Check out this video from our partner Securicore showing how Aerohive's controller-less Wi-Fi solution brings you up to speed:

The stock market runs in my blood. I have owned stock for most of my life, and I grew up watching Wall $treet Week with my grandfather on summer visits to New York. My favorite game growing up was Fortune 500, a game where players take charge of a company and try to triple their starting capital investment.

Last Friday’s IPO was the end of a natural progression for me that started with stock ownership as a kindergartner. I owned four shares of the Fortune 500-sized company my father worked for, Household International. (I write “Fortune 500-sized” because in those days, Fortune required that the F500 were industrial companies that manufactured products; that rule has since been dropped.) When I learned about a stockholder’s meeting at the company, I asked to go. My parents wrote a note to the kindergarten teacher stating something along the lines of “Please excuse Matthew from class today. He is attending a stockholder’s meeting.”

Finance business culture is more formal, so I wore a suit to the meeting. This picture is undated, and I think a little bit older than the stockholder’s meeting, but not by much. Interestingly, now that I work in technology, I no longer have a three-piece suit.

In the early- to mid-1980s on a summer visit to my grandparents in Westchester County, I was offered the chance to attend a taping of Wall Street Week in Review, a program dedicated to the happenings on the financial markets in the prior week. On the drive into Manhattan, my host kept her handbag firmly between the front seats in case somebody tried to steal it. Every time the sclerotic traffic stopped, the infamous squeegee men provided the much-unneeded  service of cleaning the windshield. New York City was viewed as a lawless, polluted place at the time. (As another indicator of how times have changed, my eldest cousin wanted to go to Cooper Union but it was considered far too dangerous to be young in lawless New York. My youngest cousin now attends Columbia and lives in a much safer Manhattan.)  

After “drinks” at the Helmsley Hotel – mine was probably ginger ale – I went to the studio. In the course of writing this post, I found out that apparently the host considered putting me on the program, but couldn’t figure out how to make it work.

Fast forward to the present day. The financial markets are significantly more open to widespread participation, and that cultural change has no doubt been driven in part by the broad-based equity culture that comes from Silicon Valley. After eight years of work at Aerohive, four of which I was able to participate in, I joined Team Aerohive on Wall Street for the second most important day in the history of the company.

Let me start off by saying that the New York Stock Exchange gets marketing. It is a storied brand, and the building is basically the high temple of American finance. Among many other promotional activities, the NYSE helped us arrange food trucks throughout the day, including this one that started off outside our hotel.

After a quick walk down Wall Street, we passed through security, had breakfast, and went down to the trading floor to watch our stock open. When I was younger, the NYSE floor at day’s end would be cluttered with scraps of paper used by the traders. Much of that paper has been automated, but the human element of judgment remains. Traders are equipped with Wi-Fi tablets, and the pieces of paper used previously are now zapped over a wireless LAN. (The first NYSE WLAN network was built in part by an early Aerohive employee, though he worked for another company at the time.)

On the floor, we took up position at our market maker’s station. The NYSE has several firms that act as “designated market makers” to provide liquidity and an orderly stock market. The best way I heard it put is that market makers are like pilots: they are most useful in opening (takeoff), closing (landing), and in times of volatility (turbulence).  In a neat conversation I had with our CFO, I learned how a company might pick a market maker, which is a great “inside baseball” story that takes you inside the market.

On an IPO day, the stock doesn’t start trading at the opening bell. The NYSE uses a price discovery process to match up buyers with the underwriters to assure an orderly start to trading. I brought my widest-angle lens to get crowd shots while standing at the market maker’s station. In these pictures you’ll see some of the earliest employees of Aerohive.

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In a theme that would recur throughout the day, the Aerohive bee made many appearances.

When the stock began to trade, everybody pulled out phones to grab pictures of the event. I was glad I had brought my SLR.

With trading established and orders flowing, we left the floor, and walked two blocks to the Charging Bull in its “temporary” location. I’ve been to the bull several times, of course, but it had special resonance when I worked for company whose stock was now a registered stock trading on an exchange.

The group went to lunch nearby, and swapped stories of the early days at Aerohive. Adam Conway talked about the early days in Changming Liu’s garage and his relationship with Changming’s dog. Yong Kang told us about his first week at the company. Changming was on vacation, so one of Yong’s most important first-week tasks was to take out the garbage.

After lunch, we went back for the closing bell. Aerohive had won the honor of ringing the closing bell, and the exchange had put up a banner just for us. We took several photos out in front of the exchange, and in perhaps the best moment of the day, we drew a crowd of tourists. For a few brief moments, Aerohive was a tourist attraction in Lower Manhattan.

Back inside for the closing bell, we entered an ornate room, with a massive table. One of the many NYSE executives involved in taking our company public spoke to us, and talked about how his hobby of beekeeping seemed to fit with our theme.

For the closing bell, our executives took to the podium, while the rest of the group gathered right below it.  We were all equipped with our own bells and foam bees, and when the closing bell rang, we let loose a volley at the executive team (quite a few of whom volleyed back quite energetically).

As we left the floor, several people asked us for foam bees, including this trader. After being given one, he asked for another one because he had two children. The following picture was my price for giving him a second!

As the closing bell died away, the Aerohive team left the floor to begin life with a newly broadened set of owners, and I left New York having crossed off an item on my bucket list that I didn’t even know was on my bucket list.

Aerohive is excited to announce availability of the SR2124P switch. The SR2124P is a high-performance switch with 24 Gigabit PoE+ ports and 4 10-Gigabit SFP/SFP+ uplink ports. Aerohive is now shipping its entire portfolio of switches! 

Similar to other Aerohive switches, the SR2124P leverages HiveOS cooperative control to provide robust switching functionality that is in harmony with the Wi-Fi infrastructure, including unified policy, management, and reporting. 

The SR2124P switch delivers the following key capabilities:

• High power PoE+ ports– 408 watts of PoE budget available to power 24 AP330, AP370, or the new AP230 access points
• 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplink ports– Ideal capacity to handle 802.11ac deployments    
• Cloud management– Centrally manage, easily provision, and troubleshoot switches in distributed sites without any local IT staff
• Unified wired & wireless policy enforcement– Deploy switches with Aerohive APs or routers to enable unified, consistent policy enforcement to wired and wireless users

There are many reasons to deploy Aerohive switches and now there’s another one with the 24-port SR2124P switch.  

BCS (Baggage Control Services) Group knew it needed to do something about its wireless solution. Having an ad hoc network in place across its global offices was causing major headaches and increasing costs for the international supplier of end-to-end solutions for the aviation industry. BCS was in the business of handling logistics, and the company desperately needed to bring its wireless network up to speed.

BCS sought a technology partner that could provide not just wireless, but remote office connectivity. BCS deployed Aerohive's Branch-on-Demand solution in its 30 remote offices located across three continents. With Aerohive in place, all BCS locations now act as one big virtual office. Regardless of location, employees are working and collaborating from one stable and secure network in real-time.

Check out the full case study here.

Every organization today is being driven to investigate the right WLAN because mobility has changed the way people work and live. The mobile lifestyle has become the mobile work-style.

So implementing a WLAN or upgrading the existing WLAN is obviously the default action. It's the modern day equivalent of the railroad system or interstate highway system – it's going to happen. The only question is: Which way will it happen and how easy is it?

The industry is at a transition in radio technology. This makes the WLAN decision process slightly more difficult. The latest technology provides some dramatic improvements in performance, but an update is only a couple years away.

Do we implement the current "best" from the last generation and then upgrade again when the second version of the "new generation" comes? Or adopt the "first" from the new generation and utilize it until the second version of the "new generation" is here? This decision clearly has obstacles:

• Cost of the access point themselves.

• Cost of implementing one solution then switching to a new radio (when the radio performance is tied to network infrastructure like controllers.)

• Cost of upgrading the POE infrastructure (which can cost more than the entire WLAN project in the first place!)

These are all very real concerns and present obstacles to just going with the better technology (802.11ac.) We saw this as a unique opportunity to leverage our distributed architecture, the latest in radio technology, and our advanced energy efficient designs to eliminate the obstacles to adopting the current revision of 802.11ac on a broad scale. This transition is why the AP230 came to be…

• Cost of the AP themselves – We've engineered the AP230 with the latest in 802.11ac chipset technology and optimized our design to meet the needs of customers well within their budget. The result: An access point that provides 3-stream 3x3 802.11ac below the price of the "best" of the old generation of radios (3-stream 3x3 802.11n).

• Cost of implementing the solution and then switching later – This is a natural for the Aerohive architecture. With a distributed architecture, you are in no way tied to upgrading anything other than the radio itself. No controller software, no controller hardware upgrades. Just swap the AP, it finds its neighbors in the "hive" and you're up and running with the latest and greatest. Need to upgrade that AP? Simply swap it for a new generation AP in a couple years and repurpose the old AP to another, less critical area and continue using it for the rest of its useful life.

• Cost of upgrading the POE infrastructure – With the advance energy-efficient design of the AP230, we were able to achieve full 3-stream, 3x3 802.11ac performance, full Wi-Fi performance for 2.4Ghz 802.11n on a second radio, and provide our full software suite of functionality all within the power budget of legacy POE (802.3af). No upgrading required.

Many vendors are spending a long time answering customers' 802.11ac question of "Why upgrade?" because there's so much to consider. With the AP230 you really have to ask yourself "Why not?"…

Not all cloud solutions are built equally.

Aerohive APs allow access to all users even if there is a loss in cloud connection. Does yours? 

Check out this video from our Partner Securicore demonstrating how Aerohive APs keep you connected:

Check out this video from our partner Securicore showing how Aerohive's controller-less Wi-Fi solution brings you up to speed:

What if the AP in your high school gym went missing? Or someone tampered with the AP in the back of your clothing store? Or a hacker paid a visit to his grandmother in her long term care facility and was able to access the building's Wi-Fi network?

Wi-Fi security is always a major concern to any organization deploying a wireless network. This concern is increasing given the fact that access points (APs) are being placed in increasingly diverse locations - retail stores, taxi cabs, patient rooms, and anywhere else mobile devices can be found. So while many wireless LAN vendors talk about the importance of assuring security while connected to a wireless LAN, when choosing a wireless solution it's important to remember physical security concerns.

Ask yourself: Is your data safe even if a hacker gets physical access to an enterprise access point?

In the past, many enterprise wireless LAN solution providers relied on their “thin AP” architectures as a way to assure secure storage of secret information like RADIUS keys, pre-shared keys, certificates, and other network credentials. The assumption was that because thin APs did not store anything locally and relied on the central controller to encrypt secure data, the APs could not be hacked to retrieve any sensitive information.

As the wireless LAN industry has evolved, and vendors have added features like local data forwarding, meshing, mutual authentication with controllers, and branch operation, these vendors have been forced to store keys and configuration information on the access points.

Architecture no longer dictates whether a vendor designed an access point to secure sensitive data. The belief that thin APs are architecturally more secure because keys are not stored locally is a dated one, and worse can give a false sense of security.

The ability to secure configuration, key, and credential information on an AP for any architecture is critical, and it is important to choose a wireless LAN vendor that makes device security and storage security a priority. This usually means that the access point must have some form of secure key storage in hardware, such as a TPM (Trust Platform Module).

A TPM chip is a microcontroller that stores keys, passwords, and digital certificates. The TPM chip resides on the motherboard of a device and provides random seed keys to encrypt stored data that can only be decrypted with the presentation of administrator credentials.

On Aerohive devices, the TPM chip securely encrypts network credentials and keys to protect the security of your network even if the access point is stolen or compromised. If a malicious user gains physical access to the Aerohive device and can interrupt the bootloader in an attempt to acquire the stored data, the entire configuration, network keys, user authentication information, and certificate data is securely encrypted and unusable without administrator credentials.

Aerohive's ability to offer secure wireless infrastructure is based on an end-to-end approach that has been built from the beginning rather than as an afterthought. Not only has Aerohive implemented a comprehensive set of features, both hardware and software, but Aerohive’s architecture also has been designed to take advantage of other security systems in place within an enterprise to ensure consistent security policy for users whether they are wired or connected wirelessly.

Through an end-to-end approach, Aerohive has delivered a comprehensive and market leading security solution to deliver a wireless network that is not only capable of securing wireless access but, is itself secure.

* picture credit Trusted Computing Group 

As Joel Vincent said in last week's blog following our latest 802.11ac access point (AP) announcement, we've just set a new price/performance standard for 11ac with our new $799 AP230. In most cases, this is less than competitors’ high-end three-stream 802.11n APs.  

For customers who are considering two-stream 802.11n APs, this price point gives the option of moving to 802.11ac at only a modest price premium. Compared to competitors’ 802.11ac offerings, the AP230 is as little as half the list price of many comparable three-stream APs and even less than the list price of two-stream APs. This is made possible by leveraging the latest available chip sets and Aerohive’s hardware design innovations.

But don't take our word for it. Read what the industry has to say about our our latest 802.11ac access point: 

• Aerohive's new access points remove deployment barriers (Zeus Kerravala, NetworkWorld) 
• Enterprise WLANs 2014 – A Few More Announcements (Craig Mathias, NetworkWorld)
• Aerohive Intros New Gigabit Access Point (Leila Meyer, The Journal)
• Aerohive Brings New Access Point To Maturing 11ac Market (Lee Badman)
• Aerohive intros money saving 802.11ac access point (James Henderson,The Channel)

When the School District of Palm Beach County faced a state mandate to become a completely 1:1 student to device environment by 2015, this was no small task for a District with 185 schools and 177,000 students, up against a slow and aging wireless network. 

The District replaced its Wi-Fi to a complete Aerohive solution, with over 13,000 access points (APs). The District was able to create efficiency and improve learning, all with enhanced security and cloud network management.

As you can imagine, the District is now well-positioned to meet BYOD and is well on the way to fully digital classrooms.

Get all the details in the customer case study here.

With the adoption of mobility accelerating in schools, classrooms are undergoing major transformations in their Wi-Fi usage. 

Empowered by mobile devices connected to the school network, students and faculty continue to stay engaged outside of school hours. This transformation is having a huge impact on school network architectures in terms of performance, availability and security while demand for a better user experience is soaring. And of course this is all happening when IT budgets in schools are either remaining flat or shrinking.

Watch this video on Aerohive Wi-Fi to learn how schools can deploy a cloud-managed mobility platform to modernize the classroom and deliver an immersive learning experience

Who remembers the announcement from December 2012 when Aruba jumped into the Application Visibility and Control arena with their 7200 controller and plans for AppRF? It was a very exciting time in the wireless world seeing how mobility is impacting networks and the level of visibility required in order to move towards a mobile-first enterprise.

What I find surprising, however, is that even after a year, Aruba only just now has the actual “control” part available in their 6.4 software for the 7000 series controllers. Ooops. I suspect real-time packet processing in a central appliance was harder to deliver than anticipated. Maybe we should take a step back and investigate what happened as we wonder how long customers have been waiting for this promised functionality in their shiny new controllers?

I have to admit, when I first saw the announcement from Aruba back in 2012, it was exciting. I loved the cool new video that accompanied the launch and I thought to myself - man, this is neat stuff. Then I started reading more about their brand new controller “optimized for 11ac” and delivering “integrated visibility and control over both traditional server-based applications as well as cloud-based and web-based mobile applications”, and realized that while their marketing department was clear on what they want, they may have gotten a little ahead of their actual technical product delivery.

Even the datasheet clarified that "Running on the 7200 series Mobility Controllers, AppRF identifies a variety of applications and who is using them.” It went on to say that you could use the PEFNG firewall to block or allow protocols, but not applications. So really, you can buy the fanciest new controller, plus the cost of feature licenses to apply firewall and security features, and still not have Application Control? Sounds like a heck of a deal! 

But thankfully, I recently read the new documentation on ArubaOS 6.4 and it sounds like the 7200 series FINALLY gets the ability to create stateful firewall and QoS policies for applications (let’s hope you weren’t one of the unfortunate customers waiting for this feature on the 3000 series - sounds like a no-go :-/). This is great news right? I mean, in their press release from Dec 2012, they said they have a university that plans to support “3500 access points and 46,000 users” by replacing their controllers with the 7200s - so they can finally do all the application visibility and control they need for an “entire campus.” I just really hope they have budget for more than one of these $50k+ devices, though, because they are going to very quickly hit the limit of this massively expensive device:  

Now you may be thinking “why would you design a network with a single controller for over 2000 APs or 32k users?” And I agree. Why indeed? I mean, if we do that math, that works out to what - 16 clients per AP? Is that how you’re designing your network? Gonna need a lot more than one AP per classroom to meet that ratio ;-).

More importantly are the specs posted on the 7200 web page. This device, custom-designed for supporting 802.11ac and gigabit speeds per user, notes a top speed of 40Gbps for large packets and a mere 2M concurrent firewall sessions. Uh oh. Now we have a true math problem. So you can connect up to 2048 11ac APs, each with at least one gigabit uplink, with 16-100 users connected per radio (with average speeds between 433Mbps and 1.3Gbps each, per this handy document: and top out at at just 40Gbps (and remember - most devices aren’t sending large packets, so let’s assume going downhill, with the wind blowing, that the IMIX speed is more like 25-30Gbps) and 60 sessions per device?

Let’s hope that most of them aren’t power users. Or using Skype, file sharing, or any other app that regularly opens many multiple concurrent sessions. 

Ok, so we probably all agree that connecting all those devices through a single controller is bad network design anyway. But wait - we haven’t even discussed the application control part yet. These session limits and throughput numbers don’t include running deep packet inspection for AppRF, so the stateful firewall can actually categorize those packets!

Where are those numbers? If we assume a 15% degradation to speed and throughput that affects nearly every DPI implementation on flow-based systems from every vendor, this extremely expensive controller quickly becomes quite the bottleneck. That university will need at least 4 of them just to keep up with 46,000 users - assuming each of those users only has a single device. How many are in your briefcase?

Obviously, I have an opinion on this, but please do go check all the references I listed throughout this blog. People have wondered why Aerohive has put so much focus on our distributed and controller-less architecture lately. Well, the proof is in the pudding, folks. Mobility has changed how we operate, and any single device, even the shiniest, newest, fastest controller on the market, cannot come close to keeping up with the speed and visibility requirements of a large-scale 802.11ac enterprise. 

So ask yourself why Aruba bifurcated their product line, created Instant, and yet still leads with controllers for advanced features? It sounds like they’re learning that creating a highly scalable, distributed architecture is more challenging than they anticipated. Features like AppRF, Layer 3 roaming, stateful policy-based firewall with flow-based forwarding, and sophisticated QoS  require a Cooperative Control solution vs just a “controller-less” one. 

The future of mobility is real-time application visibility and CONTROL, and the only way forward is to distribute the packet processing and scale linearly.

Even with deep packet inspection, distributing the load across the entire edge means that packet processing happens real time and is easily enhanced by adding another device when the load increases. Welcome to the mobile-first enterprise, folks. Welcome to Aerohive, the future of mobile-centric networking. 

March of 2014 marked two years into my Aerohive Wi-Fi deployment and I wanted to take a moment and recap some of the things I've learned along the way.

1) Aerohive Provides a Future-Proofed Wi-Fi Architecture

The first time I learned about controller-less Wi-Fi, I immediately knew that it was the only way to go.  When you really sit back and think about your network, doesn't controller-less make the most sense? One of my main goals is to eliminate single points of failures. When you look at the Wi-Fi landscape today, controller-less is the only architecture that provides that for me. Aerohive Wi-Fi is dead simple to deploy and manage. Whether you are a school, retail shop, restaurant, hospital or gas station, Aerohive Wi-Fi is incredible complex technology in a plug and play deployment model. With the introduction of an affordable 802.11ac AP, they are continuing the trend of next generation Wi-Fi.

2) Aerohive Is Made Up of Great People  

My local Aerohive team (Jeff Haydel and Shane Moore) is just an awesome team. They've continually stayed in touch and kept me up to date on the latest offerings, news and tips. Other companies may do this as well, but just not any I've dealt with. Aerohive acts like a small company when it comes to dealing with people, but a giant company when developing technology. It's a win/win.

3) Aerohive Has the Foot on the Gas

Since I deployed my Wi-Fi, Aerohive has deployed a suite of cloud managed switches, a free upgrade to Application Visibility and Control (AVC), a huge upgrade to their HiveManager software (currently on version 6 and I started on version 4), an overhauled 11n AP (AP121), and two 802.11ac APs. It's worth pointing out that I've not paid a dime to Aerohive for the software upgrades. The AVC addition was absolutely huge for us as it allowed us to fine tune our filtering at the edge depending on if it's a student, staff or guest user.  The Wi-Fi landscape is highly competitive, but Aerohive is continually staying ahead on technology and pricing.

We have about a year left on our original deployment and I will start looking to upgrade all of our APs in another year. My question won't be Aerohive, Aruba, Ruckus or Meraki. The question will be which AP do I use? Once you go controller-less, no other products compare.

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Bradley Chambers has been the Director of Information Technology at Brainerd Baptist School since 2009. At BBS, he manages an Apple network mixed with Macs and Pads (with Aerohive access points). Prior to that, he worked in the telecommunications industry for five years. He has a B.S. in Organizational Management from Covenant College. He is an Apple Certified Macintosh Technician, an Apple Certified Associate for Mac 10.7 into Windows Server environments, a Google Apps for Education Certified Trainer, and an Aerohive Certified Wireless Administrator. He is passionate about iOS and Mac in the education and enterprise markets. You can follow him on his blog or on Twitter (@bradleychambers).

When Colorado insurance provider Pinnacol Assurance began having issues with connectivity on its wireless network, it started to evaluate whether a controller-based solution was cutting it, especially when it came to managing software updates and configuration rollouts. As the company providing workers' compensation insurance for 60 percent of Colorado's workforce, it needed to take a broader look at its network needs.

Even though switching off its controller-based solution was more costly than simply upgrading its previous architecture, it chose Aerohive for a more flexible and scalable solution that would take them in the right direction for any future network requirements.

For a company in the business of risk management, Aerohive was a sure bet.

To learn more about the deployment, take a look at the case study here.

What happens when a former Editor in Chief of InfoWorld and PCWorldcombines the technical know-how of gadgetry with miniature golf in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District?

Well, for Steve Fox, he assembles a dream team to create a miniature golf utopia that reminds you a bit of Maker Faire and Burning Man meet city pub. Dubbed Urban Putt, San Francisco's "only indoor miniature golf course" opened yesterday on Cinco de Mayo. 

Right away you’ll not notice how deeply technical the entire operation is, and that’s just fine with Fox. He doesn’t want you to necessarily marvel at all the gadgetry - in his words, "technology for technology's sake." Rather, he wants to use technology for the sake of the experience. All the way down to the Wi-Fi, driven by Aerohive.

“Wi-Fi is often considered a necessary evil that customers expect, but that’s not the way I see it,” explains Fox, Urban Putt's CEO & Chief Greenskeeper. “Enterprise-class Wi-Fi from Aerohivegives me visibility into what my customers are doing, which helps me serve them a better experience.”

Steve and his crew knew they needed an enterprise-class wireless network in order to analyze and use Wi-Fi in a strategic way. Will guests bunch up at hole 9? Where do they like to hang out most often?

So, like any tech geek, Steve wants metrics. And Urban Putt wants to serve its customers most efficiently, which it can do thanks to robust features and retail analytics from Aerohive.

By the way, National Miniature Golf Day is this Saturday, May 10. 

“Congrats to @Aerohive superstar SE, Janet Rae, on becoming CWNE #137 today! Yippppeee @CWNP.”

Like a proud Papa, Aerohive Global Training Manager, David Coleman, likes to congratulate new CWNEs (Certified Wireless Network Experts) on Twitter as they come into the fold. He offers his kudos, regardless of vendor affiliation – like earlier this week when he gave a shout-out to the latest CWNE, who is a Ruckus employee.

CWNE is the top-level certification of the CWNP program. CWNEs are a very elite group as there are currently less than 200 CWNEs worldwide.

Why the beaming pride? Because David plays a key role in the life of any WLAN professional today. In addition to his role as lead Aerohive trainer, David co-authored the CWNA Certified Wireless Network Administrator Official Study Guide, which is now entering its fourth edition.

A vendor-neutral tome, CWNA Study Guide is considered to be the bible of networking professionals looking to get their Wi-Fi wings. It is the de facto study guide for CWNP (Certified Wireless Networking Professional,) the highly regarded, vendor-neutral organization that certifies Wi-Fi professionals. The CWNA certification is the foundation level enterprise Wi-Fi certification for the CWNP program. Many thousands of IT professionals across the globe are CWNA certified.    

Most enterprise WLAN vendors suggest CWNA as prerequisite training for their in-house training courses. Additionally, many WLAN Pros simply keep a copy of the CWNA book on the shelf (or iPad) and use it as a reference guide when looking to brush up on their Wi-Fi skills. 

The 4th edition of Sybex Publishing’s CWNA Study Guide is scheduled for release in August. The book will be updated to include more info on 802.11ac, MDM, BYOD and other key changes to Wi-Fi technology since the book’s last release two years ago. 

Keep an eye out for more information as we get closer to the release date. Aerohive will hold a live event on our customer community, HiveNation, in which David can talk candidly about his book and share his Wi-Fi education expertise. And you never know what kind of giveaways are on the horizon.

CWNE Fun Fact: With Janet’s certification, Aerohive has racked up its 5th CWNE, and has another on the way. Meanwhile, each member of Aerohive’s training team is a CWNE, a stat that was highlighted in theIncredible Training Team blog series. 

West Valley-Mission Community College District is located in the heart of Silicon Valley and has two separate campuses, and it was not surprising when its aging wireless network could no longer support a great influx of BYOD for its 40,000 students. 

The existing controller-based solution was not able to meet the demands of students and faculty, and the IT team turned to analysts at Gartner Group for some direction. After evaluating Meraki and Aruba, Aerohive won out for its comprehensive approach and controller-less solution. 

Now students and faculty at the large-campus environment tap into reliable and secure Wi-Fi, and take advantage of a greater number of online services. 

To learn more about the deployment, read the full case study here.

The Gilbert School had all the technology tools in place to meet digital learning goals for its 550 students, except a comprehensive Wi-Fi network. With only two access points in the entire campus, the semi-private school could not fully leverage technology tools such as SMART Boards, iPads for each student and AirServers and Apple TVs throughout the school.

One key capability that sealed the deal to deploy Aerohive was the fact the controller-less solution would integrate so easily with Apple products. With a robust network in place, the Gilbert School is not looking back, using Wi-Fi for all kinds of activities from creating marching band drill formations directly on the field to computerized testing to meet state mandates.

Next up? Wi-Fi in school buses to track arrival and departure times. To learn more, read the full case study on The Gilbert School here. 

I hate it when I’m attracted by the price of a new car, then the salesperson pulls out the 10-page list of optional luxury additions such a as a spare tire. Even when I've finally decided to pay that bottom line figure, I then need to consider the road tax, insurance and breakdown options.

What is 802.11 EVV?

802.11 EVV (where EVV stands for "Economic Value Validation") is not a new WLAN standard, but rather a new way of thinking about the WLAN technologic evolutions that already exist.

ESG's (Enterprise Strategy Group) recent report on EVV quantifies the typical cost savings and operational benefits of a controller-less wireless environments in financial terms, which helps organizations evaluating wireless investments or upgrades to understand the impact these advances can offer them above controller-based solutions. 

The scenarios illustrated in the EVV paper highlight the advantage controller-less Wi-Fi architectures and Aerohive Networks in particular have over legacy environments.

The hidden cost of car ownership is nothing new, however do we sit down and accurately analyze the total cost of ownership per year? Insurance, tax, breakdown, servicing, wear and tear parts, parking, tolls, oil, filters, anti-freeze, parking, bulbs, air fresheners (it all counts). And it’s not even just about the parts, policies, petrol and parking. What about the time it costs you when you have to go to the garage, how much time you spend stuck in traffic etc. This time is valuable, how else could you have been spending it?

Cars are a big investment, which is why most of us heavily scrutinize costs before committing to purchase. Aware of industry sales tactics and other items of consideration we are much more savvy today. If we do it for cars, shouldn’t we do TCO analysis for every product or solution ownership?

Mobility initiatives increase productivity, collaboration and potential across organizations, but without having the supporting network infrastructure that is capable of delivering reliable, fast and secure connectivity, I’m afraid your tablet, smartphones or other internet connected devices quickly become neutered lumps of plastic and metal. 

Wireless LANs have become an indispensable part of any organization. The status quo for wireless networking solutions has involved deploying wireless access points, or APs that are connected to, and managed by, a centralized controller. 

Sadly, much like that crafty car salesman not telling you about the brand new model that’s just about to be released next month (which won’t help their commission this month), many WLAN vendors are still selling technology past its sell by date, and hiding the ongoing costs of these legacy solutions. Vendors now offer evolutionary controller-less access points with distributed intelligence and cloud-based management solutions. The controller-less architecture that Aerohive Networks has pioneered is able to produce the requisite performance, scale, and operational efficiencies that also generate a significant ROI. 

If you bought wireless LAN controllers a few years ago you made a good decision, but as organizations consider expanding existing or upgrading their wireless environments with 802.11ac to better support BYOD initiatives and new applications, you should carefully review this survey document to understand how a controller-less Wi-Fi architecture could provide a compelling ROI to the business. 

We are all about good times here at the Hive. Especially when it involves tasty food. And drink. And milestones. And mingling with our colleagues. To that end, last week we enjoyed a special Happy Hour to celebrate our IPO that was sponsored by some awesome Aerohive investors. The spread was as good looking as it was delicious. Have a look.