This is an important year for wireless LAN player Airespace Inc. for more than one reason. The company is now making a direct entry into the Middle East market, after having for long been a major OEM to large vendors. And secondly, with the market having taken off in this region, Airespace EMEA Director and General Manager Marcel Dridje says playing a role in setting WLAN security standards is of prime importance. In an interview with SAME, he discusses plans.

SAME: You are making a direct entry into the Middle East under the Airespace brand name. What is the reason behind this?

Dridje: Airespace has been operating in the Middle East and such key markets but more as an OEM to major vendors like Cisco (Systems Inc.), NEC (Corp.), Alcatel and Nortel (Networks Inc.) for WLAN products, accounting for an indirect market share of over 40 percent. We have plans for an IPO and we need to build a revenue balance between direct revenues and business that comes from strategic OEM deals. So at one level this is a business decision. But at another level, this market is also opening up and as WLAN gain share, setting security standards is also an important role we want to play.

SAME: Can you tell us about your play on security standards for WLAN?

Dridje: Security on WLAN is a very key and critical issue in an enterprise. While the benefits of wireless mobility are many, the security issues associated with implementing it is often not understood well enough. Because of this problem many enterprises tend to focus most of their attention on better layer 2 authentication, authorization and encryption and often ignore other components like RF-layer protection and rouge appliance containment. All our products are based on the LWAP (light weight access point protocol), which actively secures all the layer 1 components as well including RF monitoring, rouge AP?s, Interference and noise on the network. So all WLAN standards -- 802.11a/b/g/k/i are integrated into our WLAN switches, secured by the LWAP Protocol.

SAME: Besides security protocols, Airespace seems keen for integrating management and monitoring of the network into the products. Your comments.

Dridje: Offering an integrated solution is a very important strategy. For one, this enables all changes to the network to be made from the switch -- which enables complete management from a single point. Also for security issues this offers a one-point management opportunity. We have an integrated solution for monitoring the network for intrusion detection and also a device locator tool that functions much like a GPS locator and maps all WLAN enabled devices in the area.

But more importantly, an integrated approach is necessary to enable the WLAN to also do more than providing pure network access. Because we offer a centrally managed solution we can offer the capacity for voice and data on the WLAN network. We are replacing the DECT with VoWLAN technology to enable this, asset and machine tracking is possible over IPWLAN, so RFID can be integrated into this as well.