WLAN Player Aerohive Buys Cloud StartupWLAN Player Aerohive Buys Cloud Startup

Pareto Networks offers cloud-managed routers for branch offices, which Aerohive will fold into its cloud-based managed WLAN offering.

Wireless LAN vendor Aerohive announced today that it is acquiring Pareto, a startup that focused on building infrastructure to support cloud-based network offerings. Both companies are privately held and the acquisition price was not disclosed.

Aerohive has come up with an innovative "controller-less" architecture for WLANs, and the Pareto acquisition is a natural fit with the Aerohive architecture, according to Aerohive CEO David Flynn, in a briefing yesterday. Pareto places an edge router/VPN device on the customer premises and manages the network from the cloud. Here's what Aerohive envisions as the converged LAN/WLAN cloud-based architecture once the two companies' solutions are merged:

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David Flynn said he expects the integration of the two companies to be complete and products coming to market within 2Q11; he said the fact that Pareto is still a young company accounts for the quick transition, along with the fact that the two companies' core OSs for their products are relatively compatible already.