Are you seeing more Aruba and Meru partners at your events?

We just completed a six city road show in the US with the launch of a new accelerate program which we just announced. I will tell you that probably 75 percent of all the partners in the room were ex-Aruba, ex-Aerohive, or current Aruba, Aerohvie or Meru type partners because they're all looking for something.

Who's left in the Wi-Fi vendor space?

Aerohive and Xirrus are really the only two specialists companies that are operating in the enterprise space.

Ruckas Wireless is more of a carrier wireless and service provider than an enterprise company. Meraki is part of Cisco, so it's really only us two in the enterprise space now that Meru and Aruba are gone.

Do you think Aerohive is next?

You see the move with Aerohive partnering with Dell to resell Aerohove solutions, is that the first of a multiple step process? I don't know, but that partnership creates challenges in the channel as well.

Aerohive partners are saying, 'Hey I'm not competing with Dell, this massive multi-billion corporation who's got a very strong footprint.' How do you compete with that when the margin expectation is probably less as well?

Will customers pay more for a specialized Wi-Fi vendor?

Essentially the Wi-Fi market is changing so rapidly it's bringing us a lot of leading edge technology and customers will reward that, just like some of the advanced players in the security space like applications, firewalls -- people like Palo Alto Networks and FireEye -- they actually get better margins because the products are more advanced.

It's the same in all these markets, but you have to keep the technology cycle refresh happening quickly so customers can see differentiated value. Customers are very smart, they'll pay for more products once they feel the value is there.
If customers feel the value's not there and it feel like a sort of 'me too' technology they're not going to pay as much for it.

Our view is keep innovation in the Wi-Fi world and keep on moving up that innovation curve. People will pay more for it and therefore margins remain high.

Is 2015 the year of Wi-Fi consolidation?

Yes, because technology is changing too fast and wireless companies can't keep up and most need a stronger story for them to be compelling.

From an architectural perspective there's been a shift in how you design wireless networks over the past two years as the central controller architecture standard wireless networks are becoming a thing of the past.

You see in the Cisco world massive declined in revenue for Cisco's enterprise products, a massive increase in revenue for Cisco Meraki products -- that's pretty clear because it easier to use and it's got more capabilities than the more expensive enterprise technologies.

You see the same with Aruba, a massive shift to Aruba Instant products from the traditional central controller-based Aruba products. You're talking probably over 40 percent of the market is in turmoil right now because of all these changes that are going on.