Forti-much to Appreciate at Mobility Field Day 4

About a month has gone by since I sat in a conference room at Fortinet HQ out in Sunnyvale during Mobility Field Day 4. As I review the presentations my fellow delagates and I saw first hand, I realize just how much information Fortinet’s Chris Hinsz put in front of us. Though the this was Mobility Field Day, it’s getting harder to cleanly slice off just the wireless parts from almost anyone’s product lines. With Fortinet, we not only saw the whole enchilada,  but were treated to the entire Big Hombre Combo Platter.

Fortinet is always an interesting visit, for me. The company’s networking product line and architecture always piques my interest, never having been a Fortinet customer. It’s not uncommon to sit at the competition’s offices and sometime just feel utterly smothered by market-speak, licensing paradigms, and gratuitous complexity.  I never get that vibe at Fortinet. At the same time, the Fortinet offerings feel complete, well thought-out, robust, and not lacking in anything- like they figured out a way to do what the other guys are doing without feeling the need to puff it up in all the wrong places. They must be doing something right as even though we didn’t talk much about it, Fortinet is growing and building a new HQ.

Back to the Mobility part of this Field Day event. We did get a look at Fortinet’s starting 802.11ax/Wi-Fi 6 wireless access points:

And we learned of their radio flexibility:

There’s a lot more here to consider as well as Fortinet looks towards the 802.11ax world that is coming soon. We got into new multi-gig FortiSwitches to connect those APs to, various management and control options, and a tiny taste of hundreds of features added to the latest FortiOS version. Then there is IoT Security, RF Management, SD WAN and sooooooo much more.

Fortinet is and always has been about security, so it wasn’t surprising to hear about a couple of innovative new tools in the mix to round out an alrady impressive solution set:

And the story just gets bigger. There is way too much to capture in a single blog, and so I recommend watching the recorded presentations from MFD4.

On a personal note- if you ever get a chance to talk with Chris Hinsz, make sure you take the opportunity. He’s just a genuine, wonderful guy to spend a little time with. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking technology or life in general, you can’t not feel good after hanging with Chris. 

 

Mobility Field Day: Glimpsing a Complex Wi-Fi Future

          Take me home mamma, and put me to bed. I have seen enough to know that
I have seen too much.
                      (Announcer in “League of Their Own”)

Depending on where you are on your WLAN career arc, what I’m about to say may or may not make you a bit uncomfortable. That’s not my goal, but there are some complicated times a-coming, my friends. I’m writing this just a few days after I wrapped up participating in Mobility Field Day 1, and you can’t help but leave the typical wireless Field Day  event feeling like you’ve looked directly into the future of the WLAN industry a bit.

I’ve been known to throw out lofty observations like “Wireless Is So Not About Wireless Networking Anymore.” Then there was my white-hot Napkin Drawing. Even when I’m in the thick of doing wireless, I can’t help but zoom out to 10,000 feet and try to see the Big Picture of Wi-Fi. That big picture has certainly changed since the early days of 802.11, and you could say that my journey is really just riding the evolution of wireless networking such as it is. What I saw at Mobility Field Day is more evolution, and a few years from now we’ll look back at and think “yeah, that was cool… but not SO BIG of a deal in retrospect.”

Yet, in the here and now, things that are coming our way ARE big deals. They are still new, unfamiliar, thrilling, cool, and need to be learned and assimilated into our daily Wi-Fi Pro mindsets. Here’s a few “Wow Topics” that jumped out at me during MFD:

• Ventev’s Street Furniture Wi-Fi As demands for wireless networking become more pervasive far and wide, the question of “so, how do we put it THERE?” gets asked a lot. Ventev has a really interesting line of outdoor antenna solutions coming out later in the year, as shown in the linked video.
• Nyansa’s Voyance cloud-enabled analytics. The intro and overview to this fascinating and innovative approach to analytics, support and Wi-Fi troubleshooting is here. The demonstration and accompanying discussion is here. Watch for more coverage of this interesting startup, and it stands to reason that others are likely to follow the example of cloud-enabled multi-site data correlation as Nyansa’s baby gets exposure and customers.
• Cisco Connected Mobile Experience (CMX) Cloud version. There is just sooooo much to CMX and so many different applications. I love that some of the complexity is moving to the cloud (please, God- let Prime Infrastructure go there too, soon). Video is here.  Cisco also wowed with a presentation on Flexible Intelligent Radios. Watch this video, and you’ll agree that things are getting pretty complicated in WLAN land.

Also in the bucket labeled Really Cool, and Quite Different: had a great session with Google on their OnHub approach to consumer Wi-Fi (it would also be at home on Star Trek), and Aruba Networks’ Chuck Lukaszewski talked more on 802.11ax- which may well be the most disruptive and complex standard of our careers (for many of us) when it gets here.

It was an exciting week, and I’ve just tipped the iceberg here. And like I said… these discussions show just how exciting the short future is in many directions for our Wi-Fi world.

Click the logo for all the Mobility Field Day 1 goodness.