Sunny Days at WiFi Star Aruba Networks

The sky brightened over Aruba Networks (ARUN Quote) as a sunny outlook and analysts' upgrades pushed the stock up more than 20% Friday.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based tech specialist is seen as a rising star in the wireless market as large organizations look to rebuild fast data networks on WiFi connections. Aruba, which competes directly with tech titans like Cisco (CSCO Quote) and Motorola (MOT Quote), helped win over more Wall Street fans with a solid performance in the April quarter.

Aruba swung to a penny profit, excluding stock expenses, on $45.8 million in sales. Analysts were looking for break-even results on revenue of $44.8 million, according to Yahoo Finance. On guidance, the company said it expects to have an adjusted profit of 1 to 2 cents a share on $49 million in sales in the July quarter. That is above analysts' expectations of a penny profit on $47.6 million in revenue.

Upgrading Aruba to buy from hold Friday, Jefferies analyst Bill Choi cited strong prospects ahead for Aruba. "Visibility has improved and several large multi-quarter deals are in the pipeline," Choi wrote.

WiFi technology, which has been around for nearly a decade, is popular with consumers who use so-called hotspots or home wireless routers from Netgear (NTGR Quote) or Cisco's Linksys. But for businesses, WiFi was usually considered too slow or too vulnerable to security flaws.

Aruba is capitalizing on the emergence of faster WiFi technology that approaches the speeds of standard Ethernet wired connections. And Aruba provides network management software that promises greater security control, say fans.