By Alex Scroxton

26 August 2008

The acquisition of wireless networking vendor Colubris by HP ProCurve earlier in the month was the latest in a long-running series of buy-outs of wireless players this year.

For ProCurve, the acquisition was its first in over four years and came barely a month after Marius Haas took charge at the unit.

ProCurve has already had a cracking year by anybody’s standards. The days of speculation over its future within HP are over and, with its parent’s backing, the unit is at long last beginning to rattle Cisco’s cage.

By making a foray into the wireless LAN (WLAN) space, it has entered a fiercely competitive market. Networking players are scrambling over each other to add WLAN technology to their product line-ups as consumers and businesses turn in growing numbers to wireless systems.

In the past two months alone, there have been two major WLAN buys. Back in June, Trapeze Networks fell to cabling expert Belden for $133m. In July, Motorola picked up AirDefense with similar designs.

Just days after ProCurve made its move, little-known American WLAN provider Bluesocket hawked its IP telephony software wing, Pingtel, to Nortel in a move regarded as an attempt to streamline and join a bigger league, according to US analysts.

The past week has seen the industry buzzing with talk of which niche wireless vendor will fall next.

One analyst told MicroScope the WLAN space had a noticeably different composition today than it did just six months ago, and cautioned that some vendors were in danger of missing out as the best deals were snapped up.

He suggested companies such as 3Com, Juniper and Foundry Networks – itself acquired by storage ace Brocade in July – would find it hard to grow an organic WLAN business and could face difficulties as likely targets disappear from the radar.

For the channel partners caught in the acquisition crossfire, the temptation to play WLAN vendors off against one another could prove too much. Some vendors have already been getting in on the act, such as Aruba wireless subsidiary AMP Solutions, which launched a lifeboat package for Trapeze dealers following its acquisition by Belden. In the long run, resellers will undoubtedly be able to benefit from the changing market, taking advantage of new deals and special offers.