COMPANIES TO WATCH – Red-M

Bluetooth, the wireless “cable replacement” technology, has a foothold overseas, but it still faces an uphill battle in the United States. That hasn’t stopped Red-M, a Bluetooth networking vendor based in Wexham, England, from giving the market a try.

The company builds a variety of Bluetooth-related products, including access servers, which manage a Bluetooth wireless network; access points that connect enabled devices to each other or to an existing network; and the Blade, which adds Bluetooth to Handspring and Palm Vx PDAs.

Bluetooth has yet to make significant gains in the United States, where 802.11b wireless has become the hot technology, but Red-M still has hopes for its success. Bluetooth offers networking at much lower power levels, making it ideal for smaller devices such as PDAs and cell phones. The company also offers a suite of “wirelessware” products, collectively called Genos, that let companies implement and manage multiprotocol wireless networks (including Bluetooth and 802.11b). Using Genos, companies can control user access, establish quality-of-service guidelines, set policies on what devices receive which content, and allow users to roam among various wireless networks seamlessly.

For more information, visit www.red-m.com.