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Mobility is a key attribute of networking that allows enterprises to unlock their business process from fixed points. Wireless networking is one of the key structural components of an overall mobile strategy. For example, over the past two years wireless LANs (WLANs) have entered prime time for corporate networking thanks to centralized architectures which increase ease of deployment and management plus significant advances in security, specifically the WPA and 802.11i standards. Architectural arguments and choices have shifted from thick versus thin access points, to integrated versus overlay and now from a unified approach to WLANs to a unified approach to enterprise mobility. But mobility is much more than just WLANs. A unified approach to enterprise mobility delivers integrated wired and wireless networking, mobile extensions to unified communications, geographic and end-point independent network access and location services as its four major architectural components.

A discussion of mobility usually stirs up a range of topics including cell phones, PDAs, G3, WLANs, VoWLAN, RFIDs, cell phone-unified Communications links, etc. Mobility is primarily about the experience of gaining access to corporate applications and services anywhere, which transcends all of these technologies. But we need a way to think about how all these technologies come together. The industry needs a mobility architecture for enterprise networks. In Lippis Report 81 we deliver the scope of a mobile architecture for enterprise networks so that business and IT leaders can start to wrap their minds around the opportunity and task.

Enterprise mobility is a broad topic and it is not necessarily wireless. Mobility and wireless are not synonymous. Wireless does mean that a user can be mobile. Mobility however can be gained by both wired and wireless technologies. The value proposition of IP telephony, or what we now call unified communication, was based solely on its mobility features. That is, the reduction or elimination of moves, adds and changes thanks to IP separating physical and logical networking. In a unified communications environment physical location has no bearing on the ability to receive and send voice calls. In short, voice communications is just as mobile as e-mail, independent of its underling networking technology, whether it is wired or wireless.

Enterprise mobility is about the experience of gaining access to IT resources independent of location and end-point and in the process empowering an organization to be more productive. For many companies there is a wide variety of people (sales force, field force, executives) and functions (marketing, engineering, customer service, etc.) which have mobility requirements. Mobility is about improving the capabilities of business, and empowering the workforce to get their job done no matter where they are. To satisfy these requirements, mobility can´t be boiled down to a single technology or a single device. Enterprise mobility needs to be architected.

Mobility is Well Beyond Sales Force Support

Mobility is not just about salespeople who are spending the bulk amount of their time outside the enterprise. Knowledge workers spend up to 70% of their time away from their desk, meaning that there is an in-building component to mobility as well as an outside-the-enterprise component to enterprise mobility. While mobility provides freedom to work independent of the confines of an office, it´s also critical for business continuity and disaster planning. In this era of man-made and natural disasters as well as the potential for pandemics, mobility enables business continuity by delivering the ability for a workforce to work remotely or from home. Broadly speaking, mobility is about connecting people to their information, data center, applications and other people, who could be partners, customers, or colleagues, as well as increasing access to key assets that are needed by the business to complete business processes.

The above mobility points can be summarized into three concepts. Mobility enables: 1) empowering a business with insight, which is access to its key information with context; 2) collaboration, which is about effective communication; and 3) awareness, which is visibility into the status of key assets.

Mobile Enterprise Architecture Scope

One company cannot provide all the products and services needed for a mobility architecture and total solution. Yes, a System Integrator or Professional Services organization can combine best of class point solutions into an architecture, but there is no single networking or communications vendor that can deliver a total mobile architecture with their own product sets. For example, Avaya´s professional services organization develops architectures for customers, delivers and manages them. Cisco has core mobile products and augments them with partners to deliver a whole solution. For Cisco it´s this combination with partners in which they provide a total mobility solution, but Cisco´s emphasis is on infrastructure solutions that business needs to deliver mobility. The scope of a unified approach to enterprise mobility is outlined below.

Integrated and Unified Wired and Wireless Networking: IT and business leaders see WLANS as essential parts of their IT assets and a critical part of the business infrastructure. Unifying the two networks together provide huge advantages to the business organization both from an IT perspective in terms of how they scale, manage, and deploy the network, and also from an end-user perspective in terms of services that are available.

When the wired and wireless networks are integrated IT leaders can reduce overall infrastructure Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Unified wired and wireless networking enables unified security, unified intrusion prevention, quality of service, and location services that eliminate wired and wireless network boundaries. For example, many providers such as Cisco, Extreme Networks and Foundry are offering a single platform for services that IT leaders should expect, such as a single security policy for individuals, whether they access the wireless or wired network. This provides direct benefits to an organization as they roll this out and manage WLANs. On the services side it enables quality of service and location services. This enables new capabilities for the business units and end-users. As an example, with location capabilities that are unified across the wired and wireless networks IT leaders have the ability to track assets and people. As people connect into the network independent of wired or wireless access location, knowledge is fed into the business processes increasing organizational efficiency.

A unified wired and wireless approach to mobility offers two main benefits. One is based upon services, such as QoS being able to transcend both wired and wireless; the other is common network management and security, which reduces IT operational spend to manage wired and wireless networks as one network. As WLANs increasingly become a critical part of the business infrastructure and is scaled up to a pervasive level, the TCO saving becomes dramatic when it´s integrated with the same management and security approach as the wired network.

Mobile Extensions to Unified Communications: The main theme here is to leverage the investment in Unified Communications by allowing employees to access and use this resource outside of the office. Cisco recently added the ability to deliver the Unified Communication experience to mobile devices, specifically cell phones, through its Orative acquisition. Many use cell phones as a primary communications method. You can now have that same Unified Communications experience with a corporate directory, presence, and IM capability to tell you who on your team is available and how they want to be communicated with. You can take that with you on your cell phone. But Cisco is not alone in this important area. Avaya added Traverse Networks to its Unified Communications portfolio to extend its service and feature set to mobile end-points, while Siemens launched its HiPath Mobile Connect to close the gap between enterprise and cellular networks.

Geographic and End-Point Independent Network Access: VPN solutions are part of a mobility architecture as they provide data access and usage solutions for employees working outside the enterprise. Part of this solution is tele-working solutions for people that work full or part time at home. The other part of the solution is secure remote access through VPN capability while working at a partner site, customer site, airport, or hotel.

RFID and Location Services: The RFID market is huge and growing at multiples not percentages per year. An enterprise mobile architecture needs to incorporate RFID or radio tags into their plan because over time there will be more devices connected into the internet than people. I predict that by 2010 the number of network end-points will hit one trillion, up from over a billion today thanks primarily to RFIDs. Cisco in particular has a strategy of integrating RFIDs into their location servers through the creation of an ecosystem of partners building location services via a set of APIs Cisco has developed.

Cisco is taking the capabilities they have today through partners with WLANS, active tag, as well as other types of radio tags which bring this information into the network and through APIs create a location service which other application vendors use to enhance their applications. Location information can be used to track, monitor and optimize corporate assets more efficiently. This tracking is done so companies can optimize efficiency and customer satisfaction. In many cases firms improve their inventory management and bottom line as they find that they´re not over ordering or repurchasing assets. In the future businesses can track how their products are used and create real time feedback loops to improve their products and services. Tracking can also be used for security purposes to track where a person is; this information can be used as part of the identity and authentication process in the network, for example, respecting appropriate privacy policies. Location services will generate new business models that are in part based on information about the location and status of these different devices and products.

A mobility architecture for enterprise networks extends beyond WLANs to the integration between WLANs and wired networking and the value that enterprises gain from this integration. Also, Unified Communications is extended to mobile devices leveraging presence and increasing collaboration, adding value to a mobile architecture. Getting ready for the next major wave of internet growth around — bringing the analog world into the digital world through RFID technology — will offer business efficiency and revenue generating opportunities as supply and value chain dynamics are tracked. An open approach to location services is key as the network holds much information about location, device type, status, etc., which can be used fruitfully by applications that are unique to each industry. The mobile enterprise architecture is an enabler of harvesting this information and putting it to good use to help businesses optimize business processes and use mobility in creative ways to better serve customers.