Service Assurance Manager Ensures Best User Experience, Simplifies WLAN Operations and Significantly Reduces Enterprise Network Operation Costs
 
London, 13th October, 2009 – Meru Networks, Inc., the pioneer in 802.11n enterprise networking, today announced it is creating a new category of wireless service assurance with the introduction of the Meru Networks Service Assurance Manager™ (SAM) platform. Meru Networks SAM is designed to rein in the increasing operational costs that come with operating business-critical applications on all-wireless networks and accelerate the transition of the $16 billion enterprise wired Ethernet switching market over to Meru Switched Wireless™.  This industry-first offering breaks from the legacy wireless approach of deploy-then-manually-troubleshoot to proactively and dynamically validating the end-to-end service levels of the entire wireless network on a continual basis.  This approach enables enterprises to enhance end-user experience by detecting potential performance problems for business critical applications before users encounter them, leading to significant lowering of operating costs, higher productivity for end-users and greater ROI for application and infrastructure investments.
 
“Operational costs are a big concern for organizations looking to expand the enterprise network, whether it’s wireless or wired growth,” said Andrew Borg, senior research analyst for Aberdeen Group. “For example, our recent research has shown that top-performing organizations doubled their WLAN coverage area, which resulted in a 63 percent increase in the cost of managing the WLAN and a 69 percent increase in the number of employees required to support it. If Meru can help reduce the costs associated with managing the enterprise network, it’s going to be welcome news for CIOs and CFOs alike.”
 
With the rapidly expanding use of wireless, evolving from a network of convenience to one of necessity for business-critical applications, like emergency medical response (EMR) and patient monitoring in hospitals, it’s imperative that enterprises have the ability to ensure that service levels are consistently being met end-to-end across the network.  The cost and complexity of operating and assuring optimal service levels for a business-critical WLAN network can skyrocket with its increased scale and the expanding number of devices and applications running over wireless. However, Meru SAM’s unique design and intuitive approach provides organizations a cost-effective solution for ensuring the successful roll-out of new business-critical applications over wireless networks by proactively and continuously measuring and validating that the performance characteristics of the end-to-end network meets the application needs. In addition, the new solution helps organizations ensure 24x7 network availability and performance levels, and can detect and notify IT staff of network issues even before end-users experience any loss of productivity due to network issues. Meru’s SAM enables enterprises to assess, deploy and manage the network far more effectively than ever before, producing real savings for the enterprise.
 
“We’re always looking for ways to do more with less. But no matter what we do, we’re still expected to make sure all of our employees are able to be as productive as possible, and that means 24x7 access to our business-critical applications, such as HCIS (Health Care Information System), nurse-call systems and our voice systems,” said Alan Williams, network specialist from St. Joseph’s Health System. “Using Meru’s Service Assurance Manager gives us the confidence of knowing that our doctors and nurses can deliver the highest service level to our patients – no matter where they are within the network – and our team spends significantly less time on troubleshooting and more time on delivering applications to our end users.”
 
Meru’s SAM brings a new proactive approach to the industry and challenges the current paradigm of wireless management by harnessing the power of the company’s innovative single channel architecture, which allows all access points within a network to operate on the same channel, creating a “neighbourhood watch” for end-to-end service assurance.  The new solution runs the wireless client connectivity, latency and performance throughput tests from a central location using virtual clients on each access point without requiring any extra sensor hardware or client software to be added to the network, saving organizations time and money. As a part of the E(z)RF Wireless Operations Suite, Service Assurance Manager is an application fully integrated with Meru’s Network Manager application and not only notifies IT managers of the problems but also helps quickly provide diagnosis and root cause of the problems.
 
“Meru is launching the wireless service assurance category to solve the problem of assuring predictable end-to-end application performance, providing our customers with wireless networks as a new enterprise utility,” said Ihab Abu-Hakima, president and CEO at Meru Networks. “From the very beginning – with the introduction of our single-channel architecture platform to being the first to deliver 802.11n enterprise products to market – Meru has been focused on offering wireless networking solutions that ‘just work’ – simple and easy – and with SAM we’re broadening our product portfolio to offer our customers solutions that assuage the growing complexity and potential expenses of their enterprise network operations” 
 
Availability
Meru Networks E(z)RF Service Assurance Manager is available immediately. To learn more about today’s announcement, visit the Meru Networks company blog, Signal2Noise. And for more detailed technical information on the solution visit http://bit.ly/Meru_Networks_SAM.