Context & Continuity

Mahler: A Complete Update on the Occasion of his 150th Birthday.

We (that would be you and me, Sarah) are blessed with an amazing selection of amazing recordings of Mahler's symphonies.

The first one that comes to mind is the insanely wild Bernstein / Columbia complete recording.  Completests will note that Berstein's second recording of the complete Mahler Symphones for Deutsch Gramophone is better only on the merit of its sonic fidelity.

The next one that comes to my mind is by Bernstein's protege, Michael Tilson Thomas and I don't think I'm including that here just because Maestro Thomas is the home town team.  This version is more thoughtful than passionate and perhaps that's because Maestro Bernstein had a monopoly on passion.

A recent issue of the Forward includes a story about Mahler on the occasion of a his 150th birthday and EMI's release of a sixteen-disk collection of Mahler's complete works with no less than nine, count them, nine comparative performances of "I Am Lost to the World."  The EMI edition, Mahler: The Complete Works, 150th Anniversary Box, is price only at $48.18 at Amazon and strikes me as a bargain, especially in light of the fact the conductors for the set include Simon Rattle, John Barbirolli, Otto Klemperer, Klaus Tennstedt and George Szell.  That's a line up that would do the Yankees proud.

I haven't read many reviews yet of this edition, but am confident it's a good investment and as soon as I'm able to scratch together the investment, I'll let you know what I think.

Gail Collins / NYTimes: General McChrystal's Twitters.

Just in case you didn't get to see today's NYTimes, or didn't make it to the editorial pages, you missed a Really Great article by Gail Collins who takes Twitter's interesting style and combines it with what we might imagine to be General McChrystal's voice:

DAY 2   

Stuck going to dinner w/ some damned French minister. Gang riding me big. Bluto says they will make me eat snails. Hell of a funny guy, Bluto.

Restaurant — ultra-Gucci. No Bud Light Lime. Damn. Wish I was on foot patrol in Kandahar. :(

Minister yammering diplomatic bull. I’d rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people. As if they could. LOL

Still talking. Better at this diplomatic stuff than I used to be. Learned a lot in last few years. Like, don’t mention “mission failure.”

Whoops. Mentioned “mission failure.” Don’t think the minister noticed.

Steak comes covered in some goop. Miss my gruel.

Dinner’s over. Ran 12 miles.   [more]

This Just In: Press Releases Are Boring.

Todd Wasserman, crack reporter at Brandweek has made a discovery:  press releases are boring.  Mr. Wasserman has written what's probably an amusing analysis of the contemporary press release and I wish I had the distance from the subject to laugh out loud but I have way too much invested in the subject.  Perhaps you can find at chuckle in the following excerpt:

Imagine, if you will, that a friend of yours has come over for supper. Stepping through your front door, he tells you, “I’m very excited by this opportunity to attend dinner. Dinner is a wonderful tradition that is enjoyed by citizens of every nationality throughout the world. I expect this meal to fulfill my goal of nourishing myself between the hours of 5 and midnight.” Then, after you sit down and offer him a chicken leg, he announces, “Chicken brings a unique combination of taste and nutrition to the equation. I’m confident that its proteins and fats will stimulate my digestive system.”

By this point, you’d hopefully boot this weirdo out of the house. After all, what kind of person talks like that? Well, no one—nobody in real life, at least. But this is exactly the kind of language you’ll find in most any quote within a press release.  [more]

What Mr. Wasserman describes has been a business opportunity for me for the past twenty years.  I never could understand why press releases had to be boring other than a lack of imagination on the part of the public relations guy.  Sometimes, my clients initially resisted the idea of a press release that was so different than what they were used to, but, after the sales staff checked in with their enthusiasm for the new voice, debate ceased.  So, I feel good about boring press release.  They make my work look great.  

Recommended: "How to socialize your website."

This article posted by Kipp Bodnar doesn't exactly break any new ground but it does offer four steps or paths each of which will work, for sure.  See for yourself here.             

 

NYTimes, 4.19.10: Ex-Pat Paris as It Sizzled for One Literary Lioness

From today's NYTimes, a wonderful review of a new book, The Letters of Sylvia Beach.  Ms. Beach is the probably one of the most important figure in what we've come to call Modern Literature and, perhaps most famously, published James Joyce's Ulysses.  This was her "crowd"

Joyce, Stein, Pound Hemingway Fitzgerald and H.D. and many others. 

Beach was an unlikely champion of literary modernism. The daughter of a Presbyterian minister, she was the second of three daughters and grew up in Bridgeton and Princeton, N.J. She didn’t attend college but saw the world, working during World War I as a volunteer agricultural laborer in France and then as a Red Cross volunteer in Serbia. She was plucky. One letter home from Belgrade describes a springlike day ruined by the “bomby” air.

She was a bibliophile from an early age and debated opening a bookstore in New York or London. But in Paris she met and fell in love with a bookstore owner, Adrienne Monnier, who would become, Ms. Walsh writes in her introduction, “her lifelong personal and professional partner.” (This book’s dust jacket speaks of these women’s complicated “affair,” an odd phrase for a decades-long relationship. That phrase also goes farther than Beach does; she was reserved about her sexuality, and these letters are quite chaste.)

[more]

Regarding Malcom McLaren

I wasn't was what one might call a "student" of Malcom McLaren and I was NOT a fan of the Sex Pistols. (It was all over my head.)  But I did have an appreciation of Malcom McLaren and what he was able to accomplish and his style.  This past week he passed away at 64, after only living three or four lives. 

Here's from the NYTimes obituary:

In the 1970s, Mr. McLaren returned to his native London from New York, where he had briefly managed the New York Dolls in the waning days of that band’s initial flush of fame. With his business partner and girlfriend at the time, Vivienne Westwood, they renamed their clothing shop Sex, and Mr. McLaren set about putting together his own rock act of untested British youth, which became the Sex Pistols.

“I’m much more of a magician than a musician,” he told The Globe and Mail of Toronto in 1985. “I steal other people’s songs and try to make them better.”

Mr. McLaren was a keen student of the French Situationists, who believed in staging absurdist or provocative incidents as a spur to social change. He arranged for the Sex Pistols to sign their contract with A&M Records outside Buckingham Palace and organized a performance of “God Save the Queen” on the Thames, outside the Houses of Parliament, on a boat named the Queen Elizabeth. The police quickly intervened, ratifying the group’s incendiary reputation.

In recent years his name was linked with film, television and radio projects, most of them never realized, although he did help produce the film “Fast Food Nation” and presented two series for BBC2 radio, “Malcolm McLaren’s Musical Map of London” and “Malcolm McLaren’s Life and Times in L.A.”

[more]

NYTimes, 3.22.10: Take $787 Billion. Now Show Where It’s Going.

Tufte has been a hero of mine for quite some time and has been done tremendous work for decades on exploring the the world of clear graphics and "chartjunk" (his term) for decades.  The NYTimes caught up with him yesterday and caught up with what he's been up to (a lot).  He's helping the Federal Government help communicate what they're upto with their website recovery.gov.  

Rather than define himself on the conservative-liberal political continuum, Mr. Tufte, a professor emeritus of political science, statistics and computer science at Yale, said that he longed for cause-and-effect reasoning to take hold in Washington.

“Political practice today too often skips right by evidence,” he said by e-mail. “When I listen to True Believers (left or right) talk about the problems that governments are seeking to solve, I keep muttering to myself, ‘How boring, it’s more complicated than that.’ And those who best know that it’s more complicated than that are public servants.”   [more]

I can highly recommend all of his books, but his first one,

The September Issue

Abby and the girls are in Brooklyn for my father-in-law's unveiling (and I stayed behind because when the planning was being done, we had no idea about the shape I'd be in following the surgery). And I use these times sans filles to indulge my sweet tooth for movies. So, as I was checking out what's on the big screen in my neighborhood, I found out that The September Issue was playing in Livermore, but it was closing on the Thursday nigh before the girls left on Friday. And I felt absolutely cheated. I am not a regular reader of Vogue, but I have an Immense Admiration for Anna Wintour, one of the Amazingly Great people who have worked in publishing. I admire her for her vision and her determination, energy and force of will to see her vision made manifest. She is a creative genius full stop.


And I missed viewing the documentary, The September Issue, by one day. The documentary is directed by R.J. Cutler who also directed The War Room. I was bereft.

And then, I turned to the dark side and inquired as to whether or not there might be a file of The September Issue floating around somewhere on the internets and indeed there was. I've pre-ordered the DVD on Amazon, so my conscious is a little bit clean, but I got to scratch my itch.

And it was marvelous and it surpassed my every expectation.  Anna Wintour simply demands the absolute best of her staff and everyone in her orbit and she's completely right.  For example, the movie includes a rather embarrassing scene at a tennis court with the fabulous André Leon Talley and his coach.  Mr. Talley is a very large man by any measure and watching him stumble around the court was almost funny.  But Ms. Wintour is right.  Mr. Talley should indeed take better care of himself. 

But the real action takes place in the relationship between Anna Wintour and Grace Coddington, Vogue's creative director.  The documentary makes it very clear that Grace Coddington is an accomplished artist in her own right.  Coddington is assigned two major spreads for the September issue, a '20s-themed pictorial and a pictorial on color blocking.  Meanwhile Ms. Wintour is focussed on the cover of the September issue and the cover story.   Ms. Wintour has decided that Ms. Sienna Miller will be the It Girl for the issue and has plotted an elaborate photoshoot in Rome led by Mario Testino.  The clock is wound and the action set in motion. 

Ms. Coddington delivers an absolutely stunning 20s-themed shoot, beautiful in every respect.  And her shoot is laid out on the board.  Ms. Wintour begins to whittle away at it to make space for what she assumes will be her own brilliant shoot by Testino.  But that shoot ends up going poorly.  The actress / model, Ms. Miller doesn't live up to anyone's expectations.  Her hair is so much a disaster that wigs don't even help.  Then the photographer doesn't get the shot that Ms. Wintour has sent him for:  Ms. Miller with the Colosseum in the background.  When the photographs arrive in New York, Ms. Wintour takes a look and asks, "Is that it?"  Her vision of the shot in the Colosseum is missing and the best candidate for the cover shot reveals that Ms. Miller has several fillings, huge teeth and very thick eyebrows.  Well, never mind that, as the miracle of digital photography can spackle over most anything, but Ms. Wintour is still faced with the problem that Testino hasn't delivered enough images for her to create the spread she had envisioned. 

So, Ms. Wintour does the right thing.  When all the pieces are spread out on the table, it's clear that Ms. Coddington had delivered and then some.  The images that Ms. Wintour previously removed are restored and the magazine is a smashing success.  --And that's that part I really like about the movie.  We see Ms. Wintour put the work of the magazine ahead of everything else, including some of her own plans. 

I highly recommend the movie. 

PS.  I found out why Anna Wintour wears those dark glasses.  They are prescriptions lenses.   She's as blind as a bat without them. 

It would be completely remiss of us...

 ... not to notice the debut of Gustavo Dudamel's debut as conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  This Saturday, both the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal published reviews of the debut and both were unalloyed raves.  Yesterday, on Performance Today, as aired by the newly reconstituted WQXR, highlights of the debut were aired and I got to hear the the performance of Mahler's First Symphony.  I don't have the ear that many people do, and heaven only knows what happens to the sound after it's been recorded, shipped around the world on satellite, broadcast over FM radio and then picked up by the internet, but... from what I could tell, it was a crystal clean performance.  Entire sections almost sounded like soloists.  --Regarding this, the commentators on Performance Today said the an orchestra usually tries their hardest for the debut of a new conductor.  Here's a link to the Performance Today page where you can hear the highlights for yourself.  

I'm very happy for the LA Philharmonic and wish them all the best.  LA has an outstanding number of great musicians and it rarely receives the notices it deserves.  The number of great musicians in LA has to do with the amount of work is available for them there.  As KUSC is so fond of reminding listeners, LA is the entertainment capital of the world.  And the lack of recognition has to do with the East Cost snobbery hard at work and probably some envy too because LA has had much better luck at building new concert halls than New York.  (Alice Tully Hall has been rebuilt how many times?  Four?  And they still haven't gotten it quite right?)

I hope Dudamel and LA have many happy years together. 

A Romance on Three Legs.

One of my hobbies is Glenn Gould.  Okay, he's an obsession.  Unlike other people's obsessions over transiant celebrities, I feel as if my obsession is well deserver and honorable.  I think I've written here before about a new book by Katie Hafner, A Romance on Three Legs

.

There is a wonderful interview with Ms. Hafner here.

Digital Makeovers.

Communication News, 1.9: University deploys Wi-Fi access

In 2005, the University of Utah, based in Salt Lake City, began implementation of one of the largest wireless networks at any U.S. higher-education institution. Answering the demands of students and campus organizations and institutions, the office of information technology (OIT) proposed and obtained funding approval to install a wireless network that would provide connectivity and support applications for approximately 45,000 users across 1,400 acres and more than 200 buildings.

According to Bryan Morris, OIT’s manager of network operations and services, "Our goal was to provide ubiquitous wireless access to every student, educator and administrator on campus. We also wanted to reduce administrative costs of disparate wireless systems across campus by establishing centralized management and integration with our existing wired network."

[more]

   

Press Release: TRAPEZE NETWORKS ROUTS CISCO IN WLAN RESILIENCY TEST

Tolly Group Tests Show Wide Lead of Trapeze Networks over Cisco

PLEASANTON, Calif., November 17, 2008 – Today, The Tolly Group, a leading global provider of third-party validation services for IT vendors, has published a report showing Trapeze Networks (NYSE: BDC) offers its customers wireless networks that recover from failures 800 times faster than Cisco.

Specifically, the Tolly report says that Trapeze Networks, “delivers sub-second fail-over using Trapeze’s clusters wireless controller approach, while a comparable Cisco solution results in network downtime of 9 to 12 seconds.” The report goes on to say Trapeze Networks “exhibits less that 0.1 seconds recovery without interrupting applications, while the Cisco solution drops both FTP and VoIP sessions during recovery.” Trapeze Networks is making the report available free-of-charge and it can be downloaded here.

TRAPEZE NETWORKS OPENS SECOND R&D CENTER IN CHINA

World-Wide Network of R&D Centers Expands to Four

Beijing, China, October 14, 2008 –Trapeze Networks (NYSE: BDC) is opening a research and development center in the Hangzhou, China that is focused on embedded wireless technologies.  The center is the second in China for the company.

“Trapeze Networks continues to invest in China for three important reasons,” said James Reeves, vice president of product operations.  “China -- and the entire region -- is a huge market for Trapeze Networks so we want to ensure we’re developing the right product with the right features for this market.  Second, we think that tapping the wealth of world-class engineering talent in China is giving us a competitive edge.  Finally, having a Mandarin-speaking team in Hangzhou working with our manufacturing partners in Taiwan will accelerate our time to market.”

TRAPEZE NETWORKS DEPLOYS CHINA’S LARGEST WI-FI NETWORK

6,500,000 Citizens Surf NonStop Wireless Network

Beijing, China, September 29, 2008 -- Trapeze Networks, a Belden brand, has won the Hangzhou Wi-Fi Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) project, the largest Wi-Fi MAN in China.  Trapeze Networks is deploying more than 3,000 access points in Hangzhou, allowing the city’s 6.5 million residents to enjoy the convenience and reliability of NonStop Wireless™ networking.

Press Release: WICHITA WINGNUTS WELCOME WIRELESS

Consumers Crave Cashless Concessions

PLEASANTON, Calif., September 22, 2008 – Trapeze Networks is the MVP player on a team that has built the first cashless professional sports stadium in the United States, Lawrence-Dumont Stadium, home of the Wichita Wingnuts. Other members of this winning line-up include Total Venue Control, Game Time Food & Beverage Services, EZ Pay and Renaissance Network Solutions. Working together, these companies created a turnkey solution that makes everything about baseball in Wichita a lot more fun.

 

Infoworld, 9.19.8: Wireless LAN standard to cut power use

The upcoming 802.11v standard will lower power consumption in wireless LANs, according to Matthew Gast, principal engineer at Trapeze Networks.

Work on the standard began early in 2004 and ratification is currently scheduled for March 2010. Features include a Wireless Network Management Sleep Mode, improvement on base 802.11 power savings and longer power-off times for 802.11 radios.

[more]

UPCOMING 802.11v WIRELESS STANDARD “GREENS UP” WLAN

Trapeze Networks Engineer Tells InterOp New York How

PLEASANTON, Calif., September 19, 2008 – The coming IEEE 802.11v standard will introduce new power savings features that will “green up” wireless LANs.  This important advance will be explained at the InterOp New York conference by Matthew Gast, Trapeze Networks' principal engineer, office of the CTO, and the chair of Wi-Fi Alliance Wireless Network Management and Security Technical task groups.

LEADING INDUSTRY ANALYST SAYS HEALTHCARE, RETAIL AND MANUFACTURING BENEFIT FROM VOICE OVER WIRELESS NETWORKS

Trapeze Networks Webcast Stresses Importance
Of Coverage, Density, Resiliency and Performance

 

PLEASANTON, Calif., September 15, 2008 – Trapeze Networks is hosting a webcast featuring Michael J. King, a research director at Gartner, an industry analyst firm. King presents his new findings in a webcast entitled Deployment Considerations for Voice over Wireless LANs. Trapeze Networks, a leader in wireless networking, and Polycom, a leader in collaborative applications for voice, video and data, is hosting the webcast and making it available to everyone interested in wireless voice services for their organizations. The webcast can be viewed here.

 

“Trapeze Networks is uniquely positioned to help companies get the benefits of wireless voice,” said Ahmet Tuncay, executive vice president of product management and business development. “Nonstop Wireless Networking differentiates Trapeze Networks from all its competitors. Most data applications don’t mind bits that arrive late or out of sequence as long as they all arrive at their destination sooner or later. But voice applications, and for that matter video too, demand that the signal be transmitted without interruption and Trapeze Networks does that better than any other WLAN company.”

 

Since its introduction earlier this year, Trapeze Networks has earned praise from the media and industry analysts for Nonstop Wireless. Network World, the leading trade magazine for the data networking marketplace, named Trapeze Networks a “blue ribbon winner” for its 802.11n product line. Trapeze Networks’ Nonstop Wireless networking was singled out from every other WLAN vendor for its high-availability architecture.

 

The Network World article reported on the findings of recent research performed by ABI Research. In its report, ABI Research wrote this:

 

Trapeze edges out its competitors with respect to resilience and high availability. The company’s “Non-Stop Wireless” is more than a slogan. Its use of virtual cluster controller functionality is highly innovative. Each controller contributes capacity resources to a community of controllers; and that means no impact on sessions should a controller go down. It also means that content is balanced automatically if a controller ceases operation.

 

In addition to the accolades Trapeze Networks has received from ABI Research, Current Analysis wrote this:

 

Customers of other WLAN vendors should consider Trapeze when looking to upgrade the existing WLAN. …Trapeze pulls out all the stops for its NonStop Wireless strategy.

 

About Trapeze Networks

Trapeze Networks, a Belden brand, is a leading provider of enterprise wireless LAN equipment and management software. Trapeze was the first company to introduce NonStop Wireless - delivering unmatched reliability to the enterprise wireless LAN and its solutions are optimized for companies requiring mobility and high bandwidth such as healthcare, education, and hospitality. Trapeze delivers Smart Mobile™ providing scalable wireless LANs for applications such as Voice over Wi-Fi, location services, and indoor/outdoor connectivity.

 

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Press Release: TRAPEZE ENGINEER LEADING TWO IMPORTANT WIFI ALLIANCE TASK GROUPS

The Wi-Fi Alliance, the global, non-profit industry association, has selected Matthew Gast, a Trapeze executive, to chair two new, very important task groups. Gast will chair the Wireless Network Management Marketing and Security Technical task groups.

[more]

Press Release: LEADING WORLDWIDE SUPPLIER OF PATIENT MONITORING TECHNOLOGY TURNS TO TRAPEZE NETWORKS FOR NONSTOP WIRELESS

Dräger Medical Certifies Trapeze Networks Products Interoperable

PLEASANTON, Calif., August 4, 2008 – Dräger Medical, an international leader in the fields of medical and safety, has certified interoperability between Dräger’s line of Infinity patient monitoring equipment and Trapeze Networks’ line of NonStop Wireless networking.

In Dräger’s notice of certification, Lars Roth of Dräger’s Monitoring Systems and IT group, wrote, “Due to the critical nature of medical devices, Dräger Medical tests and verifies network hardware components used for communication between medical system devices. These tests include proper IP Multicast handling, wireless roaming, wireless encryption and load testing. In addition, tests with competing traffic are run in order to understand and detect the proper Quality of Service settings. These are the key parameters that will ensure that in a shared Infinity OneNet installation, the data flow of the Dräger patient monitors is being prioritized over non-patient monitor data.”

“People kick around the words ‘mission-critical’ until the expression is meaningless,” said Ahmet Tuncay, executive vice president of product management and business development at Trapeze Networks. “For Dräger, mission-critical means monitoring patients in the ER, ICU, OR, and everywhere in between. Dräger has pioneered mobile patient monitoring and is turning to the leader in NonStop Wireless, Trapeze Networks, for wireless infrastructure. --That’s mission critical.”

[more]

TechTarget, Belden-Trapeze acquisition: Partners say so far so good

This story ended up with some very interesting competitive spins to it.  Some hard work and some great relationships brought everything together quite nicely.  Very pleased with the story.

By Rivka Gewirtz Little, Senior News Writer

Last week cabling company Belden Inc. completed its acquisition of Trapeze Networks for $133 million, and executives say the wireless LAN company's 200-plus partner channel will remain intact and supported.

"Our partners are pretty excited about this," said Jim Vogt, president of Trapeze, adding that the company will function independently, continue to use its own name and look to further expand the channel.

Because it is so difficult for an independent company to survive in the hotly competitive wireless LAN market, Trapeze partners appear to believe that the acquisition by Belden, a publicly traded company, will strengthen Trapeze's position and give it global reach. A string of small wireless LAN companies have been acquired in recent years.

"This is going to solidify Trapeze and give them the financial backing to continue on in the future," said Dick Stayner, major accounts manager at Valcom, a Trapeze partner in Salt Lake City.

Trapeze can't promise that there won't be channel conflict, since at least a portion of Belden's channel, which dwarfs Trapeze's, will eventually be able to sell the wireless product.

Initially, though, Trapeze partners are likely to see new opportunities, because many Belden partners are not yet trained in wireless technology and can't sell the wireless product until they are. In those situations Trapeze partners will be brought in on Belden deals, Vogt said.

"Now we can put our sales force behind them and go after larger accounts," Vogt said. Belden partners often serve large businesses that could have both wired and wireless networks, or have wireless systems that need extensive behind-the-scenes cabling.

However, it is unclear how Belden partners will take to bringing in Trapeze partners.

"Everybody will want to sell Trapeze and they'll wonder why we're bringing in [our own channel]," Vogt said. "So there will be some conflict there." But he added that there will be "some reward" for taking Trapeze partners into accounts.

A formal award or incentive system hasn't been finalized yet, and the companies are banging out the rules of engagement. Those guidelines must emerge quickly since eventually Belden partners will be trained and may try to cut out Trapeze partners, resulting in channel conflict.

"What the Belden guys are doing now is sorting out where the interest is in the Belden channel, figuring out who would like to step up and extend their business with this offering and whether they have the propensity to do it. Then we are going to have to map our channel list and say, 'Here are my channels by region, and here are yours," Vogt said. He added that it will be like putting the "decoder ring together."

Beyond concerns about channel conflict, partners also hope the Belden acquisition won't change Trapeze's partner-friendly attitude.

Cliff Arellano, president of Trapeze partner Communications Products Inc. (CPI) in Indianapolis, said his company used to work with wireless LAN company Airespace, which was later acquired by Cisco Systems Inc. CPI started working with Cisco but didn't find the super-vendor to be "really partner-friendly," so it switched to Trapeze. CPI has a rosier outlook on the Belden deal since it is already a Belden partner too. Nevertheless, Arellano said he hopes Belden sticks to its word that it will be friendly toward Trapeze partners.

"Belden seems to get the picture, whereas Cisco didn't appear to care," Arellano said.

In the meantime, CPI is testing products from Ruckus Wireless and may eventually incorporate some Ruckus technology into its offering.

Ruckus launched an incentive program to poach unhappy Trapeze partners once the Belden deal was announced. Ruckus marketing vice president David Callisch said the incentive program has drawn new partners, and he gave two examples. CPI was the only Trapeze partner contacted by press time that showed any interest in Ruckus, and Arellano stressed that CPI is moving very slowly with Ruckus and is fully committed to Trapeze.

Arellano said the company "had been stuck once before" with small vendors like Ruckus that were later acquired and weren't the same for partners. Now that Trapeze has been purchased by Belden, he said, it is definitely stable.

[link to original story]

      

TRAPEZE NETWORKS INTRODUCES SMARTPASS 7.0: INTELLIGENT ACCESS CONTROL FOR WIRELESS LANS

PLEASANTON, Calif., June 26, 2008 – Today, Trapeze Networks introduces SmartPass™ 7.0, the access management platform for Trapeze NonStop Wireless™ networking products. SmartPass 7.0 gives network managers precise control over every dimension of the who, what, where, when, why and how of access management. With SmartPass 7.0, network managers have more control over wireless network access than they typically have for the wired network. Network managers can easily control access based on location, traffic, and time-of-day policies.

“SmartPass 7.0 marks an important advancement in access control and how it must be integrated with business applications,” said Ahmet Tuncay, vice president of product management and marketing. “SmartPass is now a standards-based platform combining user authentication, device integrity checking, and dynamic access control with open interfaces for third-party development, a first of its kind in the wireless LAN industry.”

Today, SmartPass can accept the following plug-ins:

- Advanced Access Control
- Location-Based Authentication
- RADIUS-based Monitoring and Reporting
- Guest Access

Trapeze Networks has published the application programming interfaces for SmartPass so an enterprise can write its own plug-in and control its wireless network with precision.

Advanced Access Control
SmartPass installs quickly and immediately begins to protect the integrity of the production network. With the Advanced Access Control plug-in, the network administrator using SmartPass can set access based on location, time of day, identity of user, SSID, VLAN, and / or accounting data. It is based on the RFC 3576 standard and has the ability to change authorization attributes during active sessions.

One example application of Advanced Access Control is in an education setting where for any given student, after 10 MB of downloads one session, the user is moved down from full access to the lowest priority queue, perhaps 100 Kbps maximum. This way, every student has a chance to benefit from high-speed access.

Location, Location, Location
SmartPass 7.0, with the Location-based Authentication / Access Control plug-in, works with the Trapeze Networks Location Appliance to provide location-based services and add location information to accounting data. Network managers can set rules to permit or restrict access, allocate bandwidth and allow resources all based on location. This is a feature unique to Trapeze Networks.
In a school, for instance, a professor is giving a test from 2:00p to 3:00p in Classroom 230. She has the ability to change wireless access for students instantly to deny access to the internet during that time and at that location. If the professor chooses, students can still have access to relevant classroom materials on the local area network.

Plays Well With Others
SmartPass works hand-in-glove with Trapeze Networks’ LA-200 Location Appliance. SmartPass also works seamlessly with Trapeze Networks’ RingMaster, the company’s wireless network management suite, its access points and wireless controllers. All these components come together to deliver NonStop Wireless for the Always-on Enterprise.

No man is an island and no network application should be forced to work independently of all the others. That’s why when Trapeze Networks engineered SmartPass, it made the platform plug and play with Cisco’s NAC (Network Admission Control), Microsoft’s NAP (Network Access Protection), and the TCG (Trusted Computing Group).

SmartPass maintains per user statistics, lifetime session counts, traffic details, and total traffic passed for a user session or specific device. All together, this means that SmartPass 7.0 cooperates and complements existing network tools by giving managers unique views and reports on all aspects of wireless usage and traffic patterns relating to time of day and location. This information can be used to make decisions about adjusting the capacity of the network by adding more access points to relieve congested areas.

Be Our Guest
Today, it’s expected to allow guests to have wireless access, but too many enterprises give too much away to too many. And the new generation of wireless-enabled sub-notebooks, iPhones, gaming and music devices makes a bad situation worse.

With SmartPass, the guest access operator is completely shielded from the WLAN controllers and network management tools so mistakes can’t be made. When guest accounts are created, they are automatically purged after a pre-determined time, such as the end of a work day, and can be changed in mid-session. SmartPass can be used to handle a couple of guests in a conference room or 1,000 people in a convention center. Either way, every guest can do their own work and only their own work.

Easy to Use, Easy to Buy
Through September 30, 2008, Trapeze Networks customers can upgrade to a SmartPass 7.0 base license for $295, a $300 savings. For more information on this promotion, see the Trapeze website (www.trapezenetworks.com) or one of its many channel partners.

About Trapeze Networks
Trapeze Networks is a leading provider of enterprise wireless LAN equipment and management software. Trapeze was the first company to introduce NonStop Wireless – delivering unmatched reliability to the enterprise wireless LAN. Its solutions are optimized for companies requiring mobility and high bandwidth such as healthcare, education, and hospitality. Trapeze delivers Smart Mobile™— providing scalable wireless LANs for applications such as Voice over Wi-Fi, location services, and indoor/outdoor connectivity.

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According to Craig Mathias, Farpoint Research....

Belden Snags Trapeze - Expansion, Not Consolidation

This looks to me like a marriage made in heaven, or at least as
close as one can get to that delightful, if theoretical, concept.
Belden has a huge following, name recognition, a channel, and great
wired products. Trapeze has a very competitive wireless LAN system. I
think that this acquisition is very clear evidence of the importance of
wireless LANs, unified networking, and the very significant growth
prospects ahead for both.

[more]

Current Analysis, April 24, 2008

Trapeze Pulls Out All the Stops for Its “NonStop Wireless” Strategy

• Customers with greenfield opportunities should consider Trapeze when selecting a wireless vendor, especially if there is a need to scale the WLAN to a very large number of APs. In addition, customers in this situation should consider using 802.11n at the onset, rather than older ABG technologies.

            

• Existing Trapeze customers should consider the new controller and software in this announcement when planning upgrades to their WLAN environment. Trapeze has significantly changed the capabilities in its offerings, especially when it comes to scaling the WLAN environment. Customers should consider the new capabilities when planning for the next year.

            

• Customers of other WLAN vendors should consider Trapeze when looking to upgrade the existing WLAN. Trapeze has made significant improvements that may outstrip the current WLAN vendor.

[more]

EdTech, May 2008: Completely Unplugged.

Completely Unplugged

The University of Minnesota is set to deploy the world’s largest 802.11n wireless network.

When University of Minnesota students return for classes this fall, they’ll discover a whole new meaning for the term “academic freedom.” That’s because for the firstrt time, they’ll have a chance to connect to the school’s new campuswide wireless network, which, thanks to its adherence to the latest 802.11 Wi-Fi standard, will allow them access to electronic resources via ultra-high-speed, seamless and reliable connections from just about anywhere on the Twin Cities campus.

When it’s fully implemented in the next few years, the new 802.11n wireless network will be the world’s largest, with approximately 9,500 access points deployed over 300 buildings and large communal areas on the school’s 1,204-acre campus in St. Paul and along the east and west banks of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis.

The network, which will take five years and an estimated $15 million to build out across the entire campus, relies on state-of-the-art products from Trapeze Networks.

[more]

TechWorld, 3.19.8: Trapeze makes 5000-AP Wi-Fi appliance

My favorite bit is the final paragraph of the article.  Sweet.

Trapeze makes 5000-AP Wi-Fi appliance

By Peter Judge, Techworld

Wi-Fi network maker Trapeze Networks has launched a pre-configured appliance that can manage up to 5000 wireless access points or 1000 wireless switches - and won a giant contract for 802.11n Wi-Fi.

The RingMaster-200 is a hardware version of Trapeze's RingMaster network management software, and is pre-tuned to manage wireless LANs. “Today, it’s common for enterprise Wi-Fi networks to include thousands of access points cover hundreds of acres and span multiple sites," said Ahmet Tuncay, Trapeze's marketing vice president.

Before this product, Trapeze's largest hardware device managed around 200 access points, while rival Aruba was ahead with its MMC-6000 which can manage 2048 APs. Both companies use software to manage larger installations, which has normally run on general purpose servers. Aruba's recently purchased AirWave management platform uses software to go up to 50,000 APs. Trapeze's appliance will make the process of design and management simpler, says Trapeze, saving hundreds of IT hours.

Ringmaster was central to Trapeze's recent success in winning what it calls "the world’s largest deployment" of the new 802.11n standard, a $15 million, five-year upgrade to the wireless LANs at the University of Minnesota. The upgrade will include $3 million on access points alone, swapping out existing APs from D-Link, Cisco and other vendors for around 9,500 of Trapeze's 802.11n access points. Ringmaster "…allowed us to quickly import our own CAD drawings and immediately begin Wi-Fi planning for 300 buildings, including 1,300-plus floors," according to Steve Cawley, the university’s vice president of IT.

RingMaster has been a big part of Trapeze's WLAN strategy from the beginning, for dealing with Wi-Fi propagation issues, and managing the lifecycle of WLANs. The appliance can make a "virtual" site survey based on architectural drawings, and configure access points for specific locations before they are installed.

The appliance is based on a Linux OS, and has two redundant 250GB hard drives to gather monitoring and performance data. The basic unit costs $19,000 (£9,515) including a licence to support 250 APs, which can be extended in steps of ten to 1000, up to 5000, if users buy software keys.

Trapeze's claims - like most claims in the ever-competitive Wi-Fi world - have already been disputed. Aruba told us that it already has an appliance that manages 5000 APs, called the MM-200. We have been unable to find this product on Aruba's site, however.

Information Week, 3.10.8: University Of Minnesota Plans Wi-Fi Network For 80,000

University Of Minnesota Plans Wi-Fi Network For 80,000

The installation will cover 1,204 acres across the university's two campuses and supercede a current network of scattered Wi-Fi access points.

By W. David Gardner
InformationWeek
March 10, 2008 04:21 PM

The University of Minnesota is preparing to roll out what it calls the "world's largest 802.11n deployment" at the Big Ten university's two campuses. The deployment, to get under way in May, eventually will serve 80,000 students and staff.

[more]

Wi-Fi Planet, 3.7.8: When Disaster Strikes, Wi-Fi Responds

By Jeff Goldman

In a disaster recovery scenario, Wi-Fi can offer the perfect mix of flexibility and interoperability.

<snip>

Similarly, Trapeze Networks is using Wi-Fi for disaster response in schools—company director of product marketing David Cohen says an educational environment is perfect for that kind of deployment, since the same network that’s being used for student and faculty Internet access can support everything from video monitoring to emergency communications.

“To enable all the administrators, firemen, police captains, all those people, to communicate with each other on a wireless network, that is a tremendous resource,” he says.

To that end, Cohen says, it’s the interoperability that really makes Wi-Fi ideal in an emergency situation: any first responder with a Wi-Fi device can instantly access the network as needed.

“Wi-Fi uniquely offers one system with guaranteed interoperability,” Cohen says. “Everything just works together.”

Computerworld, 3.7.8: Faster Wi-Fi deployed at U of Minnesota

Trapeze System Replaces Older Wi-Fi from Various Vendors

By Matt Hamblen

March 7, 2008 (Computerworld) Wi-Fi has become commonplace on college campuses, but the University of Minnesota is embarking on a five-year project to upgrade its Wi-Fi network to the much faster 802.11n standard. The $15 million upgrade would provide about 9,500 access points, one of the largest deployments to date.

 

The first phase of the project, to begin in May, involves replacing 2,200 access points that have been in place for as long as nine years. The access points from Cisco Systems Inc., D-Link Corp. and others will be replaced with 802.11n APs from Trapeze Networks at a cost of about $3 million, said Louis Hammond, assistant director of networking and telecom at the university, in an interview today.

 

Trapeze beat 23 other bids in a rigorous RFP process, and won because of cost and Trapeze's ability to manage the overall Wi-Fi infrastructure centrally and in a secure manner, Hammond said. A key factor was that Trapeze has a planning tool called Ringmaster that allows the university to use computer-aided design drawings of buildings to immediately begin planning where to locate the APs for maximum coverage in 300 buildings with 1,300 floors, and serving 80,000 students, faculty and staff.

 

"We're trying to build a safer and more secure system, and the current Wi-Fi system is open, so this one from Trapeze will lock it down," Hammond said.

 

Even though 802.11n is still in draft form, many vendors are selling products to the existing draft specification. Hammond said the university was concerned about deploying a draft N product, but decided to go with it because the hardware in the standard is finalized and only the software might be changed. "If there are changes, they will be in software," which would reduce the cost and complexity of a change, Hammond said.

 

The university has two campuses, in Minneapolis and St. Paul, covering 1,204 acres. Faster 802.11n, with its longer range, could be useful in eventually supporting real-time video and voice traffic, but will also help as the school prepares to scan bar codes on tickets to football games in a new stadium opening in the fall of 2009.

 

Hammond said the more robust Wi-Fi system could be integrated in the future with WiMax network applications, although he said it is unclear what those applications might be. Trapeze said it could integrate with WiMax technology when it becomes available, meeting one of the conditions of the RFP, Hammond said. "There are still a lot of questions about WiMax," he said.