Currently competition among the LAN and Wireless LAN infrastructure getting more tight. Although the incumbent as we know Cisco still leading the market. But with other vendor has improve their feature, more competitive in price and make cooperation with many partner to distribute make the competitive landscape has changed and push the incumbent to keep watch about the progress of this challenger. Vendor that are recognize that is challenger for incumbent are Juniper, HP Network,Aruba, Huawei Extreme network, Tellabs.
Infrastrucutre vendor must see and can predict what will the consumer intention and preferable from each of their product whether its Standalone access point, Access point controller or wireless outer. This trend. We saw that some of the product that using 802.11 G has seen the shifting trend and prepared this as bridging strategy to the newer,faster and more functional feature in 802.11n. Besides that they must set the strategy in the price aspect cause we see some of the access point with controller enabled under 802.11n for less than $300 and this is how the vendor positioning themselves in the market
WLAN vendors continue to improve their functionality in aspect of security,reliability, control access and one of the most important aspect is user friendly configuration so the consumer are able to commissioning the device easily.
That for residential user, but different case for Enterprise user cause each of the company has their own policy and usage of their wireless LAN needs to support their business process.
Some of the point that become concern of the enterprise segment are :
· Identifying potential issues and resolving them
· Provide better quality in Voice,video and data communication with some case bandwidth limitation as constrain
· Have complete network management that administrator can take control
· Identify overlap coverage,dual home access points and mesh network capabilities
· Ensure the owner/enterprise about security aspect of this wireless infrastructure
On this case there is a tools to map the market situation based on their specific characteristic that is call “magic Quadrant for Wireless infrastructure”. Its a quadrant consists of 4 section that map the vendor for wireless infrastructure . And this is consist as challenger, niche player, leader or visionaries.
They measure the vendor based on many aspect that put it into the quadrant
Some of the aspect that is evaluated :
- Product/ Service : In here the WLAN infrastructure are evaluated based on the type of the product whether it for Access Point standalone, Wireless router and Mesh network
- Sales strategy/Pricing : Vendor is seen in how their position their price compared by other competitor in this side like cisco has set their position as premium price player that the price cant be compared with Huawei,Dlink or even TP Link
- Marketing Responsiveness :How their way to communicated their product into the consumer mind and able to maintain the relation with the end users
- Customer experience : It’s the cross check view that how customers and partners view about this vendor cause they will give objective view about how this product are based on their experience
And after that its mapped in the quadrant below that overal market can know other player position
