Cisco moves mobility into motion

Cisco Systems Canada (NASDAQ: CSCO) is unveiling Cisco Motion, a set of four network mobility software services that will try to solve four key problems: unifying disparate networks, securing and managing devices, selecting the right media at the right time and delivering open APIs.

Cisco Motion will also come with its own channel marketing program called Partner Motion. The program’s aim is to enable partners to build a mobility practice. Partner Motion includes a go-to-market framework that identifies migration, integration and innovation as they pertain to revenue opportunities in the wireless/mobility market place. As it stands, Partner Motion will not be part of the umbrella VIP program.

The new Cisco mobility vision will also be released in phases. The Context-Aware services is available now. Cisco Canada will release the remaining three (adaptive wireless intrusion prevention, secure client manager and mobile intelligent roaming) later on this year and into early 2009.

At the centre of the Cisco Motion vision is the Cisco 3300 Series Mobility Services Engine, an appliance that offers open APIs for consolidating and supporting any array of mobility services across wireless and wired networks.

“There has to be a business need for wireless. It is not about handhelds, but the applications on a network that enables these devices. New types of services can be delivered to devices,” said Pat Calhoun, chief technology officer, Ethernet and wireless technology group, Cisco Systems.

Various industry analyst firms from IDC and Gartner to the U.K.’s Data Monitor have pegged the wireless market to be worth US$13 billion, but Cisco’s portion of that market is slightly more than a billion, according to those same analyst firms.

IDC predicted earlier this year that within the next three years more than 1.2 billion wireless devices will ship in the form of either laptops or dual mode handsets from RIM, Nokia and Apple. Part of that 1.2 billion will also include RFID tags and other specialized vertical devices such as scanners in retail and manufacturing environments or patience monitors for healthcare.

Cisco already has an alliance with RIM and Nokia, for example, to enable their devices to be enterprise ready. In one instance, a Cisco unified communications client is built into the Nokia handset for users to do Voice over IP. Cisco has also announced a partnership with Apple that will see the iPhone have a VPN client.

The company also wants to develop further alliances with other handheld manufacturers, but no announcements to that end have been set.

According to Calhoun, there are four key problems that solution providers have to solve. The largest is disparate networks, in his opinion. Calhoun cited an example of one customer in the manufacturing sector who was running three different RFID technologies that were unable to communicate or share information with each other.

“Customers are reactive and some are putting in RFID applications and readers that are either passive or active. They do not integrate with each other and customers cannot read them so now they have to deal with disparate networks.

The Cisco Mobility Services Engine with Context-Aware software will try to unify those systems.

Gartner also estimates that 80 per cent of the cost of operations are from end points and troubleshooting. Facilitating collaboration is another customer problem that the mobility services engine will try to help solve. To be released later this year, the Facilitate Collaboration service will provide unified communications based on the right network and utilize the capability of the network where it is outdoors or indoors.

Another area of importance is Fix Mobile Convergence (FMC) which is more of a European issue than North American, but Calhoun believes FMC is coming here soon. Currently, Cisco has 100 FMC deployments with another 400 in pilot stages.

“This will help the mobilization of networking and make sure the applications run over all platforms,” he said.

One of the applications in question is global position systems (GPS) that provide a certain standard of quality outdoors, but not necessarily indoors. Cisco wants to help in this regard with its location services for both indoor and outdoor, Calhoun said.

The Adaptive Wireless Intrusion Prevention System will also be introduced later this year. In 2009, Cisco will release the last piece of Cisco Motion the Mobile Intelligent Roaming service. The list price for the Cisco 3300 Series Mobility Services Engine will start at $19,995.

Cisco has also forged alliances with HP, IBM, Oracle, AeroScout, Agito Networks, and Airetrak with the hopes of providing more application integration for the mobility services engine.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Paolo Del Nibletto
Paolo Del Nibletto
Former editor of Computer Dealer News, covering Canada's IT channel community.

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