German manufacturer Lancom Systems was recently touting its Lancom Management Cloud. The company said it completed a pilot phase for the management cloud, and now all registered Lancom partners can use it to manage their networks by means of software-defined networking (SDN).
The company is known for manufacturing routers, gateways, and WLAN devices. SDxCentral asked Lancom if the new management cloud signaled a move away from its hardware roots, and into a software business.
“We offer professional users secure, reliable, and future-proof infrastructure solutions for local-area and multi-site networks,” said Stefan Herrlich, managing partner of Lancom Systems. “In the past two years, however, we have put great focus on developing and offering a centralized network management based on modern software-defined networking and cloud technologies: SD-WAN, SD-LAN, and SD-WLAN,” said Herrlich.
The management cloud controls networks via SDN technology for all components in the WAN, LAN, and WLAN. It works with any of the current Lancom hardware models – be it routers, gateways, switches, or WiFi access points. “Plus, it supports our virtual VPN router and the Lancom wireless ePaper displays for digital signage,” said Herrlich. “Manual configuration of individual devices consequently becomes obsolete.”
Lancom’s management cloud can be hosted in a public cloud instance or operated on-premises as a private installation.
Herrlich said, “With the Lancom Management Cloud, we make use of [our] experience and knowledge to target an entirely new segment: the fast growing SDN market.”
In the past, Lancom mainly competed with the big network equipment vendors such as Cisco and Hewlett-Packard. “The SDN market, however, sees a different set of players that mainly offer either isolated SD-WAN or SD-WLAN solutions, or try to market SDN solutions that work independent of the underlying hardware,” Herrlich said.
Lancom is angling its cloud management software in combination with its hardware as an advantage. And Herrlich adds, “In addition, we are the only vendor who does not force customers into the cloud. Enterprise customers always have the option to choose between classical management and our Lancom Management Cloud. Our hardware is made ‘cloud-ready’ with the help of a free software update. By means of this update, more than 400,000 current Lancom products can be moved into the cloud.”
The company’s management cloud and its SDN capabilities have been developed in-house. It is not an open source solution.