ADTRAN Expands Wireless Portfolio with Bluesocket Buy

Networking vendor ADTRAN is adding to its wireless prowess by snapping up Bluesocket, a privately held company specializing in wireless network solutions with virtual control. Such a move can help propel ADTRAN beyond its current market reach and into myriad new opportunities. Here’s why.

ADTRAN has a full stable of wired and wireless networking wares aimed at enterprise and campus environments. Bluesocket, meanwhile, has nifty technology it calls vWLAN that virtualizes the management of wireless infrastructure, eliminating the need for hardware-based controllers. (Other vendors offering a hardware controller-free approach to WLAN management include Aerohive Networks and Meraki.) About a year ago, Bluesocket began offering its technology for virtual machine platforms, starting with VMware.

What makes this acquisition such a winner for ADTRAN and its partner base is the potential it carries for new customers and new markets: Because the two companies’ technologies are complementary, partners may find it easier to sell into environments where management of access points is difficult because of the distance between them. Bluesocket touts its vWLAN technology as “a uniquely distributed architecture that supports decisions at the edge of the network and manages them with a centralized appliance or server,” which reduces the stress on and increases the capacity within the wireless controller.

With its acquisition of Bluesocket, ADTRAN now has the technology to offer up solutions to a whole host of new customers moving to virtualized environments as well as those looking for a way to quickly ramp up and manage their wireless infrastructure.

ADTRAN also now can move deeper into the cloud, enabling service providers “to offer new cloud-based wireless services where both management and control are centralized in a secure data center,” according to the release announcing the acquisition – something ADTRAN VP of Global Marketing Gary Bolton discussed at the company’s partner conference in December 2010.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but the acquisition was effective Aug. 4, 2011, and the Bluesocket employee base and product portfolio will be incorporated into ADTRAN’s Enterprise Networks Division, ADTRAN said.

In addition, Bluesocket’s fledgling channel base will be absorbed into ADTRAN’s partner program.