Gartner Breaks Down the Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure Space

As vendors have narrowed the gap between wired and wireless environments, Gartner brings both ends of the access layer together in their Magic Quadrant for the Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure. In this report Gartner’s Tim Zimmerman and Mark Fabbi highlight vendors that offer standard network components providing connectivity to the infrastructure through both LAN and WLAN capabilities. They outline today’s standard requirements in terms of frequency, connectivity and management functions.
Gartner also highlights some of the industry emergences they have observed: The 802.11n standard becoming the mainstay for most enterprise environments. A shift from physical controller offerings to application or cloud based management functionality. A growth in 1 gigabit access switch offering. The emergence of WLAN managed services supplementing managed security for those enterprises that do not have the capabilities to implement a complex WLAN.
Per usual, Gartner evaluates vendors meeting a certain set of criteria, highlighting “Strengths” and “Cautions” in an attempt to offer the information necessary for users to make suitable decisions when evaluating LAN and WLAN product offerings.