NEW YORK-Airespace Inc., San Jose, Calif., hatched in the Storm Ventures incubator 18 months ago, reached a fledgling milestone last weekwhen it made the first commercial shipment of its Wireless Enterprise Platform for managing and securing in-building and campus wireless local area networks.
At customer request, the company cannot make public its first revenue-producing installation, said Alan Cohen, vice president of marketing. However, he said Airespace also is involved in live deployments for beta testing of its platform at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina, at the University of California at Berkeley and at the HP Pavilion sports arena in San Jose.
The first commercial shipment coincided with Airespace’s announcement that it had signed an original equipment vendor contract under which NEC America Inc, Irving, Texas, will private-label the Wireless Enterprise Platform. NEC will incorporate the Airespace technology into its data product line and its converged offering for 802.11 voice and data communications, Cohen said.
The Wireless Enterprise Platform consists of an 802.11a/b/g access point, a WLAN switch, a control system for network management and an operating system, the AireOS.
Airespace has outsourced its manufacturing to Singapore-based Venture, which also has production facilities in Freemont, Calif., and is a contract manufacturer for the access points developed by Cisco Systems Inc., Cohen said.
Brett Galloway, formerly vice president of engineering for Metricom, is chief executive officer of Airespace, and Bob Friday, formerly chief RF scientist for Metricom, holds the same position at the new company.
Airespace received its first round of venture financing, $15 million, a year ago. Participants included Storm Ventures, Battery Ventures, Taiwan’s Hotung Capital and KTB Ventures, the venture-financing unit of Korea Telecom.
