5 Things Partners Should Know About Aerohive's New Generation Of Access Points

Aerohive says the launch of three new high-performance 802.11ax access points and the new Atom pluggable access point will make Wi-Fi easier, more efficient and more flexible for customers and partners.

X Marks The Spot

Aerohive is aiming to make Wi-Fi easier, more efficient and more flexible for customers and partners with the launch of three new high performance 802.11ax access points and the new Atom pluggable access point that the company says is a natural fit for Internet of Things deployments.

Michael O'Brien, vice president of global channel sales at the Milpitas, Calif., company, said the new 802.11ax access points come as "partners are looking for ways to extend the cloud-managed network environment. This takes the portfolio and extends it to help partners get into other areas of the marketplace and address other use cases."

The use cases for the one of the 802.11ax models and the wall outlet-mounted Atom access point include IoT deployments, where partners are faced with the challenge of customers that do not want to run IoT on production networks. "Atom can extend IoT services down to the mobile worker," O'Brien said. "It extends the corporate network in a mobile manner. Sometimes facilities don't lend themselves to shared AP models."

Here are five things solution providers should know about Aerohive's new access points.

Crowded House

Aerohive is rolling out three 802.11ax access points for high-performance deployments, and the company is calling them "Wi-Fi for the real world," because the 802.11ax WLAN standard addresses efficiency and collision problems that have cropped up as Wi-Fi has become the main mode of connection. Combining subcarrier resources to enable the transfer of data, and the ability to talk to multiple users at once based on traffic needs, the access point decides how to arrange the traffic up to a couple of dozen users, the company said.

The Lineup

The three access points are the AP630, AP650 and AP650X. The AP630 and AP650 feature internal antennas. The AP630 sports dual-band radio, while the 650 features dual 5GHz radio. The AP630 has two 1G ports while the AP650 has a 1G and a 2.5G port. The units have a slimmed-down design and can be twist-mounted almost like a home smoke detector. The AP650X is geared toward industrial uses and IoT deployments and features external antennas and an outdoor mode. The units are expected to be available in the late second or early third quarter. The AP630 and AP650 will list at $1,199. The AP650X's list price is $1,399. The access points include a single license key for Aerohive's Hive Manager and support.

Wall Flower

Aerohive says its Atom AP30 is the industry's first enterprise-grade, pluggable access point. The Atom is not intended to replace existing products, but to be complementary. It can be plugged straight into a wall power socket, can be relocated at will, and is small enough to fit in the palm of one's hand. Aerohive sees strong potential for the Atom in retail, and in IoT because the unit can be plugged in in accessible areas and automatically integrates with existing Aerohive access points straight out of the box, and can be provisioned in a matter of minutes. Retailers can use the Atom to more efficiently get into data collection and analytics related to customer engagement.

Atomic Time

The Atom AP30 is expected to be available in March or April and will come in boxes of three for $599, including a single license per pack. Partners, the company said, should be able to leverage that price point successfully, the company said, and are expected to push the fact that the Atom's VPN connectivity via a virtualized VPN gateway makes the Atom a good fit for temporary locations like kiosks, or use cases where multiple devices have to connect back to corporate infrastructure.

Partner Push

The new access points give Aerohive partners a more dynamic approach to how they help customers design and deploy their networks, said Matt Edwards, the company's senior manager of product marketing, by allowing partners to help design networks today while readying customers for changes down the road. With the Atom, "partners can understand what is happening, and recommend to customers where they should be redistributing their APs," Edwards said. The new access points are launching as "a lot of partners are looking for ways to extend the cloud managed network environment," O'Brien said. "This takes the portfolio and extends it to help partners get into other areas of the marketplace and address other use cases."