Air Time: Enterprise Wi-Fi: Obstacles And Opportunities

We recently surveyed our readers to get an update on their attitudes concerning enterprise WLAN adoption. We received responses from 276 individuals, getting a pretty good mix from midsized-to-large organizations. Our surveys don't typically make their way into the hands of individuals working in small organizations, so in that sense they aren't really representative of the broad business market. But the responses do provide some interesting insights into the views of readers in larger organizations.

We've long felt that even organizations that don't feel ready for strategic wireless deployments should get some skin in the game. It's only through practical, real-world experience that IT professionals come to fully appreciate the complexities associated with Wi-Fi. The notable exception here are high-security environments where a conscious decision has been made not to deploy wireless services. In our sample, 71 respondents--just over 25%--reported no adoption to date. At the other extreme, 38 respondents-- about 15%--reported large installations of over 100 access points. The remaining 60% fell somewhere in between.

We were particularly interested in assessing the differences among these three groups, which we'll label here as wireless resisters, tactical adopters and strategic adopters. When we asked how Wi-Fi might transform LAN services three years into the future, even the wireless resisters acknowledged a significant role, with 32% predicting it would be broadly available throughout their facilities. That compares to 46% of the tactical adopters and 62% of the strategic adopters.

In terms of benefits associated with deploying wireless, the highest ranked item was increased employee convenience and satisfaction, followed by increased productivity and business process improvement. Interestingly, this was consistent across all three groups. The biggest difference across groups related to the role of WLANs in facilitating wireless VoIP rollouts. Strategic adopters viewed it as a significant positive benefit, while the other two groups were neutral or slightly negative about the benefits of wireless VoIP.

The enterprise Wi-Fi market grew somewhere between 5% and 20% last year, depending on whose numbers you believe. That's pretty modest growth, but it's also understandable in light of the many obstacles IT faces in deploying this technology. Despite the emergence of new standards and products, security continues to be the biggest barrier, followed by lack of compelling business justification and uncertainty over evolving WLAN standards. At the opposite extreme, none of the groups cited lack of user demand, operational costs or dissatisfaction with vendor offerings as a significant barrier. Not surprisingly, the greatest difference across our three subsamples related to the lack of compelling business justification. Concerns about acquisition and deployment costs were also much greater among the resisters than the strategic adopters.When we asked respondents which of about 20 features and functionalities were important in an enterprise-class WLAN product, the answer was clear: all of them. Security features were judged most important, followed by upgradeability of products to meet future standards, and centralized management. Items judged least important--though still ranked as desirable-- included automated site-survey planning, help desk monitoring and management-oriented reporting tools. We found it interesting that while there was relatively little disagreement across subsamples regarding features and functionality, the item that ranked highest was integrated firewall services: Resisters considered this important, while strategic adopters felt it was significantly less important.

When we asked about the importance of certain standards, we were disappointed, though not shocked, to see that 802.11a lagged in importance, though it was rated significantly more important among the strategic adopters than the resisters. On the other hand, there was very little variation between groups regarding the importance of 802.11n. That suggests a significant proportion of respondents think they can just skip 802.11a and wait for 802.11n. As we've stated in the past, we think this is a big mistake.

Given the relatively small sample size of our survey and the fact that the sample is skewed toward large organizations, it would be a mistake to overgeneralize these results. Nonetheless, they do provide interesting insights about adoption of Wi-Fi in the enterprise. It's clear that users are demanding wireless services, which puts IT in a difficult position, concerned about security, standards and investment protection. The vendors that do the best job of addressing these concerns are likely to garner considerable future business.