Ruckus Wireless, which was acquired by Brocade back in May in a deal worth $1.2 billion, this week commercially launched Ruckus Cloud Wi-Fi, a WiFi management-as-a-service offer powered by its public cloud platform.
Ruckus Cloud Wi-Fi is designed to offer a simple-to-deploy, less time-intensive alternative to on-premises controller architectures to enable even the most IT-constrained organizations to easily manage dozens or even hundreds of sites. According to Ruckus, a number of customers have implemented Ruckus Cloud Wi-Fi prior to the market introduction, including school districts. Its Wi-Fi enables distributed organizations with limited IT resources to set up, monitor and manage a high-performance multi-site WiFi network of any size.
With the introduction of Cloud Wi-Fi, Ruckus Wireless claims that it now offers the industry’s broadest range of deployment options—public cloud, data center or private cloud, hardware or virtual appliance, and controller-less—making it a leader in WLAN architectural flexibility.
In the future, the company plans to introduce Ruckus Cloud support for in-building LTE service and Brocade ICX switches, delivering an integrated platform simplifying the configuration, monitoring and troubleshooting of both wired and wireless networks.
Dan Rabinovitsj, chief operating officer, Ruckus Wireless Business Unit, Brocade
With Cloud Wi-Fi, customers don’t need to make these tradeoffs anymore. Using the Ruckus Cloud platform, we will continue to introduce compelling as-a-service offers that can include cloud-managed switching and cloud-managed for in-building LTE service based on OpenG technology.
Nolan Greene, senior research analyst, network infrastructure at IDC
The WLAN market experienced substantial growth in the first quarter of 2016, a trend that we expect to continue, in part due to increased demand for the well-established benefits of cloud-managed WLAN services.
