Motorola Study Reveals Enterprise WLANs as a Must-Have to Increase Productivity

IT Spending on Wi-Fi Expected to Grow in North America to Meet Business’ Demand for Significantly Enhanced and Expanded WLANs in the Next Year


INTEROP, LAS VEGAS (Booth #1051) – April 2008 – The Enterprise Mobility business of Motorola, Inc. (NYSE: MOT) today announced its research results from an enterprise wireless LAN (WLAN) study[1] analyzing the deployments and requirements of North American enterprise WLAN decision-makers. More than half of all the survey respondents said they have either fully or partially deployed an enterprise WLAN with an additional 31 percent trialing or planning to deploy WLANs by 2010.

Nearly 20 percent of the polled enterprises said their IT spending on WLAN technologies will be 5 percent higher than last year’s budgeted expenditure. Despite the current soft economic conditions worldwide, enterprises are still prioritizing enterprise WLAN deployments and upgrades. Only 4 percent of survey respondents said they would reduce spending on WLAN technologies this year.

“Enterprises are realizing the strategic need to invest in wireless infrastructures rather than continuing to invest in both wired and wireless,” said Sujai Hajela, vice president and general manager of Enterprise WLAN, Motorola Enterprise Mobility business. “802.11n-based wireless networks are more secure, more reliable, faster and cheaper than the traditional wired network infrastructure enterprises use today. The technology is ready for the wireless edge to evolve to the completely wireless enterprise.”

Another industry trend that was validated by the survey showed that almost 60 percent of enterprises with existing WLAN deployments are providing access to more than half of their workforce. This represents a 20 percent increase over last year and highlights the growing adoption of Wi-Fi usage across various employee position levels and job responsibilities.

An example of how WLAN technology can improve network efficiency and the bottom-line is the innovative wireless deployment at San Marino Unified School District. “We decided to install a Motorola WLAN switch for centralized management and to standardize our access points from a single vendor to reduce the school district’s wireless operational costs,” said Stephen Choi, director of technology, San Marino Unified School District. “Motorola’s indoor and outdoor wireless solutions will enable high performance mobile connectivity on all four campuses supporting 3,200 students and 300 employees, which enhances the educational experience.”

Enterprise WLAN is part of Motorola’s portfolio of innovative wireless broadband solutions and services that complement and complete Internet Protocol (IP) networks. Delivering IP coverage to virtually all spaces both indoors and outdoors, the portfolio includes fixed broadband, mesh, broadband over powerline, WiMAX and Enterprise WLAN solutions for private and public networks.
MOTOROLA and the stylized M Logo are registered in the US Patent & Trademark Office. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners. © Motorola, Inc. 2008. All rights reserved.

[1] “E-WLAN Market Monitor Report” CWMP/eRewards Market Research, February 2008. More than 550 respondents represented the full range of North American decision makers including two-thirds that are engineers, managers, or IT directors.