4/25/2005 -- The dust still hasn’t settled from Cisco’s uber-disruptive Airespace acquisition earlier this year. In fact, competitors in the wireless LAN (WLAN) space continue to respond to Cisco’s game-changing move.

In March, for example, Nortel announced a long-term alliance and development relationship with enterprise WLAN specialist Trapeze Networks.

And last week, Trapeze itself announced new features for its Mobility System Software that are designed to support legacy Cisco access points (AP), including the Cisco Aironet 350, 1100 and 1200 Series APs.

Analysts say the move gives Trapeze a rather substantial carrot with which to go after Cisco’s installed base. “By giving customers the ability to bring existing Cisco APs into a Trapeze-managed solution, Trapeze is giving customers a viable alternative to tearing out or simply co-existing with installed Cisco infrastructure,” says Joel Conover, a principal analyst for enterprise infrastructure with consultancy Current Analysis. “This support will give Trapeze and its partners a considerable advantage when competing for business where Cisco already has an installed base.”

Trapeze officials, for their part, promise that the new features more than deliver the goods, including support for secure roaming between and among all Cisco and Trapeze APs and Mobility Exchange switches; full 802.1X Authentication; per client policies; and full accounting for all clients associated with Cisco or Trapeze APs. According to Current Analysis’ Conover, however, customers who embrace the Trapeze solution shouldn’t expect the wireless equivalent of alchemy. “The addition of limited support for Cisco gear provides Trapeze and its partners with a great opportunity to target legacy Cisco installed base customers,” he writes. “While the integration falls short of converting Cisco APs into fully functional, managed units for the Trapeze solution, it does allow enterprises to deploy roaming and authentication in a uniform way across the enterprise. That’s more than competitors can claim.”

For a variety of reasons, then, Conover says Trapeze’s move may be too little, too late. “[S]upporting installed legacy systems from Cisco will deliver opportunities where none existed before. However, such opportunities are only a small fraction of the total addressable opportunity in the market, and the frequency of those opportunities will continue to decline as next-generation WLAN adoption continues to grow,” he points out. “[T]he real opportunity to target Cisco’s installed base started more than 18 months ago, and while some customers are still running on legacy Cisco devices, the perceived value of maintaining that investment is much lower today.”

Trapeze says support for Cisco Aironet APs will be available starting in May as part of a free upgrade for its Mobility System Software. -Stephen Swoyer