By Claus Hetting, Wi-Fi NOW CEO & Chairman
The enterprise WLAN market may be mostly contracting this year but it is far from doom and gloom across the board. New Campus NaaS ‘LAN-as-a-Utility’ providers are creating plenty of new value and are driving innovations in both services and infrastructure, says Dell’Oro in its latest report. Overall the enterprise WLAN segment is expected to deliver 4% of CAGR towards 2028, Dell’Oro says.
It is well known that the enterprise WLAN market is contracting this year as evidenced by consolidation and a few layoffs. This follows a couple of strong growth years for the enterprise segment. Meanwhile a few new shining stars are appearing: A good handful of new ‘Campus Network-as-a-Service’ providers have emerged and are expected to deliver significant percentage growth and innovation, says Dell’Oro Research Director, Siân Morgan.
“New CNaaS provider revenues – for companies such as Meter, JoinDigital, Nile, and others – may not be big just yet, but this is a high-growth segment and there’s lots of potential. Their CNaaS business models stand out because they are based on delivering specific outcomes to clients. That means this is also implicitly about delivering a guaranteed level of service,” Siân Morgan says.
In addition to market forecasting, Siân Morgan has done an admirable job in categorising the various CNaaS offerings and mapping out this increasingly complex vendor landscape. Even the acronym ‘CNaaS’ is a new and invented to signify something entirely different than what is usually meant by ‘NaaS’, she says.
The startups mentioned fall in the ‘LAN-as-a-Utility’ category because they deliver outcomes, not networks. She calls the other two (and somewhat overlapping) CNaaS segments ‘enablers’ and ‘turnkey’ providers, respectively. Last year Dell’Oro forecasted the ‘LAN-as-a-Utility’ group to deliver US$600 million of revenues by 2027 and likely much more in contract value, says Siân Morgan. She has raised the forecast in her current report.
“The LAN-as-a-Utility companies will deliver for example a Mbps Wi-Fi service per employee, per square meter, and so on. This is substantially different from what we call the ‘enabler’ category, which includes many of the big enterprise WLAN brands, who are focused on delivering enabling technologies to MSPs. In this case the MPSs usually deliver life-cycle services to the enterprise clients,” Siân Morgan says.
Growth is important but what is perhaps even more important is innovation. LAN-as-a-Utility providers are strongly incentivised to deliver highly cost-efficient networks because this will impact their bottom lines directly, and most have developed own infrastructure solutions – perhaps for that very reason. Others – such as JoinDigital – bundle value-added services into their offering. Join Digital’s innovation is all about workplace optimisation.
“Smart building IoT and workplace optimisation analytics services are useful features for building owners, allowing them to manage and grow the value of renting their premises. In general we’re seeing a trend towards higher quality workspaces, and value-added features layered on top of enterprise LAN services certainly support this trend,” says Siân Morgan.
/Claus.
Dell’Oro’s new report “Advanced Research Reports on Campus NaaS and Public Cloud-Managed LAN” by Siân Morgan is available here. For more don’t miss Dell’Oro’s Siân Morgan and Meter at Wi-Fi World Congress in Sarasota, Florida on April 22-24. For tickets & information click here.
