Newbury Networks , a location-tracking appliance maker, is hoping to build market presence on the back of channel partners that complete its solution.

The Boston-based firm, teamed up with PanGo Networks to provide an 802.11n reader, the first third-party application to build on Newbury's 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 Newbury's location systems into Trapeze's wireless networking solutions.

Now, PanGo's PanOS Location Management Platform and PanGo Locator application will be able to be powered by Newbury's 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, PanGo's president and CEO, in a statement. "Newbury's 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 PanGo's 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 Cisco's products.

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