Aerohive Networks, a provider of next-generation controller-less wireless LAN products, has announced that Matthew Gast has joined the company as director of product management.

As a member of Aerohive’s (News - Alert) product management team, Gast will report to Adam Conway, vice president of product management for Aerohive.

Gast is the author of 802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly Media), one of the best selling reference works in the WLAN field. Before joining Aerohive, Gast was chief strategist at Trapeze Networks (News - Alert).

“When we started Aerohive, we had one thing in mind: To build an enterprise-class WLAN architecture that revolutionized the market,” David Flynn, chief executive officer, Aerohive Networks said.

“In a very short period of time, we have assembled one of the best teams in the industry that is moving quickly to meet that goal. We are pleased to welcome Matthew and look forward to working with him to continue pushing the technology envelope,” Flynn added.

As a voting member of the IEEE (News - Alert)802.11 working group, Gast also takes credit to have served as chair of 802.11 Task Group M. As chair of the Wi-Fi Alliance's (WFA) Wireless Network Management marketing task group, he ran the investigation of certification requirements for power saving, performance optimization and location and timing services. Additionally, he also chairs the Security Technical TG at WFA, which is looking into new authentication methods to support emerging mobile devices as well as develop certification test requirements for 802.11w.

In 2007, Gast has also served as a founder of the OpenSEA Alliance, a group organized to support the development of open-source network security solutions. His book, 802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide, has been translated into Korean, Japanese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, French, Polish and Spanish.

“Aerohive is in a unique position in the WLAN market. They have already solved the data forwarding and distributed control problems that every other vendor in the space is trying to solve,” Matthew Gast, director of product management at Aerohive said.

Gast also believes that Aerohive will enable him an opportunity to build innovative, customer centric solutions on top of an architecture that was designed for high performance, resilient, 802.11n networks from the beginning.

Jai C.S. is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Jai's articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Patrick Barnard