Wireless LAN (WLAN) hardware vendor Aruba Networks and WLAN software vendor AMP Solutions (known as AirWave in the US) have announced a partnership that will help firms with an old or unmanaged wireless infrastructure move to a central switch architecture.

“This tie-up is designed to protect firms’ investments in second-generation legacy access points,” said Aruba’s senior marketing director, Gary Singh. “We’re offering to manage what you have in place this minute, giving a much smoother transition to a centrally managed architecture. This solution is not limited to any type of deployment.”

Singh said that many firms face difficulties because vendors have moved to the centrally-switched method of running wireless networks, leaving five million “orphan” access points worldwide. He added that Aruba and AMP now offer these firms a vendor-independent migration path.

AMP’s chief operating officer, Greg Murphy, said many customers using AMP software were moving to the centrally-switched model. “With AMP’s multi-architecture support, instead of having to rip out their entire legacy infrastructure all at once, these customers can manage both the older products and powerful new Aruba solutions from the AMP console, which makes the transition less time-consuming and costly,” he added.

AMP’s management suite runs on a server under Linux and can support WLAN infrastructures from Aruba, 3Com, Cisco, Proxim, Symbol and others.

In its recent Wireless LAN Equipment report, research firm Infonetics reported that worldwide WLAN equipment sales rose eight percent in the first quarter, driven mainly by strong demand from large firms.

“Enterprises are moving from patchy, organic wireless LANs to campus-wide rollouts of ubiquitous wireless LAN, based on single-supplier homogeneous platforms,” said Richard Webb, analyst at Infonetics Research. Infonetics said that Cisco is the leader in enterprise WLAN equipment, followed by Symbol, Aruba, 3Com, and Trapeze.

Infonetics predicts that enterprise WLAN sales will more than double by 2009 to reach $2.4bn.