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Ah Ubiquiti… I recently attended Mobility Field Day 2, and Ubiquiti was NOT there. Yet,they were the one absent vendor that was most talked about by the delegates (along the lines of “It would be great to hear them present their own story in their own words”). The truth is, The Big U does things their own way, and it seems to be paying off for them.

Back in 2013 I wrote this blog article about Ubiquiti. This was when I learned about Robert Para- the man behind the company, and also noticed them starting to break out of their image as pretty much a provider of cheap point-to-point bridge and WISP gear. I promised then that Ubiquiti would be interesting to watch in the days to come, and that promise has certainly been delivered upon.

Fast forward to today, and Ubiquiti is making their presence felt across the LAN, WAN, and WLAN markets. At least one analysis shows Ubiquiti at Number 3 in the Wi-Fi market by sales volume. When one company gains, another has to lose and the leaders are in fact seeing their shares being nibbled away at.

The official Ubiquiti blog does a decent job of tracking features and product rollouts, and the pace is fairly rapid. And just like Ubiquiti has so far avoided Mobility Field Day, they also don’t do their own big flashy annual conference at a glitzy venue with celebrity speakers- like the competition does. Yet they are sitting in the #3 market spot- seemingly without breaking a sweat.

Ubiquiti has an established and growing following because they seem to sell a respectable balance performance and reliability (an area where not all vendors shine) at ridiculously low prices. Their customer base tends to be their best marketing tool, and it’s a strategy that’s apparantly working.

I personally have a fair amount of first-hand experience with Ubiquiti’s bridges and UniFi networking products, and I mostly get what the excitement is about. Ubiquiti simply blows competitors away with price, while in parallel they are working hard to cultivate a more mainstream enterprise image and support paradigm with UniFi products and cloud management as key building blocks to that strategy.

My own UniFi dashboard is every bit the NMS that pricey, heavily licensed products that I’ve used are. Every generation of LAN and WLAN hardware that comes from Ubiquiti tends to be more compelling than the last, and each incarnation reflects Ubiquit’s goal to become a better fit for enterprise environments. The company does have it’s occasional bug, but they admit those straightaway and get them fixed quickly. The company has a good run going by almost any measure.

To me, certain other vendors currently seem to be perpetually trying to one-up each other with ever more complex feature sets and bloated, buzzwordy campaigns. I get the notion of technical evolution, but it can sometimes feel like those trying the hardest have lost focus on providing stable access to clients and reliability/predictability to network admins. Ubiquiti hasn’t gotten goofy in this regard yet, and I hope they keep their wits about them as they evolve. The lure of Keeping Up With the Jones’ can be both a motivator and a curse.

Only time will tell if Ubiquiti can continue to preserve what customers love about them while also elevating their approach to the point where they are included in the same RFPs and conversations that the big guns of LAN and WLAN currently dominate.

As I said back in 2013, Ubiquiti is a networking company worth watching.