December - 2007 issue > Cover Story

By Aritra Bhattacharya

Across ‘U.S. Air Force’ bases around the world, every time a fighter jet takes off on a sortie or comes back battered from a relief operation, Aruba’s wireless access points whirl into action, connecting to the plane, recording the exact time of the liftoff and touchdown, and registering the type and make of the plane and its ‘user’.

Keerti Melkote, co-founder and head of products and partnerships for Aruba Networks says it was a long fight before Wi-Fi access points were accepted for use by the U.S. Air Force. For one, for security reasons the military did not immediately embrace Wi-Fi because prior to Aruba no supplier was able to provide data encryption end-to-end from the client all the way to the data center. Thirdly, all parties were following what Melkote calls “a port-centric approach” in which each base station acted like a separate point of connection and creating a management nightmare and security risk.

Melkote tackled the problem using a different tack - he took a user-centric approach that dispensed with ports and instead granted each user a separate identity with which the Wi-Fi network could authenticating him or her. Melkote was convinced that marrying identity-based security with the mobility afforded by an enterprise class wireless broadband platform would change the networking business forever.

Those efforts, combined with marketing targeted at key defense events, created a buzz and addressed the government’s security concerns. A few months later Aruba
went public.

Trek to maturity

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