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VeriWave had a good thing going with its wireless testing products: a steady stream of vendor and service provider customers impressed with its client-based performance measurement offerings. But with wireless network demands surging due to the growth of mobile devices, the volume of clients being added to networks and the pickup of faster 802.11n wireless technologies, VeriWave saw another golden opportunity for selling its wares: wireless-savvy VARs.
In late September, the company launched a full channel partner program to sell two recent software offerings, WaveDeploy and WaveInsite, through the enterprise channel. The goal was to not only give VARs a wireless testing service option beyond basic site surveys -- which many VARs say have become commoditized and limited in their appeal -- but also a flexible testing option that can be deployed as an up-front surveying tool and leveraged as a managed service play, too.
"We saw a three-tier opportunity," said Eran Karoly, vice president of marketing for VeriWave, in an interview with CRN. "These organizations have the opportunity to help IT managers deploy networks better, and they can make money doing it by reselling our solutions. The opportunity here for life-cycle revenues -- they are continuously health-checking the network -- is big."
Instead of mapping performance by access point signal, WaveDeploy evaluates client devices and applications on their performance, interoperability and interaction with access points, as well as wired and wireless networks, using traffic sent and received from actual Wi-Fi clients as they move throughout a site.
The WaveDeploy software is deployed on a laptop, while WaveAgent, another software application, is loaded onto client devices that need to be tested. WaveDeploy collects data as in a traditional site survey, but it can measure a number of different clients and applications in one take, instead of individually, and it can create color-coded maps that indicate on a scale of green to red the trouble spots in the Wi-Fi deployment.
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