Still offering us the solution we need but unhappy with the new controller upgrades
You have to ask yourself why when a company is solid secure and doing well do they choose to upset their customers by saying that the last refresh of controllers are going end of life and the new controllers will not be able to talk to the old ones as they will no longer be supporting security upgrades to any of the older controllers. As they are still on the expensive side and much better systems like the Cisco Meraki are available now, why would you "cut your nose off to spite your face". We have just heavily invested in 2014 in expanding our network to ensure one access point is shared by no more than 15 users, so why now would we want to replace the whole sites WIFI again so we can remain security compliant. This is poor show and I expect other less cash rich companies will have to live with what they have got and replace piecemeal as they fail or can afford. In hard financial times do you really screw your existing customers so that you can sell more product, wouldn't work for us in our industry, and is this part of the reason IT gets such a hard press from almost every company, always costing money never saving enough to be appreciated.
Aruba works very well for us here at our corporate HQ and it is easy to add additional points and configure and monitor them through the controller, and the ability to issue daily, weekly or long term guest access has been a real boon with all the consultants that we use. While it might be towards the expensive side of the market it is robust and certainly does the job for us.
We have continued to expand this network and we now have coverage over the whole site of 1500 employees and guests and we plan to expand in the future into our distribution warehouse where a further 600 people are employed. The system is easy to manage and still through our third party installer/monitor offer us a robust solution so much so that the planned main IT refit at the tail end of 2015 is planned as a fully wireless solution with only some exception zones for large file transfers and updates and printers being cabled solutions. Watch this space to see in early 2016 how this has gone and if wireless is still the way to take IT programming and design development forward.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
