar partnership with Kineto, leveraging Kineto’s UMA products to integrate femtocells into an operator’s mobile core.

Competitive Concerns

► The mechanism by which Ubiquisys’ femtocells will leverage UMA or IMS in the network core is not well explained. If Ubiquisys wants would-be customers to take its new solution seriously – or at least understand the interplay between UMA, IMS and femtocells - it needs to explain the offer in deeper detail.

► Ubiquisys’ announcements fail to detail the specific benefits of using UMA or IMS as network integration tool. .

► Even when tied to a UMA core, femtocell strategies represent a mass-market, consumer interaction with mobile operator infrastructure, on a level operators have never before experienced. This interaction sets operators up for a flood of customer service calls and support issues as end-users begin to deploy (or at least attempt to) their femtocells.

► Kineto and Tatara can both point to FMC customers. When it comes to integrating a mass of consumer electronics devices into an operator’s network, major wireless vendors supplying core network infrastructure have considerably greater clout.