Will differentiation be a problem for partners now becoming a part of the HP and Fortinet channel?

What happens when these companies get acquired into these larger companies the differentiation from a product or solution perspective is less. Partners' value in terms of being a value-added reseller starts getting eroded.

Aruba for example had a huge channel with thousands of partners on a worldwide basis. As Aruba gets sucked into HP with hundreds-of-thousands of partners, everyone starts selling the same thing, the same gear, it's going to be hard for people to get differentiation.

If a customer comes out with a RFP or looking for a new technology, you can have everyone from kind of a corner store right up to a large integrator all pitching the same gear – you see that with Cisco all the time and with HP.

Why would Wi-Fi partners suffer from a lack of differentiation?

Wi-Fi partners need to have differentiation.

They need to have a product they can upsell with higher margin and something that's a different story than, 'Do you want fries with that?' And that's the problem when you deal with the bigger vendors who have a whole portfolio, the Wi-Fi piece is tacked onto the end and it's not that compelling and the margins aren't going to be that great.

Will Aruba and Meru innovation slow down?

Yes. As Aruba gets consolidated into HP, is it likely they can keep that leading edge technology when you're an $800 million piece of business inside a $60 billion HP enterprise business? How are they going to get leverage?

How likely is Meru's reducing market share with their legacy technology – the channel blanket technology – going to actually have longevity inside a security company? That's what partners are asking themselves and that's why they're turning up in droves at our events because they're saying, 'Hey, we need to go somewhere else.'

Why can't a company like Forinet drive Wi-Fi innovation with Meru?

Forinet is a world-class security company and they're highly innovative -- but it's a security company, it's not a networking company.

Wi-Fi is a complex medium and there's a lot of subtleties in the technology which vendors have to implement in a certain way to get the technology to work and that technology is changing rapidly.

If you acquire technology that's not core to your business are you really going to be that focused on it? Are you going to put the right focus, effort and investments to ensure the technology stays current and it is truly leading edge?

For Meru it's a big challenge because their channel blanket technology was very appropriate in the 2.4 GHz world, it's not quite as appropriate in the 5 GHz world because they're more channels in the 5 GHz bands.