Mojo Networks never fails to provide an interesting presentation. Recently, I sat in Mojo’s conference room in San Jose for the fourth time in roughly as many years to hear what the company is up to, and what their vision for the future is. At Mobility Field Day 2 (MFD2) I found myself fairly riveted to CEO Rick Wilmer’s introductory session. Why? Because if Wilmer’s vision of WHAT COULD BE takes root, it could disrupt the WLAN industry (and beyond) in some profound ways.

Wilmer pulled no punches describing what the typical margin is for wireless access points sold to customers- 70%. That’s 70% per AP, times hundreds of thousands of APs generating much revenue for WLAN vendors. Wilmer sees a world where the advantage shifts to the customer when it comes to wireless access points, but we’ll get to that.

Then there’s vendor lock-in… I remember back in the early days of LWAPP (the thin AP protocol), I had very naive and childish visions of a protocol so sparkly-wonderful-special that I might be able to mix components from Vendor A and Vendor B on the same damn network. I was all a-tingle, for about 30 seconds. Then I was slapped with the reality that what comes out of the antennas might be mostly-standards-based, but there is and would continue to be zero compatibility between vendors under the hood. Ah well, I was a silly wireless child then. But Wilmer’s vision touches that as well.

If you watch the MFD2 Wilmer session, you’ll not hear a CEO harping on buzzy claims of Machine Learning and crazy wonderful feature sets. (That all comes later in Mojo’s other presentations, and even then what could be a Bucket o’ Buzzwords is really just incorporated into what Mojo does, versus the vendor hanging a bunch of impressive terminology in the air and hoping that you salivate over it.) Wilmer paints a vision of commodity-priced access points- and eventually switches and security appliances- being cloud managed in an open source framework where innovation is driven by the greater technical community instead of any single vendor’s skewed view of the feature world.

Cloud management, software-defined everything, and open hardware standards CAN replace bloated, proprietary systems as shown in different examples made by Wilmer’s team in presentations that came after his. The technical stuff is interesting, and you should watch Mojo’s story from MFD2 all the way through. But just as significant is Mojo’s idea of a new business model that flies in the face of convention, and could capitalize on the success of the Open Compute Project (OCP) in building white box data center components as that model stretches into wireless access.

It’s a fairly bold premise, and I applaud Mojo for taking a truly unique and interesting path. Hopefully they find some big allies soon to help push this vision along.

See Mojo Networks at Mobility Field Day 2 here, and catch up on all things Mojo at the company’s blog.

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Some of my past coverage of Mojo Networks (and Airtight)

• Goodbye AirTight, Hello Mojo Networks (IT Toolbox)

• Quick Hits: Xirrus, Ruckus, Cambium, Mojo Networks, Nyansa, CWNP (Wirednot)

• An aggregate of AirTight coverage on Wirednot blog
• The “New” Enterprise WLAN Vendor (Network Computing)

Filed under: Cloud Managed WLAN, SDN, Wireless Networking Tagged: #MFD2, AirTight, Mobility Field Day 2, Mojo Networks, Networking as a Service, Open Compute Project, Rick Wilmer, WLAN as a Service