Newbury, PanGo Team on Location-Based Services

Newbury Networks is looking to strengthen its position in the location-based services market by teaming up with PanGo Networks to provide the first third-party application on Newburys infrastructure-agnostic Location Appliance.

The partnership, which the companies plan to announce on Dec. 11, is just the latest in a series of moves by Newbury Networks to get an edge over Cisco in the LBS market, said Michael Maggio, CEO of the Boston-based company. In November, the company released the Newbury Location Appliance, which collects data from WLAN (wireless LAN access points and clients and computes their locations. It then passes that information on to other applications.

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Also in November, Newbury agreed to allow Trapeze Networks to license its server-side location technology and work with them to integrate Newburys location systems into Trapezes wireless networking solutions.

Now, PanGos PanOS Location Management Platform and PanGo Locator application will be able to be powered by Newburys Location Appliance, enabling users to locate any 802.11-based device across a wide range of WLAN infrastructures, including 3Com, Aruba, Cisco, Nortel, Symbol and Trapeze.

“The demand for precise and accurate location data continues to increase across our customer base and the market as a whole,” said Mike McGuinness, PanGos president and CEO, in a statement. “Newburys commitment to supporting location-enabled applications meets a broad set of needs in the wireless LAN market and makes the Newbury Location Appliance a natural fit with our open platform approach.”

Newbury will use PanGos open Provider Interface to deliver location information to the PanOS Platform and PanGo Locator running in any of these diverse wireless network environments.

Location-based technology has some practical uses for large businesses, such as tracking inventory and workers, said Chris Silva, an analyst with Forrester Reseach. Though the technology is still not widely used, the LBS market has growth potential as more and more enterprises use WLANs as a primary network, Silva said. It will probably be more than 18 months before the LBS market truly takes off, he said.

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In the meantime, Newbury hopes to position itself to take control of the market when that happens. Its Location Application can pinpoint items with high accuracy, Maggio said. According to the company, it is 99 percent accurate within 10 meters of an object and 97 percent accurate within 5 meters—numbers Newbury officials claim are better than Ciscos products.

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