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Corporate WiFi innovator Trapeze gets $22m investment, including cash from Motorola, Nortel

Both Trapeze and Motorola have issued a joint announcement of Motorola's contribution to the "third round" of funding, a round totalling $22.5m, in Trapeze Networks. That figure includes funds raised from other sources, announced earlier this year. It raises the temperature in a market originally dominated by Airespace (now swallowed up by Cisco) and Aruba (determinedly independent, for now) and could focus corporate attention on "Ringmaster" - Trapeze's proprietary wireless network manager.

"Motorola isn't just giving me money," Trapeze president Jim Vogt [right] told NewsWireless. "The urgency of the market has tightened since Cisco bought Airespace and started integrating their code in a variety of products, and we are now stacking up partners with the big guys, 3Com and Nortel and Enterasys, and D-Link - and now Motorola."

The deal with Motorola involves "millions of dollars" was all Vogt was prepared to say about the size of the investment. "The important thing is that this has been a six month process, and Motorola plans multiple ways of getting these technologies integrated into their corporation, now the investment is in place - and voice is a major part of our future plans."

The Nortel investment, probably of a similar size, was announced back in April.

Vogt said that the recent Motorola purchase of Mesh Networks has provided a major opportunity for Trapeze integration.

Trapeze has a good technology for "seamless mobility" for roaming users, and Mesh Networks urgently needs a secure way of achieving this. "Motorola was planning to integrate their scan requirements into a Proxim product for wireless," said Vogt, "but when that product went away, they urgently needed a switch to replace it, and without the Proxim solution, they don't have a customer premise solution to sell with their mesh."

They need, in short, a mesh-aware WiFi access point to sell with it.

The resulting problem, said Vogt, is that if a user moves out of a WiFi area in a building onto a campus, they switch to the Mesh wireless - and the management "loses" the user. "They can't apply policy and services to the user in that case. That's what we do; as the user moves out of the premise, then into the mesh and then back into the premise; we can see them anywhere in the network."

Vogt added that he expects Motorola to be a big customer of Trapeze networks corporately. "They have a huge number of 'fat APs' installed, and are looking to install thin APs. That's one major reason why Motorola invested; they don't make independent investments; they try to invest where there is synergy."

Finally, Voice over Internet Protocol work will become part of a joint development, said Vogt, not only in technology, but in marketing outreach.

"It's an endorsement of our tech to the market place, especially in terms of VoIP strategy." Voyt said. "There's a lot of moving pieces that need to be integrated to make this technology work. But I think Motorola is more interested in partnering with the channel, so they can implement pieces of the solution. You know, what they get with us: they get access not just to Trapeze, but to our partners like Enterasys, Nortel, 3Com and so on."

Trapeze gets the majority of its sales in Europe, said Vogt, and the partnerships are enabling them to establish a channel presence. "This is going to get harder, which means our competitors, like Aruba, will find it harder and harder to drive a direct channel strategy."