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Modern corporate networks are under increasing pressure to support a wider variety of applications thanks to mobile and cloud computing, desktop virtualization plus video traffic having skyrocketed. Not only are bandwidth rates increasing from 1 to 10 to 40 GbE, but most importantly network services are needed to manage and support a different application portfolio mix and network access methods. Network services such as firewalls, WLANs, network diagnostics and monitoring plus application performance acceleration are needed to deliver a consistently excellent user experience. Cisco recently announced an upgrade to its popular Catalyst 6k with the availability of the Supervisor 2T that included re-vamped high performance service modules to deliver these network services. Goyal, product line manager at Cisco Systems joins me to discuss which network services need to be available in modern networks.

Download “A Comprehensive Testing of Cisco Systems Catalyst 6500 Sup2T” report here.

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During the week of October 31, 2011, the Lippis Report tested Cisco System’s new Catalyst 6500 with Supervisor 2T or Sup2T for performance, upgradability, control and scalability at Ixia’s modern iSimCity laboratory in Santa Clara CA. By all counts, Cisco’s upgrade of the Catalyst 6500 via its new Sup2T, is its most ambitious and thoughtful yet for the venerable platform. The Sup2T is a major upgrade to the most widely-deployed switching platform in campus and data center networking. It’s the new Catalyst 6500’s network services that deliver most of the value, which is partially found in the Sup2T’s Policy Feature Card or PFC that increases NetFlow monitoring and a new TCAM design offering improved Access Control (ACL), Quality of Service design options, encryption security and many other features. This Lippis Report test verifies many of Cisco’s performance and upgradability claims. While it’s impossible to test all of the Catalyst 6500’s new 200-plus features with the Sup2T, we rather focus on a select few that will have the widest impact on IT business leaders’ product acquisition decision process.

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To create a seamless collaboration environment for mobile and remote workers, Avaya has fully embraced mobile computing by integrating Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Symbian mobile endpoints plus Windows and Mac computing into its Aura core infrastructure. In this podcast Avaya’s VP of Unified Communications Product Marketing, Nancy Maluso, discusses Avaya’s UC mobile collaboration strategy and how IT business leaders can put this technology to work in their corporation.

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To create a seamless collaboration environment for mobile and remote workers, Avaya has fully embraced mobile computing by integrating Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Symbian mobile endpoints plus Windows and Mac computing into its Aura core infrastructure. In this podcast Avaya’s VP of Unified Communications Product Marketing, Nancy Maluso, discusses Avaya’s UC mobile collaboration strategy and how IT business leaders can put this technology to work in their corporation.

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The Web Malware Pandemic

Just as the Internet, the Web, and the information age have revolutionized our businesses and our lives, these developments have also radically changed the face of crime. Computer and Internet crime are no exception. Today, computers factor in nearly every form of crime – from crimes facilitated by computers (credit card theft, for example), to crimes, which are specifically computer-to-computer (malware, for example), and to crimes in which computers play an incidental supporting role (i.e. an illegal gambling bookie that keeps computerized records). This paper addresses one single facet of cybercrime – the manipulation of Web content and Web technologies for criminal and/or for illicit gains

Find out how to defend Web traffic from cybercrime by downloading this paper

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THE WORLD’S LARGEST SECURITY ANALYSIS OF REAL-WORLD WEB TRAFFIC
By Cisco Systems

The ScanSafe Global Threat Report is an analysis of more than a trillion Web requests processed in 2009 by the ScanSafe Threat Center on behalf of the company’s corporate clients in over 80 countries across five continents. Our leading position of providing security in-the-cloud provides unparalleled insight in the real-world Web threats faced by the today’s enterprise; this report represents the world’s largest security analysis of real- world Web traffic.

Download it now here.

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by Cisco Systems

Every manager faces the prospect of an operations breakdown. That is the risk of doing business in an uncertain world. But business resiliency implies more than successfully coping with disasters and disruptions when they occur. Managers need to give their employees the knowledge, means and confidence to overcome, and even take advantage of, the potential risks that pervade the business environment. A successful business resiliency program involves anticipating and preparing for the major disruptive threat exposures that any company faces, while taking a risk-adjusted, capital-allocation-based approach to managing risks. With foresight and proper planning, organizations can develop a level of resilience that allows them to withstand any emergency that could put their people and business in jeopardy.
Find out how by downloading this white paper.

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Unified Communications (UC) as an integrated launch point to multiple communications applications will swiftly fade as UC is integrated into corporate social networking and collaboration applications. This is the impression I walked away with after the Orlando VoiceCon industry event. The implication of this is systemic, sending change throughout the industry from suppliers, buyers, and even industry event organizers. What I mean is that UC as a standalone desktop application has limited value. IT and business leaders are pressing suppliers to improve user experience and in the process productivity.

It wasn’t too long ago that UC was touted as a better way to access a broad range of communication applications such as voice, IM, video, email, etc. Vendors such as Microsoft’s Office Communicator, Cisco’s Unified Personal Communicator, Avaya’s One-X, Siemens OpenScape Desktop Client et al., will be of increasingly little use as standalone products. Even as these UC clients go mobile they will fall short of user experience expectations. As communications is now firmly in the grips of Moore’s Law and software economics, the rate of change and level of integration is accelerating at a frantic pace.

There are multiple trends building upon each other with such force as to morph UC into social networking and collaboration Web 2.0 applications. Social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter have jumped from consumer internet services to business tools. There is a cottage industry of start-ups that are creating innovative approaches to capturing an individual’s social grid and interface it into contact centers so as to better up- and cross-sell. Yes there are interesting Facebook, Google and/or LinkedIn pop-ups that extend caller ID to a screen pop, complete with a caller’s profile and even search your email for relevant past exchanges with the caller, all aimed at increasing user experience.

Then there are corporate-based social networking platforms such as SocialText which add security and journaling to social media tools. Whether UC is added to consumer social and collaboration tools or to enterprise grade applications is irrelevant; both are occurring and both activities will only accelerate. The growth and level of communications enabled by social networking and collaboration tools is unparalleled and represents a new approach to human interaction that needs to be captured and put to work within enterprises. We are in the midst of a great experimental phase of how best to achieve this integration. The meeting at VoiceCon offered only a glimpse of this progress.

Collaboration platforms such as IBM Lotus Sametime is very popular and its growth has not waned during the economic downturn. In fact IBM’s LotusLive cloud collaboration for inter-company collaboration is one of the fastest growing IBM products. Sametime is a great example of how a UC has been integrated into a collaboration suite and improves the user experience. IBM’s mash-up hub application lets users create their own mash-ups with a Sametime call widget, again increasing the user experience and control over that experience.

Siemens is in an interesting position as its OpenScape is an integral part of IBM’s Sametime. Siemens introduced its Cloud UC service built upon Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to offer the SMB market UC in a SaaS model. One can imagine that with OpenScape and Sametime in the Amazon cloud a SMB would have access to the same tools and user experience that only large firms could once afford. Therein lies the beauty of UC being integrated into collaboration suites and offered as a cloud service. Price points are smashed along with a total disruption of the SMB channel to market.

Cisco has been busy integrating UC into a wide range of collaboration tools too. It has integrated its unified personal communicator client into its Unified MeetingPlace and WebEx platforms. I expect to see UC integrated into its recently acquired Jabber IM service and Telepresence platform too.

Avaya introduced its Aura™ platform, which seeks to clean up and rationalize legacy voice and VoIP communications into a SIP platform. Two important aspects of Aura™ are that 1) it’s a new design that takes cost out of communications by reducing WAN, equipment and operational spend; and 2) it offers a UC integration into applications platforms. In short Aura™ should pay for itself within twelve months and pay dividends as communications is embedded into applications, especially social networking and collaboration applications.

But the above examples are just snapshots of a broader and bigger vision of how UC will be integrated into Web 2.0-based social and collaboration tools.

Envision a corporate Facebook-like user interface that is self populated with an employee’s profile, complete with past and current projects, their skills and relationships to both internal and external resources. Employees can join groups modeled after traditional organizational lines of command such as finance, HR, manufacturing, engineering, sales, etc. But more importantly, imagine these groups being cross-functional and based upon projects or product development where sales, engineering, marketing, manufacturing, etc., collaborate to move a product through its phase review process. Employees would populate the groups with work product, placing a huge body of work or information into the collaboration space. So imagine that over time three entities would emerge: people, groups and information, all cross-referenced through TAGs. All IT offers is the collaboration and social networking platform; profiles, group membership and information are populated by employees. The collaboration between these entities of people, information and groups would enable work to move faster throughout an organization and employees to self-organize around projects. Now inject real-time UC and video into this platform and you have the basis for a new approach to how work gets done.

The above scenario is not just my vision; it’s the direction our industry is heading after numerous NDA briefings with a wide range of IT suppliers. The intersection between social networking, collaboration and UC, thanks to Web 2.0 techniques will usher in a new model for productivity improvement through improved user experience and in its wake will change the IT industry and IT organizational design. This new collaboration model will emerge as the global economy recovers. As capital spending recovers it’s becoming clear that IT and business leaders will not fund the same old projects but will invest their capital spend into new innovative approaches to corporate productivity such as the UC and social collaboration platform discussed above.

For IT organizations a re-design is needed. UC has been sold to networking and telecom professionals while social networking and collaboration tools are sold to those who manage applications. These two groups are clearly stakeholders in the solution they eventually deploy and thus need to work together. Here too the economic downturn has a positive effect in that many of the past organizational barriers have fallen as IT is focused on operational cost reduction and project delivery.

As the application and networking groups seek a new working relationship so too do IT suppliers. For example, Adobe, Citrix, HP, et al who have for the most part been absent in social networking, collaboration or UC will partner up or acquire others to engage in this new industry sector. Look for one of the above to make a huge announcement at Interop.

Just as IT organizations and suppliers re-align and position for the Web 2.0-enabled collaboration market so too will the industry venues. VoiceCon for example attracts the telecom manager, but not the networking, application, or collaboration buyer. At the same time VoiceCon was taking place so too was Web 2.0 expo. Look for a new venue to emerge that is virtual and uses the tools of social, collaboration and UC to address this new market.

UC as a standalone desktop application has limited value. IT and business leaders should focus on collaboration platforms that are Web 2.0-based, and incorporate social media and UC as the path toward greater use experience and productivity.

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By Siemens Enterprise Communications

This paper defines different telecommuting models and shows how companies are telecommuting across the globe. Lastly, it will demonstrate how Siemens Enterprise Communications Group has significantly cut expenses by adopting green telecommuting and how you can do the same.

Download this white paper to find out how to reduce cost by leveraging telecommuting.

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By Foundry Networks

Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) as a technology has been around for over a decade and has been used extensively in several service provider networks world-wide. Over the last few years, the standardization of applications such as VPN technologies over MPLS has opened the door for this technology to be used in an enterprise network. This paper explores the use of MPLS in an enterprise network and its associated benefits of lower cost and increased security.

Find out how to use MLPS in your enterprise WAN by downloading this paper.

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By Ruckus Wireless

Faced with a population of over 16,000 students, limited resources and WiFi-enabled devices of all shapes and sizes, the Delta School District (Delta) recognized it was time to take action in finding a simple, streamlined solution to their growing wireless needs. Delta needed to deploy a reliable wireless infrastructure in each of its schools to accommodate a variety of applications, such as supporting small-footprint laptops provided to special need students, video surveillance, tablet computers, mobile computing carts equipped with laptops, back-office applications and even the ability to control school heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems.

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By Cisco Systems and The City of Dublin, Ohio

The city of Dublin, Ohio is home to more than 3,000 businesses, and continually strives to create an attractive economic environment. Information technology plays an important role in Dublin's efforts to bring the best and most promising businesses to the city, and it was important to provide access anytime, anywhere. "œA major emphasis has always been enhancing economic development and establishing a significant tax base that will take us into the future," says Mayor Marilee Chinnici-Zuercher. "œAccess to technology is a key element of our strategy, because we have a lot of small businesses that are global in their missions and purposes." Adds Jane Brautigam, City Manager, "œWe believe that providing better access to the Internet, via our network infrastructure, will bring companies to the city, and encourage them to grow their business here."

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The Cisco mobility group has always had the broadest view and product portfolio for mobility solutions. Their definition of mobility expands beyond wireless LANs to include cellular, VPNs, and location services. But last week the Cisco mobility group elevated their value proposition beyond physical and geographic independent networked computing with the launch of Cisco Motion. Cisco Motion offers the broadest technical and business architecture for mobile networks and communications positioning Cisco far from its smaller WLAN competitors such as Aruba, Meru, Trapeze, et al.

Cisco Motion is yet another example of how Cisco is pivoting its value position to compete for a larger share of IT budgets. With the Network as a Business Platform initiative Cisco is blurring the boundary between computing, communications and networking. Cisco now offers Linux and Windows platforms within its Integrated Services Router (ISR) and Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) products. In the ISR its Application eXtension Platform offers a technical and business architecture for partners creating an ecosystem and value creation around its branch office offerings. The Workspace Ready Networks initiative from its unified communications group links communications and networks together so that collaboration takes place independent of workspace. Its Vframe and Nexus data center orchestration and switch products offer a new approach to data center design that eliminates the old boundaries between computing, applications, networking and storage. Cisco Motion offers a new organizing principal for mobile computing and communications, which connects disparate mobile technologies while offering developers both a technical architecture to build value and business architecture to generate revenues.

There is no doubt that Cisco is increasingly going head-to-head with Microsoft and HP in particular as they seek to gain a larger share of IT budgets. Clearly Cisco has in-segment competitors, which it focuses on, but the real initiatives are engaging business and IT leaders to demonstrate the power of value creation through the network as a core business platform. To that end, Cisco Motion sets Cisco apart from its in-segment competitors such as Aruba, Meru, Trapeze, etc., and engages business and IT leaders with an approach to mobility that includes the following.
The Cisco Motion initiative seeks to:

Unify disparate networks thus allowing mobile applications to be extended to end-points.

Enable end-point choice by being agnostic to various mobile clients while in the process securing and managing devices via centralized client provisioning.

Facilitate Collaboration by using the network to select the appropriate communications media (voice, IM, Video, or a combination thereof) to deliver end-point appropriate collaboration services.

Open Mobility Applications by delivering an open API for ISVs to inject innovation and value creation addressing line of business and/or corporate requirements.

To deliver on the above goals Cisco Motion needs a deep technical architecture. It delivers on that by providing common access to disparate wireless networks and clients through a set of open source protocols, an open API (XML/SOAP) and its Mobility Services Engine (MSE). Cisco Motion includes all versions of 802.11 as well as cellular/WiMax, Zigbee for wireless control of everyday devices and instrumentation, Ultra-Wideband

(UWB) for short wireless gigabit links and Radio-frequency identification (RFID) for supply chain management and senior network applications. Access to these networks is via unified wireless network controllers, which in turn connect disparate wireless networks via a set of open source protocols.
Applications such as conferencing, presence, inventory management, assembly line monitoring, CRM, email, search, et al are presented with a set of mobility services, which increase their access to the above mentioned wireless networks. Mobility services provided in MSE such as context aware, adaptive wireless IPS, secure client manager, mobile intelligent roaming, voice, guest access, spectrum intelligence, et al, are delivered to applications via Cisco's MSE. MSE provides an open API (XML/SOAP based) for developers, which is Cisco's innovation injection and value creation point of entry for partners.

Central to Cisco Mobility is the Cisco Mobility Services Engine (MSE). The 3300 Series MSE is an appliance-based platform that integrates with WLAN Controller and Cisco Wireless Control System (WCS). The 3300 Series MSE provides a common framework for multiple services easing deployment and efficient allocation of capital spend. An abstraction layer based upon Network Mobility Services Protocol (NMSP) and the Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Points (CAPWAP) allows transport and applications to evolve at their own separate pace.

As MSE is central to Cisco Mobility it is the basis for the Cisco ecosystem of application partners where Cisco hopes to accelerate development and deployment of customized solutions for customers. As mentioned above MSE provides a range of mobility services to applications. Today MSE provides four services in its software suite. These include: 1) Context Aware which optimizes business process with context such as location and telemetry; 2) Adaptive Wireless IPS to mitigate wireless threats with integrated intrusion protection; 3) Secure Client Manger to simplify device provisioning and management for the wave of new mobile devices; and 4) Mobile Intelligent Roaming to deliver handoff for mobility applications across public and private networks.

Delivering a platform is only 10% of a solution; the other 90% comes from an ecosystem of partners. The Cisco Motion ecosystem includes business application partners such as Oracle, Philips, AeroScout, PanGo, airetrak, Intellidot, Oat, et al. Client or end-point partners include AeroScout, Nokea, PanGo, Intel and airetrak.

Cisco gets credit for delivering the most comprehensive vision plus technical and business architecture for mobility services in Cisco Motion. MSE offers a great rallying point for Cisco partners and the creation of an ecosystem, but it needs to expand both the number of partners and services delivered to applications via MSE. Cisco also has to remain competitive with its in-segment competitors while offering great application integration value to business and IT leaders. As the WLAN market transitions to 802.11n and meshing, network technology will gain the spotlight, and Cisco needs to keep up with that while increasing its application value proposition through Cisco Motion. This is a tricky balance, but it's a task Cisco has done so well with previous initiatives.
While Cisco continues to put the technical pieces together to deliver the network as the business platform, it needs to do a better job at organizing, growing and galvanizing its Cisco Developers Network (CDN) to offer business and IT leaders thought-leading networked-based application solutions. Cisco Motion is a good step in that direction.

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By Ruckus Wireless

Businesses are struggling with the complexity and cost of installing and managing large-scale WLANs. Wi-Fi meshing is a solution to this problem. An enterprise mesh WLAN is made up of a group of cooperating APs, only some of which are directly attached to Ethernet. The APs form a wireless topology to route client traffic between any member of the mesh and the wired network. Meshing greatly reduces, if not eliminates, WLAN cabling costs and delays as well as AP placement constraints. But despite these compelling benefits, most enterprises have not overcome their concerns over the performance, reliability and complexity of mesh WLANs to take advantage of it on a broad scale.

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By Ruckus Wireless

With physical data rates up to 600Mbps, many believe that 802.11n will replace wired networks within the enterprise and at home. But there's significant disparity between the 802.11n promise and the actual throughput experienced by users of the current generation of 802.11n systems. The most overlooked and under-optimized aspect of commercial 802.11n systems is the control over radio frequency (RF) variability. A robust, responsive RF layer is central to wireless network performance, particularly for Wi-Fi which operates in the open spectrum. It is ironic that most of the system products based on 802.11n, designed to make maximum use of the RF domain, do little in this regard beyond integrating more radio chains and antennas.

Ruckus Wireless Smart Wi-Fi technology combines advances in miniaturized multi-element antenna design and sophisticated RF routing software to direct signals onto the best paths in real time to deliver the highest possible performance and reliability in ever changing RF conditions. It also features client- and media-intelligent QoS to optimize multimedia transmissions. With 802.11n, Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi has been extended to optimize antenna operations with multiple radios and intelligent channel utilization software to overcome many of the challenges in realizing 802.11n's true potential.

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By Extreme Networks

Wireless LANs have become pervasive in today's business environment. Mobile applications are driving innovations in wireless LAN technology as the exponential growth in users has put increasing demands on wireless bandwidth. This paper discusses the emerging 802.11n WLAN technology and suggests migration strategies for Enterprise customers.

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With every IT paradigm transition comes not only increased bandwidth requirements, but an increased reliance on network services such as security, remote VPN access, QoS, and application classification to support a wide variety of corporate applications. Also new WAN services such as Metro Ethernet and 3G wireless are redefining WAN design. Between these demanding new applications and WAN options, lies the aggregation router, which has been primarily a narrowband device connecting sites via Frame Relay and MPLS, and thus has presented a bottleneck to new real-time collaboration technologies. This is all about to change, because a new era of WAN design has emerged. New router platforms are rare as their life-cycle is usually greater then a decade. So when one is announced it's the beginning of a long industry cycle and when it's Cisco who's making the announcement you know that it's an industry-changing event. Cisco has announced its Aggregation Services Router, or ASR, 1000 Series, which is focused on the high-end enterprise WAN and service provider edges. The ASR value proposition is rooted in a reduction of appliance hardware, lower WAN cost through aggregation and lower operational spend thanks to management break-throughs. Marie Hattar, Senior Director of Network Systems and Security solutions marketing at Cisco Systems is my guest as we dive into the ASR and new WAN design options it enables. To get the cost out and performance into your WAN, listen to this podcast.

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The edge or access of a network connects all end-points into an enterprise network infrastructure. The network edge is made up of wiring closet switches, which are usually fixed Ethernet switching devices. The market for wiring closet switches is evolving.

In the previous decade IT organizations had traditionally pursued an edge network that utilized shared hubs and switches to provide connectivity to end-points. The primary buying criteria was price per port with low price being paramount. These switching devices possessed few network services such as layer 2 forwarding, Virtual Local Area Networking (VLAN), Routing Information Protocol (RIP) and a configuration tool as their primary network management capabilities. In short the old network access model provided best effort connectivity services with little to no operational control.

As a result of these past decisions, edge/access security was limited, with Layer 2 security measures often implemented haphazardly. Multiple VLANs were relied upon to maintain separation of user traffic and provided limited access control. Most switches relied on RIP as an interior gateway routing protocol but limitations in its algorithm could lead to sporadic outages that would render the network unusable.

From Commodity to Strategic

IT departments saw wiring closet switches as commoditized networking equipment, with little differentiation between vendors. As a result, purchasing decisions were typically made solely on the basis of upfront acquisition cost with little regard for the increased lifecycle costs these purchases incurred on operations. Large organizations that focused their decisions on acquisition costs had soon assembled an enterprise network made up of equipment from different vendors throughout their wiring closets, distribution and core. Equipment from multiple vendors made effective management difficult and the multiple management systems required that these organizations keep a large staff with diverse skills to maintain network functionality.
Wiring closet switch manufacturers have been driven to deliver increased network services in their products due to changing enterprise network demands, discussed below. As a result wiring closet switches and the network edge in particular have transitioned from being a commodity connectivity service to a strategic enabler of new IT applications and services while being the first level of defense to mitigate against internal network threats and attacks. This is a fundamental change in enterprise network design upon which business and IT leaders need to assess and review their infrastructure.
A new category of wiring closet switches has recently begun to appear on the market. These switches are not to be viewed as commodities. Instead, these switches offer a host of new features that allow vendors to compete on multiple different fronts beyond traditional price per port metrics. It is important for executives responsible for purchasing decisions to understand this new basis of competition and to take into account not just their organization's current needs but also heretofore unconsidered future needs before selecting wiring closet switches and designing the next generation edge network.

Enterprise Trends

A new set of enterprise trends are forcing IT executives to review projects, programs and priorities as they seek to drive down Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) while extracting additional value from their enterprise network. Business executives expect their IT departments to meet continually growing demands for an increased number of networked applications and associated performance without significant year over year network expenditures. To manage this requirement IT leaders seek to purchase network switches that possess more forward-looking designs and significant upgradability than what was provided by the previous generation of equipment.

IT Application Infrastructure Changes: There are fundamental changes taking place with IT applications and communications, which are forcing new network edge requirements into the market. New applications, communications and data center strategies are creating a new dynamic in mixed traffic patterns and increased desktop bandwidth requirements.

A New Era in Communications Has Emerged: IP telephony and now Unified Communications (UC) offer strong economic advantages, prompting business and IT leaders to adopt this technology.

Power Over Ethernet (PoE) Distribution: The demands on the network continue to grow as additional devices are deployed throughout the enterprise. WLAN access points, video surveillance, IP phones, specialty devices such as health care instrumentation, point of sale devices and soon even laptops will require power distribution from the edge of the network.

The Network Edge Is The First Level of Defense: All prior generations of wiring closet switches are less secure than today's devices. Network Access Control (NAC) and application policing has increased in importance for organizations committed to protecting the integrity of their network, the privacy of their data and providing compliance to various government and industry regulations.

Total Cost of Ownership: The network edge and wiring closet switches in particular have a total cost of ownership break down of 20% capital spend and 80% operational spend according to Gartner Group. While new wiring closet switches may be more expensive from a capital acquisition point of view, their operational cost is lower and the total dollar spend over a three-year period will also be lower while delivering increased value to the enterprise.

A New Class of Wiring Closet Switches Emerges

Wiring closet switch suppliers have recognized the above enterprise trends and responded to the growing needs of their customers with a new type of wiring closet switch that adds significant functionality over and above previous switch generations. These suppliers are succeeding at delivering increased value to IT organizations and in the process transforming the commoditized network edge into a strategic IT asset. These new switches build upon the capabilities of the previous generation and enable a host of new applications such as UC, enterprise-wide mobility and enhanced security features that provide a new degree of protection against internal security threats.

Intelligence and network services are being distributed to the network edge or access, allowing wiring closet switches to support enterprise transitions in IT application infrastructure and communications, adding business value in the process. This new class of wiring closet switches includes the following characteristics:

Quality of Service: New wiring closet switches tag applications at access to guarantee priority throughout an internal network and active monitoring.

Power over Ethernet (PoE): Power is distributed over Ethernet cables, enabling new classes of devices to emerge and operate in environments that lack electrical infrastructure.

Integrated Security: Both integrated security features and the support of security appliances implement strong access control and application-policing, bolstering internal threat defenses.

Wireless Local Area Networking: WLAN integration, which includes access point PoE and controller support, increases WLAN coverage. Further common network management interfaces streamline operational support for both wired and wireless networks.

Unified Communication (UC): UC support via PoE to power IP phones and UC end-points plus unique UC configuration profiles to ensure reliable and stable UC operation.

Application Intelligence: Application intelligence or the categorizing of applications as they enter the wiring closet and either mark them with QoS or discard the application, affording application policing at the network edge.

Layer 3: Full layer 3 forwarding enabling all the value associating with routing including segmentation and aggregation are now included in some wiring closet switches.

In addition to the above network services, wiring closet switches have become more powerful from a performance point of view, while engineers have increased switch reliability, availability and manageability designs. Power supplies are more efficient and serviceable, reducing power consumption and service outage. Bandwidth and packet processing performance have increased to support higher densities of 1 and 10 Gbs Ethernet while offering clever approaches to ease the transition to higher LAN speeds.

The New Basis of Competition Emerges

This new category of switches has redefined the basis of competition among switch vendors. These advanced features allow for a degree of differentiation that was not possible for the previous generation. Organizations must assess their needs and begin making decisions based on a host of new factors besides initial acquisition cost. The following nine items are the new basis of competition among wiring closet switch suppliers.

Future Proofing: Future proofing is found in backward and forward migration strategies to utilize past investment as part of upgrades. Another aspect of future proofing is acquiring wiring closet switches with more than enough packet processing performance to meet existing requirements and those unforeseen demands.

Transitioning From 1Gb Ethernet to 10Gbs Ethernet: 10Gbs Ethernet is the future of networking, with more than 1 million 10Gbs capable ports shipped in 2007. If the past is a guide to the future, then over time more and more 1 Gbs Ethernet ports will upgrade to 10 Gbs placing strain on wiring closet packet processing performance while driving up 10Gbs port density requirements plus downstream distribution and core switch capabilities.

Power over Ethernet (PoE): PoE is a standard wiring closet requirement as it enables a wide range of devices to exist in areas that are not wired for electrical power in addition to being convenient and an efficient power distribution method.

High Reliability and Availability: High availability switch features ensure that the network edge does not suffer downtime. Some wiring closet switches implement a stacking feature to increase port density when needed, avoiding larger than needed capital acquisitions. This is an effective approach to scale and in some cases availability; however care must be applied when researching the stacking mechanism.

High Performance: As an ever-increasing amount of traffic is placed upon the network, performance remains an important differentiator between switches. The ability of this latest generation of switches to handle the load imposed by voice and video traffic in addition to the standard application demands is critical.

Reduced / Contained Operational Costs: To reduce the largest and most expensive component of the network edge's TCO, switch features that minimize operational impact should be exploited.

Consistent Network Management: Consistent network management means leveraging the same supplier for the network edge, distribution and core.

True Layer 3 Support: To support all the above-mentioned trends and unforeseen applications, wiring closet switches are required to support full layer 3 forwarding.

Support of UC, Mobility and Security: This basis of competition is one of the most important attributes to the new network edge. Wiring closet switches need to support both standard interfaces and services for UC, mobility and security so that mixed vendor solutions may occur.

The new basis of competition among wiring closet switch suppliers is based upon switch attributes, scale, and features which reduce operational requirements and spend plus possess the ability to not only support but add value to UC, mobility and security. In the upcoming Lippis Report “Wiring Closet Switches Enable New Applications And IT Services: Intelligence Enters Network Access” we review various suppliers against the above basis of competition.

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802.11n offers impressive improvements in rate, range, and price/performance thanks to significantly higher processing and power consumption than older WLAN Access Points (APs). A key question in the decision to deploy 802.11n APs is whether there is enough power delivered over 802.3af Power over Ethernet (PoE) switch ports or compliant power injectors to run these Aps, since 802.11n's increased bandwidth and processing may require more than the 12.95 Watts provided in 802.3af switch ports. I interview Craig Mathias, a Principal at Farpoint Group and author of the recent report “802.11n Access Points and Power over Ethernet: Key Considerations” and Luc Roy, VP of Enterprise Mobility at Siemens Enterprise Communications which is shipping an 802.11n AP that operates with 802.3af PoE. Craig tested the Siemens AP3620 802.11n APs and shares the results.

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By Cisco Systems

As the network has become an integral part of the enterprise and small- to medium-sized business, new applications have added new devices onto the network infrastructure. From IP telephony clients to new IEEE 802.11n wireless access points, the requirement to provide increasing levels of power to network end devices has grown dramatically. Cisco® was the first to develop the capability of providing power network end-points when it enabled power from an Ethernet switch port to its Cisco IP phone. From there, Cisco began work with numerous other vendors within the IEEE to create a standards-based means of providing Power over Ethernet (PoE). PoE is now a widely adopted IEEE 802.3af standard. Cisco Enhanced PoE is Cisco's extension to the IEEE 802.3af standard that supplies greater amounts of power per port. By expanding its PoE support to deliver more than 15.4 watts (W) per port, Cisco offers greater flexibility and mobility to users while offering greater operational manageability to network managers.

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Local Area Network (LAN) changes have ebbed and flowed on a nearly consistent five-year basis. In 1990 the worldwide $100 million dollar plus 10Mbs shared Ethernet market was emerging as the LAN standard. It was only five years later that the introduction of 100 Mbs fast Ethernet and the introduction of Ethernet switching usurped 10Mbs shared Ethernet. Between 1995 and 2000 two very important introductions were made to switched LANs: virtual local area networking (VLANs) and 1 Gbs Ethernet. Now 10Gbs Ethernet modules and switches are the norm as price points and port densities have made 10Gbs downlinks and desktop connections economically feasible.

Now with every new generation of LANs, the market has grown by billions of dollars. The transition from shared to switched LANs was explosive, growing a $5.2B market in 1995 to over $14B in 2000 and expecting to grow to over $18B in 2010. This four times market expansion was due to the transition from shared to switched LANs plus favorable price/performance characteristics thanks to an order of magnitude increase in speed nearly every five years. There is no lack of innovation in the wired Ethernet market as many of the large firms will be offering 10 to 100G data center platforms this month and Power over Ethernet requirements are driving new shipments.

There has been a school of thought in the industry that WLANs (Wireless Local Area Networks) will cut into wired Ethernet growth, but it has not happened. WLANs have been an explosive market with high double-digit annual growth. WLAN's industry market size is approximately $1.6 billion, representing a little more than 10% of the switched Ethernet market. The Dell'Oro Group estimates that only 15 percent of large enterprises have deployed WLANs, meaning that WLANs are very early in their corporate adoption rate.

From a bandwidth provisioning point of view WLANs are where shared Ethernet was in the early 1990s, meaning that x amount of bandwidth is shared among access point users. From a security point of view WLANs are decades ahead of where shared Ethernet was in the 1990s, to the point where WLANs are more secure than wired Ethernet. And yes, WLAN deployments will continue to increase based upon their current technical architecture where dependent access points and wireless LAN controllers account for nearly three quarters of the market revenue. This architecture extends the shared bandwidth of WLANs so that IT leaders can build large networks, and will drive penetration to reach almost 30 percent over the next 5 years, according to the Dell'Oro Group.

But WLANs are on a technical architecture trajectory similar to Ethernet. As mentioned above, Ethernet was first a shared medium. To increase Ethernet's usefulness different media was used, coax, twisted pair, fiber, etc., and bandwidth was increased. This is where WLANs are today. We have 802.11a, b, g, n, etc., that are standard shared bandwidths. Innovations in RF management, network services placement via controllers, etc., increase WLAN reliability, network coverage and manageability. 802.11n is just starting to be offered by all the major networking and WLAN players. 802.11n is an emerging, next-generation wireless standard that will trigger significant upgrades to existing WLAN deployment and wired infrastructure to support increased down stream bandwidth loads. In addition, with the increased price tag of 802.11n, expect WLANs to garner an increased share of networking budgets. What will drive 802.11n projects into existing enterprises and new greenfield deployments is not only its performance increase from 54 Mbps available in 802.11a and g, to now 300 Mbps within 802.11n but its MIMO (multiple-input and multiple-output) technology which significantly increases reliability of the wireless network for all WLAN clients, that is 802.11a, b, g and n.

Companies such as Cisco, Aruba Networks, Motorola, Ruckus Wireless, Meru Networks, Trapeze Networks et al., have capitalized on the market need for more robust WLANs. To help scope the enterprise WLAN space, Cisco is the dominant WLAN provider with 65% share followed by Aruba at approximately 10%. Motorola, thanks to its acquisition of Symbol Technologies is another major enterprise player. Ruckus Wireless is a high-growth WLAN newcomer entrant into the emerging small- to medium-sized business. With nearly a $1B of market cap and just 10% enterprise WLAN share, Aruba Networks is a bell weather to the health of this market.

What drove the Ethernet market from hundreds of millions of dollars in market size to billions was the introduction of switching. To capitalize on this new market twenty plus companies were VC funded in the early 1990s. Firms such as UB, Synoptics, Cabletron, Kalpna, Synernetics, Crescendo/Cisco, Alantech et al., innovated and educated the market to the value of switching.

Clearly different requirements call for different solutions. Today's mobile enterprise is driven by extending unified communications over WLANs, location-based services and the huge increase in laptop computing, for example. Laptops and desktop computing drove the WLAN market over past five years, but this next business cycle will be driven by a sharp increase in both the quantity and diversity of Wi-Fi devices. Wi-Fi is being built into everything from single- and dual-mode phones, medical devices, printers, manufacturing scanning devices, Wi-Fi RFID tags, etc. In fact, it's estimated that there will be up to 1.5 Billion new Wi-Fi devices shipping to the market in the next three years alone. With a 15% current coverage model, and very little 802.11n deployed, it is safe to say that the average enterprise WLAN isn’t ready for these Wi-Fi devices, which will be both sanctioned by business leaders and therefore, find their way into the enterprise.

As WLANs become pervasive, and they will be pervasive, their shared bandwidth architecture will give way to a scheme, which segments bandwidth and offers wireless switched service. Just as wired LANs moving away from a shared medium to a switched architecture increased scale, network performance and design options, WLANs will need such a transition in the future to accelerate its adoption and meshing may be the way.

Meshing transitions a shared WLAN into a switched WLAN architecture by offering segmentation of user access and backhauling. A wireless mesh network is made up of radio nodes in which there are at least two pathways of communication to each node. The coverage area of radio nodes working as a single network becomes a mesh cloud. Access to the mesh cloud is dependent on the radio nodes working in harmony to allocate bandwidth and access thus increasing bandwidth and reliability through redundancy. Faulty radio nodes are bypassed as wireless mesh networks self heal. To deliver on segmentation, wireless mesh utilizes routes between radio nodes. Wireless mesh nodes forms paths or hops, which connect together to form the wireless mesh network. WLAN meshing is being standardized in project IEEE 802.11s

WLAN meshes may do the same to WLANs that switching did for Ethernet, that is increase network design options, network diameter, reliability, availability and performance. While it may take as long as 2012 until WLANs start to slow down wired Ethernet port shipments, there's no question that WLANs are on the same trajectory as wired Ethernet. Expect to see existing WLAN providers and a flurry of new WLAN companies touting mesh WLAN solutions over the next 18 months. Before meshing comes into its own, 802.11n will have reached its natural adoption and deployment rate, which could be a five-year span. These start-ups will have to overcome meshing's current liabilities of lower WLAN network performance. But this was the same hurtle that early Ethernet switch companies managed too. As existing and new companies enter the mesh WLAN market, increased price/performance ratios and market adoption will follow as will the emergence of the multi billion dollar WLAN enterprise market.

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Selina Lo the CEO of Ruckus Wireless joins me to discuss the emerging mid-tier enterprise WLAN market that Ruckus Wireless finds itself in the envious position of being alone within. Ruckus Wireless is the expert on RF and antennas for high performance and stable WLANs. Radio communications are subject to unpredictable behavior due to environmental dependencies and various flavors of interference. Yet it's possible to effectively mitigate many of these impairments through continuous intelligent selection of system operating parameters and a sufficiently agile antenna system. WLAN reliability has plagued enterprise WLAN deployments since their inception. Ruckus has invested into engineering solutions to these problems developed over the past three years supplying service providers with over 1 million WLAN solutions for IPTV services around the world. Their intellectual property and mid-tier market requirements could not be more aligned. If you are in the hospitality, retail, education or just a mid-tier enterprise company that needs a stable and easy to deploy WLAN solution, then you need to listen to this podcast.

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A warm Happy Holiday wish to all Lippis Report subscribers, supporters and their families. We have a special Lippis Report for you. Zeus Kerravala and I review the important and game-changing trends of 2007 and predict what 2008 has in store for business and IT leaders. We then take a further look out to 2012 and paint a picture of what the industry will look like. We provide this analysis in both written and podcast formats.

2007

2007 was the year that enterprise communication vendors restructured with Avaya going private, Cisco buying WebEx, Shoretel going public, Microsoft entering the market and joining forces with Nortel et al., Siemens Communications being spun off from Siemens AG, Mitel acquiring Inter-tet, etc. In addition 2007 was the year that the software industry focused their interest in Voice over IP (VoIP) and Unified Communications. In addition to Microsoft’s October OCS launch, IBM came out with its UC² initiative while Citrix’s CEO Mark Templeton clued in its developers on how to do Click-to-Call in a Citrix environment. Microsoft, IBM and Citrix’s participation is a big step for the communications industry to move forward and transition to a software industry. 2007 was the year that enterprise communications was totally restructured. We’ll see more restructuring going forward but the big story in 2007 is a radical change in enterprise communication suppliers.

Many business and IT leaders scratched their heads trying to figure out NAC (Network Admission Control) to see how they could deploy it and put it into their network. A lot of them were confused by the complexity associated with rolling NAC out on a wide scale. 2007 was also a year where tighter integration between wired and wireless LANs, as well as mobile and fixed communication integration occurred as smartphone devices took off.

2007 was also the year that application fluent networks came of age. Riverbed took off with a very successful IPO while F5 had a great growth year and Cisco bolstered its offering by adding Application Intelligence in its Catalyst 6500 product line. When talking to CIO’s and IT managers, one of the areas of increased budget and spend will be network technology that directly impacts application performance.

If 2007 was about enterprise communication firms restructuring, mobile communications and application fluent networks what does 2008 have in store?

2008

The Year of Unified Communications: 2008 will be the year of Unified Communications with Microsoft being a top three enterprise communications vendor. In fact, they will be a top two vendor with Cisco. Avaya will be a strong three, but nearly every business and IT leader will be evaluating OCS next year. This will have profound industry implications as many vendors who did not join the mainstream and kept to their own siloed proprietary communication solutions will fail. If ’07 was the year a few software companies got interested in UC then 2008 will be the year that the ISV (independent software vendors) community gets interested in VOIP, which will be driven largely by Microsoft and IBM. Some of the implications of this trend will be that high-end desktop phone sales will drop like a rock as UC and Smartphone sales skyrocket. The Apple iPhone will ship over 16 million units in 2008. We’ll see SIP trunking take off as a preferred way to connect Unified Communication islands and provide inter-enterprise UC links. In addition, managed service providers will increasingly offer hosted UC to the SMB market.

More Corporate Apps go Mobile: 2008 will also be the year that mobility will extend applications beyond email and calendar access. In short, we will start to see main corporate applications go mobile. Right now when you’re mobile with your Blackberry or IPhone you really only have access to corporate email and calendar. The big contribution that Blackberry made (and other smart phone vendors are following suit) is that they didn’t try and mobilize the application like exchange. Microsoft spent years trying to make Pocket Outlook work and it worked pretty poorly. What RIM did was take the application from Outlook and from exchange and give it to you in a format that’s usable. We’re starting to see a few small companies do the same for many corporate applications such as Dexterra Software that provide the same approach for CRM systems. The thinking here is that when users are mobile they don’t necessarily want the application, what they want is very specific information from their applications depending on what they are doing. 2008 will be the year that we start to see broader use of mobile corporate information.

2008 will be a very active M&A year. There are hundreds of start ups that are well financed and working in good niche areas while the industry has a group of very wealthy companies, particularly Microsoft, IBM, and Cisco. They’ll continue to buy at their already aggressive trends. We’ll see Microsoft pick up twenty, IBM pick up twenty, and Cisco at least pick up ten but probably between ten and twenty companies.

Green IT Drives Data Center Virtualization: Green IT, which has been an initiative in Europe, will become an issue in the U.S. finally. The EPA just finished a study on data center power and cooling energy consumption which will drive change. Almost every major organization has a corporate social responsibility officer to assure that environmentally friendly processes are in place. However IT generally falls outside the realm of the corporate social responsibility officer but IT will start to be measured by this office in 2008. When that happens Green IT will be a corporate mandate and possible government mandated regulations around power and cooling will be initiated. This will change the way IT buys and builds data centers. One of the big evaluation criteria, by the end of next year, may be power and cooling efficiencies, which may change data center supplier market share. As power and cooling efficiency becomes data center table stakes, virtualization will go beyond power, space and cooling savings and efficiencies moving into networks where many-to-one management and one-to-many service distribution efficiencies are gained.

Application Fluent Network Appliances Integrate More Services: Application fluency appliance vendors will integrate more services in 2008. In 2007 IT departments bought F5 equipment for their data center, Riverbed, Cisco and Juniper for their branch, etc. Applications respond to different techniques based on where that technology resides. Some applications respond positively and some negatively to different application delivery technology. For that reason, in 2008 application fluency appliances will start to integrate WAN optimization, layer 4-7 and SSL-VPN technologies et al, to create what we think of as an application delivery market. The implication will be that the vendor community will be rationalized. Riverbed will seek to broaden their product line but Citrix, F5, Cisco, and Juniper have been collecting these components for a couple of years. One of those companies is going to come out with an end-to-end story.

Network Security Architecture Gets Rationalized: NAC, NAP, and Cisco’s recent TrustSec, will define the core of a compliant ready network.

Mid Enterprise WLAN Market Booms: There is a new enterprise wireless LAN market that is starting to take shape, which isn’t being addressed by Cisco, Aruba, Meru, Trapeze et al. Look at Ruckus Wireless to break out in 2008.

So 2008 is the year of UC, Microsoft will be a top three VOIP vendor and we’ll see more kinds of enterprise mobility expand outside of existing applications. We’ll see developers being heavily recruited by Cisco, Microsoft, and Avaya to build upon their UC platforms; NAC, NAP, and TrustSec are the architectures for compliant ready networks, Green IT hits the U.S. corporate market. SIP trunking takes off in 2008. The application delivery network market will restructure, mature and force industry consolidation.

Now Zeus and I look out to 2012 to see what the future of networks and communications has in store for business and IT leaders or vice versa.

2012

By 2012, Telepresence will be available in approximately 40% of organizations as video is a common form of corporate communications. By 2012 Telepresence will be used by inter company communications, not just intra company.

By 2012 the VOIP market will be enough of a software play that business and IT leaders will implement open source telephony reaching 10% market share.

By 2012 there are only four enterprise communication suppliers in the market with revenues greater than $5 billion and that includes Microsoft. So there are three others including Cisco, Avaya and IBM with Citrix being a dark horse.

By 2012 Microsoft will have between 25 – 30% UC market share.

By 2012 phone tag and voicemail usage is nearly gone from corporate communications, replaced by present-based IP communication.

By 2012 more than 50% of global 2000 concerns appoint a chief communications officer responsible for communication-enabled business processes (CEBP) where CEBP is systemic and common as it’s a contributor to corporate annual productivity.

By 2012 the Apple iPhone is the second largest player in the advanced OS Smart phone marketplace, but Apple is still half the size of Microsoft.

By 2012 there are only three enterprise LAN switch vendors that have revenue above $600 million, Cisco is one of the three. We predict the other two to be Foundry and ProCurve.

By 2012 you will start to see Fiber channel and infinaban market share fall as Ethernet technology continues to mature and becomes the preferred networking technology in the data center.

By 2012 wireless speeds will be fast enough to start negative growth in the LAN switching market.

Thank you for a great year everyone. Happy Holidays,
The Lippis Report Staff

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By Ruckus Wireless

Administrators of small-to-medium businesses or independent hot spots at hotels, stores, transportation centers, and other public venues are often frustrated by the limitations of wireless consumer products and have no time or budget for enterprise-class solutions. These companies need an affordable, easy-to-use alternative that is still robust and scalable enough to extend the reach of their wireless LANs, support existing and next generation services and provide reliable and predictable Wi-Fi performance.

This paper examines the opportunities and challenges associated with operating a small-to-medium business WLAN or public hot spot. It explains the benefits of a self-configuring platform that can deliver Wi-Fi more reliably to increasingly diverse devices and applications, covering larger areas and higher user densities, while minimizing total cost of ownership. Finally, this paper introduces the Ruckus ZoneFlex wireless LAN system and its attempt to fill the gap between current low AP and high-end WLAN platforms.

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by Ruckus Wireless

This black paper provides detail on spatial multiplexing which can significantly increase data throughput as the number of resolved spatial data streams is increased. Each spatial stream requires its own TX/RX antenna pair at each end of the transmission. It is important to understand that MIMO technology, a major architectural element of 802.11n radios requires a separate radio frequency (RF) chain and analog-to-digital converter (ADC) for each MIMO antenna. This increasing complexity ultimately translates to higher implementation costs as higher-performance systems are required.

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By Avaya

Have you ever wondered why the sound quality on your phone seemed so poor after listening to your iPod? The reason? Limited bandwidth thanks to 20th century compromises between cost and quality resulting in narrowband audio. Today’s network infrastructure is not limited to these old constraints and much higher audio bandwidth is available. This paper explores the possibilities for better sound quality within IP telephony through the introduction of Wideband Audio technology and the business implications for improved productivity that the new wave of sound can offer. It will also explore how Avaya, one of the leaders in IP Telephony, has chosen to exploit the productivity potential for Wideband Audio in its new line of telephones. With all the time spent on communications in a typical day, improving audio quality makes for an improved work experience.

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Bill Kish, Chief Technical Officer of Ruckus Wireless, talks with Nick Lippis about enterprise Wireless LANs and the new 802.11n standard. With the increase in bandwidth, spectrum and power of 802.11n many IT leaders are now starting to think through how to incorporate 802.11n into their network architecture. Backbone link speeds, access point and WLAN controller placement, security, power over Ethernet, wireless bandwidth and spectrum power are all factors which plug into the calculus of next generation WLAN deployments. Bill Kish is uniquely qualified to talk on 802.11n as he is an active participant on IEEE project 802.11, the organization creating the standard. He is also a co-founder of Ruckus Wireless, and their CTO. Bill offers a vision for how the industry will progress that I buy into. Here’s a hint, think of 802.11n as a platform not just a product.

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With the communications industry transitioning toward a software and service model we thought it appropriate to ponder and highlight a few cool applications. As most Lippis Report readers and listeners know, communication silos are in the process of being integrated into office productivity and mobile computing application software thanks to unified communications. The days of transiting from the phone, to email, to IM, to voice mail, mobile endpoint, etc., will soon be gone. These applications will be available as a single launch point on a desktop, laptop and mobile device near you. With unified communications being that single launch point and communication vendors such as Avaya, Siemens, Cisco, Nortel, Mitel, ShoreTel, et al exposing their features to a web services application development layer, business and IT leaders will be equipped with the tools to inject communications into business process speeding up workflow or creating new processes altogether. It’s an amazing time. During Microsoft’s October 16 Office Communication Server launch, Bill Gates, Microsoft’s Chairman, used the term Communications Enabled-Business Processes. This is the first time that I can remember that the software industry used the same terms to describe the same opportunity as the communications industry. Bottom line, software and communications are in synch on the new opportunities ahead in this new era of communications. With these two huge industries motivated to work with each other, an explosion of new cool communications applications will be the result.

It’s impossible to predict what kind of new and exciting applications will be a result of unified communications now that all major software and communication concerns are courting independent software vendors (ISVs) to write to their platforms. One thing is for sure, innovation and creativity is about to be unleashed on an IT area that has been static for decades, with the exception of the mobile market. What is presented below are categories of applications that will have ecosystems around them to customize to the individual or business or both.

Unified Communications: Very Cool Application

Many companies are using the term Unified Communications (UC) to describe different things. Some companies use UC to describe the integration of a desktop launch point for communications while others use it to describe integrated communications.

Unified communications can be thought of as a super-set of IP-based communications. IP-based tools, such as web conferencing, audio conferencing, and video conferencing, unified messaging and instant messaging, have been around for a while. Unified communications is the super-set of all of these tools accessed through a unified method. That is, access to people and information is managed through one interface; no longer does the user need to have separate tools to drive separate communication applications. Access is integrated so that from an instant messenger chat session, for example, a single “click-to-call” or “click-to-conference” button will conference somebody else in. In the near future, unified communications will be brought into other business applications to enhance work flow in the communications process. But for now, UC is the coming together of various collaborative applications and communications tools which have existed for a long time.

For the end-user, UC is an experience that simplifies work and increases productivity by reducing delay in accessing and communicating with others. Some cool applications here are Avaya’s One-X platform, the Microsoft Office Communications Server or OCS, Cisco’s Telepresense conferencing system and many others.

The IPhone: Very Very Cool Application

One can argue if the IPhone is a product or category. I say it’s a new category of UC mobile devices. It provides integrated access to messaging, email, visual voice mail and voice communications. These communications applications are integrated and bundled within most other IPhone applications. For example, point the browser to a site with a phone number on it, click on the phone number and the IPhone dials it. Search for a Starbucks on the maps applications and up will come email and phone numbers for a number of Starbucks on which the user can click and launch the email or phone application. With Apple now opening up the IPhone to 3rd party ISVs, and potentially other mobile providers and enterprise IP telephony players, the Iphone fits into one of the coolest applications on the market today.

Voice Portal: Cool Application

The voice portal is a Web portal that can be accessed by voice commands via an ordinary phone. Any type of information, service, or transaction on the Internet could be accessed through a voice portal. While voice portals are not new, their interest to ISVs has grown significantly as it allows web sites to be more accessible. For example, a mobile user with a cell phone might dial in to a voice portal Web site and request information using voice or Touchtone keys and receive requested information from a special voice-producing program at the Web site. Voice portal interaction may involve audible speech, speech recognition or a telephone keypad interface. Depending on the user’s needs, voice portals automate call routing to access information from a variety of sources and web page content or route request to live agents.

A consumer voice portal provides general access to information; an enterprise voice portal provides customized access to customer support. Consumer voice portals were available back in the late 1990s. The early services integrated text-to-speech and speech recognition with Internet-based technologies such as databases. Types of information commonly accessed through a consumer voice portal include weather, sport scores and stock quotes.

Enterprise voice portals are more interesting as they manage inbound and outbound voice traffic and agent controls to manage calls within the enterprise.

Avaya, Cisco and Genesys are among the leading providers of customer premise-based enterprise voice portals.

CEBP: Very Very Cool Application

There is an emerging market for Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP). Late last summer the IP telephony industry accelerated its software focus with Unified Communications and CEBP initiatives and offerings from all major suppliers. Unified Communications is in essence a single launch point or portal to gain access to multiple communication applications with tools such as click-to-call, instant messaging, click-to-conferencing, and many others. CEBP injects communications into business process to reduce human and system delay, hoping to speed workflow and increase the response of an organization to business events. Unified Communications is being delivered to market via packaged software and massive distribution channels thanks to Microsoft and IBM. CEBP is different. Each enterprise will have a unique entry point for CEBP based upon their process improvement priorities, funding, and project business case strength.

CEBP, by definition is a custom project. There are business process modeling consulting organizations, which are today’s efficiency engineers, working through business process to save an organization time and money. But CEBP promises to be much more; it promises to deliver a new kind of agile and competitive organization that can respond to business events quickly, satisfy customers more deeply, and in the process create competitive barriers of entry. There are tremendous opportunities for companies who analyze innovative communications technology like CEBP as it presents a new paradigm for business communications. CEBP promises to contribute to better corporate decision making by inserting human decision making at the right time with the right people and providing the right context to decision makers through multi-channel communications.

CEBP will in effect link front-end applications with back-end data center applications through communications. For example, Whirlpool business executives are summoned into a meeting when its stock price falls or rises by an extra-ordinary amount. Once the stock price change event hits this threshold a communication process is invoked which notifies the group of business executives that a meeting is being scheduled to review the cause of the stock price change. There could be a supply chain, customer, manufacturing, distribution issue, etc., which is impacting the stock price, which the executives can address. This is but one example of how front-end applications are linked with back-end business applications through communications. In short, CEBP will not only hasten existing business process but will help create new ones that allow organizations to be more agile and responsive. This is a very cool application category that includes system integrators, software and communication vendors as well as consultants.

Contact Center Business Intelligence: Cool Application

Contact centers contain the deepest and widest customer information available to business leaders. UC with its federated presence information will allow agents to expand their pool of knowledge workers, allowing them to bring the right person into the right discussion at the right time to answer a customer’s question or cross/up sell them. The exhaust of contact center data, that is verbal discussions and transactions needs to be minded to deliver business and IT leaders with business intelligence.

Business executives yearn for insight into what their customers want and think to make better products and services while increasing their brand and loyalty. Contact center recording systems collect thousands of customer interactions and transactions each day. Yet, this wealth of data provides little in the way of automated analysis or actionable information from which executives can formulate strategy or change processes, either to improve quality or to realize new business opportunities.

While business intelligence has been floated around the industry for over five years with little progress, UC and CEBP offer new tools to bring customer experience management to a new level and offer executives customer insight previously unavailable.

Fixed Mobile Convergence: Very Cool Application

I am redefining the term for enterprise-based fixed mobile convergence (FMC) with Mobile Unified Communications. FMC is the linking of fixed telephony end-points such as desktop phones and messaging with mobile devices. Unified Communications is making FMC obsolete as business and IT leaders search for solutions to provide mobile executives with the same features on the road as they have in the office. All the major IP telephony providers are busy extending their UC features and interfaces to mobile devices, which far outstrips the single vmail box, PBX features on mobile phones and fixed/mobile phone ringing tricks provided by FMC. IP telephony companies such as Avaya have purchased Traverse Networks to extend their mobile UC offering while Cisco purchased Orative to do the same. The offerings of both companies deliver value far above traditional FMC capabilities.

To make this point, we’ll focus on Avaya’s FMC to Mobile Unified Communications MUC offering. Clearly there are many other firms such as Cisco, Siemens, Nortel, Mitel, Alcatel-Lucent that are on the same FMC to MUC journey but with limited space, we’ll focus on Avaya for now.

Avaya has an over-arching mobility umbrella, which is referenced internally as the One-X experience for mobility. The goal is to provide executives with the same communications experience when moving from a fixed desk environment to a mobile environment. To achieve this common experience the features and capabilities available in a fixed environment transpose out to a mobile environment. What’s meant by mobile environment are devices that are not only a cellular phone, but also PDAs and softphones. The key is to provide the same rich PBX functionality on mobile devices as are available on fixed station sets, so executives have access to features such as call transfer, hold, and about 20 other features that are typically exposed, without needing to learn anything new. In addition to the One-X experience Avaya has conducted integration with Microsoft, Lotus Notes, Dominos, IBM Websphere and others that are both fixed and mobile.

Over this next business cycle, there will be more categories and many new cool applications. Welcome to a new era in software communications.

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By CheckPhone

A SIP security gateway can provide comprehensive, scalable, flexible security and connectivity for remote and mobile VoIP users. The emergence of SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) as the standard of choice for real-time IP communications is fueling the convergence of previously separate applications including telephony, Email, Instant Messaging and Online collaboration. But by combining aspects of networking and telephony, VoIP presents a unique set of security challenges. Administrators are struggling to find ways to provide a service with the quality and reliability of traditional telephony, while mitigating the same risks and threats faced by online services like port 80 and email Unless these issues are properly addressed, critical business applications can be left open to attack or abuse resulting in service disruption, financial loss and legal liability. This paper describes a mitigation approach which includes VoIP over VPNs and associated techniques to close VoIP vulnerabilities.

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By Cisco Systems

As applications are being centralized and users become increasingly distributed, the performance limitations of a WAN such as limited bandwidth, significantly longer latency, and packet loss are seriously slowing down application delivery. Cisco® Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) and Cisco Performance Routing (PfR) can work together to intelligently optimize application delivery across the WAN-at both the application level and network level.

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There is a buying shift taking place in the WLAN market marked by a new basis of competition which values unification with wired networks. The shift places an advantage to those with LAN switch infrastructure market share. All the big network infrastructure players such as Cisco, ProCurve Networking by HP, Extreme Networks, Foundry Networks, Nortel et al., are focusing on unifying wired and wireless networking from a user experience, management and service level perspective. At the same time upstarts such as Aruba Networks, Trapeze Networks, Meru Networks, Ruckus Wireless and others offer WLAN approaches that either overlay on top of existing network infrastructure or they offer both wired and wireless devices. In this Lippis Report we analyze the unified wired and wireless
services from Cisco’s unified networking, ProCurve Networking by HP, Aruba’s Mobile Edge Architecture and Trapeze’s Smart Mobile architecture. We’ll address this topic in two parts. The first part presented here is a requirements statement based upon our consulting work with large enterprises. The second part, to be published in November is a supplier assessment against these requirements. Most IT decision makers want to cut to the chase and find out which suppliers we favor so we provide a sneak peak here.

The market for WLANs is shifting from a separate overlay deployment to an integrated or unified WLAN and wired LAN implementation. This shift in requirements and features opens the door for established infrastructure providers to leverage their large installed base of Ethernet switching to address a new multi-billion dollar market by offering unique unified features. These features include management integration with LAN systems, consistent user/client services, enhanced guest access administration and voice over WLAN (VoWLAN) services. Cisco offers the vision and solution set with a wide range of products and features. ProCurve’s new ZL WLAN controller offers a simple approach to unifying wired and wireless networks. Aruba offers both wired and WLAN connectivity in its controllers but lacks switched Ethernet market share, which limits its ability to integrate with LAN infrastructure and management. Trapeze is a pure play WLAN overlay, which does not integrate with LAN infrastructure. Ruckus Wireless is entering the enterprise market soon and we’ll provide perspective when they announce. Since access points dominate the cost of ownership for a WLAN solution, this market can be modeled as a razor/razor blade market. Innovation in user licensing which lowers the cost for the controller (or razor blade) should drive many razors (or access points).

Enterprise Market Demands A Unified Mobility Solution

While mobility is a broader topic than wireless LAN (WLAN) access including Virtual Private Networking or VPN, cellular, location services, Radio Frequency ID (RFID), etc., in this Lippis Report we focus on the movement to unify wired and wireless local area networking. It’s within the context of WLANs that we will use the term mobility.

There are multiple drivers for mobility solutions in the enterprise market. 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 WLANs have entered prime time for corporate networking thanks to 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 vs. thin access points to integrated vs. overlay and now to a unified approach to WLANs and wired LAN networking.

Market requirements for a unified wired and wireless LAN approach to network access includes client, infrastructure and netops dimensions. Client access should be consistent, independent of wired or wireless network access method. Ideally WLAN access points and controllers should be deeply integrated into existing network infrastructure and tightly linked to management, control and security services. The higher the level of integration of WLAN with wired infrastructure the lower the operational cost, as common tools and interfaces increase netops productivity while training requirements are minimized.

The value of a unified wireless and wired network where access points or radios are low cost and widely distributed and communicate to WLAN modules embedded into LAN switches offers benefits to netops, the client or end-user experience and guest access. Unified WLANs and wired LANs are accomplished through integration of hardware, software, management, network security, and protocols.

A unified WLAN and wired network needs to include the following considerations:
Wired Infrastructure Integration

To integrate WLANs with existing wired LAN infrastructure the following essential components are needed:

• Wireless encryption protocols such as WPA, 802.11i, etc.
• Identity Management for wired and wireless access control
• Rogue AP detection
• Built-in stateful firewall to defend against external intruders, which may be integrated into controllers as separate appliances
• Network Address Translation (NAT)
• Built-in Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to track commonly known wireless attacks onto the network and alert netops
• Network Access Control (NAC) to provide a consistent user authentication experience
• Management, monitoring and configuration via existing wired management platform
• Identity management integration to define user access policies, which are common to wired and wireless access providing users with true mobility
• DHCP server in case a WLAN, separate from existing wired infrastructure, is desired

Enhanced Guest Access and Administration

A guest contingent work force requirement is pervasive in the global economy as it allows collaboration between employees, consultants, suppliers, partners and contractors. But guarantees of appropriate levels of security need to be in place to protect a corporation from inadvertently opening its network and IT resources to unauthorized access. Of particular concern to netops has been the large amount of time and resources consumed during administration of guest access.

There have been few options for guest wireless network access administration. Common practice is that netops would advertise a WLAN network guest account, which would direct guest traffic via routing and Access Control List (ACLs) to a corporation’s DMZ and the internet. This is a limited capability. Netops would not know who was using the guest access service nor have tools to track its bandwidth utilization.

Guest access capabilities need to be more granular in their definition and easier to administer. With a unified network there could be multiple guest administrators setting up guest accounts. For example, upon the arrival of a customer, a business leader could establish a user name and password assigned to a guest access group and configure its policy, which specifies the length of time access is available to the customer.

Combining the guest access group with identity management offers netops an even more powerful set of options in the administration of guest access accounts. Many IT leaders are uncomfortable with adding temporary users into network and IT databases. Identity management provides netops with a way to push the operation and control of guest users to business leaders, allowing them to set up group administration while being confident that netops is still in control of security and how guests gain access to the network. This eliminates requiring netops to perform extensive work in provisioning temporary guest access based on an event, i.e., sales training, customer visits, etc. Netops can set up multiple guest access accounts at which multiple WLAN controllers can all point and share a common area where guest accounts can be created, maintained, and deleted. This is a key unified networks feature where a centralized location can host a database of guests’ accounts which can be maintained, easing administration and closing the vulnerability of undeleted guest accounts.

Client Experience

The user experience of wired access sets the performance expectation during wireless access. While bandwidth is still much greater on wired networks, WLANS continue to close the bandwidth gap and are in fact more secure than wired connections. Many past WLAN frustrations can be eliminated with a unified WLAN and wired architecture. Corporate users have been frustrated when locating a wireless network, authenticating the wireless network, losing connections while roaming through a campus or office building and questioning the security of their access. One of the largest complaints about WLANs has been the inability to roam.
Roaming

Layer three roaming is enabled by having WLAN controllers or modules embedded in the network fabric. There are two deployment options for layer three roaming, which depend on the number of controllers or modules deployed across the network fabric. In a single module scenario, IT leaders would deploy multiple radios across layer three boundaries where traffic is tunneled across subnets to the single module. In a multiple module scenario where all modules participate in controlling traffic from radios scattered across multiple subnets, the modules set up tunnels among each other and route traffic as wireless clients roam between subnets and network segments. This provides a consistent user experience as they roam throughout the network.

VoWLAN Support

New applications, such as voice over wireless LAN (VoWLAN) are posed for rapid mainstream adoption. IT leaders desire to future proof their wireless investment to address future application requirements such as VoWLAN. The roaming discussion above is critical to maintain voice connections while roaming with VoWLAN handsets. Wi-Fi WMM (multimedia) support, which provides QoS functionality in wireless networks by prioritizing wireless traffic from different applications offers future proofing too. SpectraLink voice priority (SVP) support, which prioritizes SpectraLink voice IP packets, sent from a SpectraLink NetLink SVP server to SpectraLink wireless voice handsets enable VoWLAN service. Unscheduled Automatic Power Save Delivery (uAPSD), also known as 802.11e power save extends the battery life for Wi-Fi devices such as VoWLAN handsets. All of these features are key to future proofing the unified network.
Unified Network Design

There are two basis approaches to unified network design. The first is to place wireless services (controller or module) located at the network core or distribution level embedded in Ethernet switches. Though simple to deploy and maintain, this network configuration has limitations worth noting. Wireless traffic transverses the network headed to the core switch where the WLAN module is placed. But encrypted (if clients use wireless encryption) user/device authentication and traffic ingressing the network has not been challenged or verified, making the network vulnerable to exploits. Network latency may be increased during the back and forth journey between end-point and core switch, having a negative impact on real-time network applications such as VoWLAN.

The second alternative is to deploy wireless services at the network edge. This deployment offers several advantages over wireless services at the core or distribution level. User/device authentication occurs at the edge of the network before traffic can enter into the network, mitigating the above vulnerability. Built-in RADIUS authentication and DHCP service, firewall, static ACLs and identity management are dynamically assigned and user-based network policy is enforced at the edge of the network to ensure safe and appropriate network access. Traffic is classified and efficiently routed at the edge of the network. In addition, PoE can be more effectively and efficiently administered to radio ports/access points. Also with layer 3 roaming, mobile users transverse routed boundaries and subnets.

With a unified network infrastructure, which includes the components mentioned above, the following type of fail over services are enabled. Self-healing access points or radios allow a controller to detect a failed radio and adjust the RF coverage accordingly to provide appropriate access. RF adjustment based upon an aggregated network view, thanks to distributed data collection, can identify RF interference from Bluetooth or wireless headset devices, for example and adjust RF power accordingly. As controllers or modules are integrated into switch chassis/fabric they share the power redundancy already designed into LAN switching products to provide consistent service in the case of failure.

NetOps Integration

With WLAN service deeply embedded in LAN switches and associated management, netops is able to integrate the configuration, monitoring and management of WANs through a common set of management tools. Further, as NAC and identity management and other network security services have been built around the LAN switch architecture, these services are then integrated and offered to WLAN clients, easing netops administration of WLAN services.

In short, netops is offered a single pane of glass management for wired and wireless: device, policy and access management. User-based policies are defined once, centrally in the network, and then applied consistently throughout the network independent of access method. This provides a scalable framework. As new capacity is required for additional users, controllers are added to LAN switches and radios adjust their power and bandwidth accordingly while centrally defined policies are applied in lock step with existing devices. This framework inherently reduces operational expense as network administrators are not repeating tasks such as defining access control policies unnecessarily.

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For many business and IT leaders Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) means cheap, low cost IP phones. And while there are low cost SIP phones available, holding on to that concept only allows you to miss the main point, which is that SIP is an ecosystem and fundamental to a new era in communications. True, the IETF’s SIP goal was to create a protocol for setting up and tearing down real time sessions over IP packet networks. But SIP has transcended that goal by emerging as a framework which engineers leverage to architect IP communication solutions. There are three aspects to the SIP ecosystem: SIP connections, SIP end-points and the SIP platform. In this Lippis Report we explore the SIP ecosystem as the underpinning of unified communications.

The SIP ecosystem:

There are three aspects of SIP. First SIP connections which consist of SIP trunking, gateways and peering offered by various service providers and equipment suppliers. There are a wide range of SIP end-points including soft-phones, hard-phones, fixed and mobile end-points which make up the second component of the ecosystem. Linking SIP connections to end-points requires a SIP platform which is a switching mechanism establishing and disconnecting sessions and offering application developers hooks to create and customize communication applications. In short, the communications industry has divided itself into these three areas, making up the SIP ecosystem.

Connection Points: SIP Trunking and Peering

The connection segment of the SIP ecosystem provides links into service providers via SIP trunking and between service providers via SIP peering. SIP trunking is being provided by many of the equipment suppliers such as Avaya, Cisco, Siemens, Nortel, Alcatel, ShoreTel, Mitel, et al. natively without the use of separate gateway device or appliance. The value proposition of SIP trunking is one of lower communication cost and simplicity thanks to its being able to provide a service provider with a single SIP link (T1, DS3, etc.) A single SIP trunk provides the transport of many simulation SIP sessions vs. the alternative of linking buildings with private lines to support SIP traffic or overloading existing enterprise WANs and routers with backhauling inter-company SIP traffic. SIP trunking simplifies numbering too. In short SIP trunking delivers traffic aggregation, addressing, and naming complexity reduction, which lowers operational and facilities cost.

The number of service providers offering or announcing SIP trunking has grown considerably over the past 24 months. In North America SIP Trunking is either available or soon will be from AGN Networks, AT&T, BandTel, Global Crossing, Onvoy, Paetec, Verizon Business, McleodUSA, Qwest, and TelePacific. In EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) SIP trunking and peering is being provided by Arcor, Belgacom, British Telecom, Colt, Deutsche Telekom, Proximus and QSC. CALA (Central America/Latin America) SIP service providers include Embratel, Telefonica and UNE – EPM Telecommunications. In Asia and Pacific (APAC) KT (Korean Telecom), SingTel, TFN (Taiwan Fixed Network), and TOT (Telephone Organization of Thailand) are SIP service providers. This level of global SIP support is a testament to the interoperability that SIP provides. For example, SIP end-points are different across the world thanks to the multitude of suppliers yet all can connect and communicate via SIP trunks and peering points between the above SIP service providers.

SIP end-points

SIP end-points are not about cheap phones. SIP offers end-point value well beyond a price point. Perhaps the most prevalent SIP end-point will be the soft-phones available from Microsoft and IBM as both use SIP as the cornerstone to their unified communications products.

SIP is opening up end-points for customization, greater user control, branding, etc. SIP allows extending features and functions between hard-phones, soft-phones and mobile phones. In some SIP product lines such as the Avaya one-X, users enjoy the same user interface independent of hard-phone, soft-phone or mobile phone, providing consistency, ease of use and some very cool features such as call logs, especially missed calls, and twinning of devices. Twinning devices rings both desk and mobile phones so that if you’re not at your desk, but you’re walking around the building or outside SIP is ringing both your phones.

Whisper paging is another cool feature that’s becoming very popular and in demand. Whisper paging allows an assistant to break into a boss’s call with only the assistant and boss hearing each other. In essence the assistant is able to whisper a message into the boss’s ear and ask if they’d like to take the call. These are the types of features that are traditionally available in the PBX space, but completely non-traditional on mobile devices. What SIP has permitted is to extend some of those features and functions all the way out to mobile devices. In addition to these feature examples, many IP telephony providers are adding features such as web browsing to their SIP phones, which enable customization and new services.

True, the IETF SIP standard defined a limited number of features such as place call, forward call, three-way local conferencing, put call on hold, transfer call, etc. And many suppliers are extending the feature set through SIP extensions, which can be a double-edged sword. On one side SIP extensions increase the feature set, on the other side some suppliers may build proprietary extensions which operate only with their SIP platform, locking customers into their architecture for years to come.

While most, if not all, SIP end-point providers deliver on basic features, where differentiation occurs is in the extension of traditional PBX features to SIP phones. For example, not all SIP phone providers are able to provide bridge line appearances because there is no SIP RFC standard. Bridge line appearance allows an administrative assistant to know if the people he/she supports are available to take a call. There is a draft, which describes how to do bridge line appearances or the busy indicator of somebody else’s appearance. In SIP the leveraging of presence can deliver a wide range of older PBX features and as well as new ones. There is a method to extend SIP that is compliant to the SIP standard as well; the spirit of SIP using presence to provide bridge line appearances is an example of that method. Business and IT leaders should select SIP vendors carefully and choose those who implement SIP per IETF draft and the RFCs.

The bottom line: SIP end-points are not cheap phones but are becoming feature rich communicating devices in many form factors and price points.

The SIP platform:

While SIP end-points get most of the press attention, the SIP platform receives the lion’s share of business and IT leader attention. Large corporate IT staffs are spending approximately 25% on SIP end-points and 75% on the SIP platform. Not only does the SIP platform demand the lion’s share of acquisition dollars but a lot of time is being spent on planning how the SIP platform will fit into an IT infrastructure.

Most of the hard SIP work was in the establishment of the protocols and framework, which defines the SIP platform. The industry has looked at the two edges of the SIP ecosystem (end-points and connections) but not enough on the platform in the middle. In order for the two edges to work end-to-end you need the middle. The SIP platform provides session establishment and management, a presence server, a registrar and the platform proxy. Beyond the basic session services the SIP platform is also providing a development environment, which allows IT developers to either customize specific communication applications or call upon SIP services to add value to structured business processes. In the real world the SIP platform will be the evolution of Avaya’s communication manager and its ubiquity application development platform. For Cisco it would be the evolution of call manager with its Reactivity acquisition. Perhaps the best example of this is the Ubiquity SIP A/S, which is the SIP Application Server. There is a whole developer network that has been formed around SIP A/S resulting in a wide range of applications.

A New Era In Communications

The SIP ecosystem is changing the communications and computing industry. With Microsoft and IBM entering into the market, it’s clear that the days of the $600 desktop phone are limited. The reason? Microsoft and IBM will give back to IP telephony providers approximately $8 per soft-phone license. In essence Microsoft and IBM are gearing up to be the new distribution channel for enterprise communications. The revenue loss due to the dwindling of the $600 per fixed phone will have two results to the enterprise IP telephony providers. First there will be consolidation and fewer IP telephony providers over this next business cycle as there will be less revenue to support the current number of vendors. Second, those IP telephony providers who embrace a software and services model will be better equipped to navigate the industry change. While soft-phones and mobile/PDA phones will grow at the expense of fixed desktop phones, those IP telephony firms who add value to their soft- and PDA platforms will be better positioned to increase margin well beyond what their desktop phone revenue stream provided.

Expect all IP telephony providers to compete aggressively on unified communications with feature richness and SIP platform robustness. Adding “chargeable” value to PDA and mobile phones will be key to success. Bolstering their SIP platform to go beyond basic SIP services to include an application development environment will be key too as this is where professional services and customized solutions reside. We have entered a new era of communications, one that is marked by openness, software and integration and SIP at the center of it.

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By Vantrix Corporation

This white paper describes an architecture which leverages mobile devices to deliver video surveillance thanks to SIP user agent. The Vantrix Surveillance consists of two modules: a camera controller, in charge of the monitoring, event detection and streaming from cameras and other sensors; and a security server, which stores all recorded events and interfaces with the end device via the Internet or wireless networks. These end devices may be computers, SIP user agent devices or regular cell phones.

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I have a great family. They gave me an iPhone for my birthday recently and it lives up to the hype. It does the best job at blending computing and telephony in a mobile device. The networking aspect of the iPhone is impressive. It’s a dual mode phone supporting AT&T’s edge network and wifi. Walking or driving around you enter and leave hot spots while nearly always being connected to the AT&T wireless network. You find yourself looking for a hot spot to boost your bandwidth to download content or connect back into the office. I process data more than voice so dual mode offers me a way to get data faster. The iPhone does a great job at dual mode for data, but does nothing for voice. Dual mode operation for voice provides continuity of a voice call while traveling in between WLANs and cellular networks taking advantage of lower cost communications. Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) leverages dual mode end-points by providing WLAN/Cellular mobility plus dual ringing where an enterprise’s IP telephony system can ring the executive’s multiple extensions simultaneously in an effort to make the executive more accessible. This enables executives to have a single telephone number and voicemail box too, simplifying voice message management. Vendors approach dual mode based upon their expertise. The computer and data companies approach it from a data perspective while telephony firms approach it from a voice perspective. Both should approach dual mode from a seamless mobile collaboration perspective blending both voice and data dual mode operation to deliver the best experience to the executive.

There is an industry trend to integrate unified networks (WLANs + wired LANs) and unified communications to improve reach and business responsiveness. Industry insiders describe the extending of IP telephony features to mobile end-points such as cell phones, PDAs and smart phones with the term “fixed mobile convergence”. The level of integration associated with fixed mobile convergence is usually limited to providing users with a single v-mail box and ringing either their mobile or desktop phone when an inbound call is placed. The linking of unified networking and unified communications offers a richer set of business experiences such as collaboration, calendar syncing, data application access, paging, push to talk, group-based dialing, and many more. In short, unified networks and communications is a platform which provides geographic and networking independence to application and communication access. As business process goes mobile so too will IT and in the process enable new revenue generation and customer experience options which business leaders are exploiting.

Beyond FMC

First Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) is an awful term, used only by vendors, service providers and analysts; it is not relevant to enterprises. What enterprises are trying to do is provide good collaboration and access to data applications and employees everywhere. Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) speaks to the voice aspects of employee, customer, partner or supplier voice communications. The vendor community needs to start thinking of mobility from a Seamless Mobile Collaboration (SMC) perspective as this is the end goal which business and IT leaders are interested in deploying. Yes, SMC enables employees to work from a remote site, have a single voice mailbox and a single phone number, but this is just a starting point. The vision for mobility is one that is enabling a Seamless Mobile Collaboration experience across any access network, linking executives into business communication systems and their business network. So where is the increased value that’s being offered to business and IT leaders as they start to implement an SMC strategy?

Seamless Mobile Collaboration Promises

The value that SMC offers to business is wide spread. SMC turns into increased productivity, which translates into an improved bottom line. Ultimately SMC delivers efficiency by allowing people to connect to their colleagues, partners, customers and suppliers in a more simplistic and user friendly way as SMC eliminates the concern and complexity of the access network. In other words, an executive does not need to be concerned if the person they are reaching is on a cell, WLAN, or wired LAN access network. You just communicate, either via voice or any data communication modality such as email, IM, conferencing, etc. Also message management is easier too as executives do not need to manage the complexity and inconvenience of multiple voice mail systems, multiple phone numbers, checking multiple voice mailboxes and in the process missing calls while you’re trying to retrieve old ones.

For IT leaders, SMC promises reduced cost of operations thanks to the efficiency of managing a single network and communication system. While the industry has made great strides to converge all their networks under Ethernet and IP on the network side and to add IP telephony to this converged network, it still struggles to integrate WLANs and VoWLAN to this converged network. In addition cellular networks are separate physical and logical entities today too, with email and at times IM being the only common service between cellular and corporate networks. Most IT organizations are managing office communications systems with wired phones, while they manage mobile systems separately. In the future SMC offers a strategy to combine these networks under one management platform and one set of security policies while providing common services. While this level of consolidation has always proved to reduce operational cost over time, more importantly SMC will add material value back into the organization by allowing people to perform their workflow independent of physical location, thus creating business value.

Seamless Mobile Collaboration In Retail

For example, in retail there are different employee profiles that require different types of SMC. Retail associates who assist customers as they enter a store looking for a product need an SMC solution that gives them the freedom to roam within their campus or retail store environment. A VoWLAN (Voice over WLAN) solution is ideal as this provides them roaming mobility freedom. VoWLAN can be combined with a push to talk capability so that the associate can access a group of associates and the manager on duty to address a customer’s question. In addition a customer may be calling from home with a question, which can be routed to an associate on the retail floor to check inventory or address a question. A regional or branch manager whose work requires them to be primarily mobile between multiple stores has a different set of mobility requirements. This manager requires a different type of solution, one that’s based on their cell phone, since a large percentage of their time is spent traveling between stores. They’re probably going to have a fixed office phone too, as they are part of the executive management chain.

Solutions such as Cisco Unified Mobility or Cisco Mobile Communicator, Avaya’s extension to cellular, Siemens’ HiPath MobileConnect, DiVitas Networks, Tango Networks, Kineto Wireless, NewStep Networks, Agito Networks, Ascendent acquired by RIM, all forward calls from office to cell phone allowing users to have a SMC experience, whether they’re inside a store or traveling in between them. In short there are different SMC scenarios based upon job type and requirements, but one thing is for sure: every person working in the global economy will benefit from some form of SMC. So how do business and IT leaders start moving towards a SMC vision? How should they begin the process in determining which solutions they should consider?

Seamless Mobile Collaboration: How To Get Started

There are three simple steps that you as business and IT leaders can take to begin this process toward SMC:

Related Podcast: Custom Cisco Based Unified Communications Applications

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1. The first step is starting to profile mobile workers within your organization. As mentioned in the above example, some firms have mobile workers who stay within a building or cluster of buildings, while other mobile workers travel outside of their building as well as being mobile inside. Profiling mobile workers is a first key step.
2. The second step builds upon the mobile profiles by adding job requirements and end-point device needs. Again some may require a standard cell phone, others may require a more enhanced device because they also have the requirement for mobile email or other mobile applications, and still others may need ruggedized devices for their job profile. Perhaps they work in a warehouse or in an outdoor environment where ruggedization is critical due to the device use.
3. The final step is analyzing mobile worker profiles and the different end-point device types needed to support their job and specific applications. Business and IT leaders should consider which business areas are most critical to improving customer responsiveness, competitiveness, productivity, etc. Think of the mobile profiles and key corporate objectives. What you will find is that one class of mobile workers will have the biggest impact on that business objective. This is where business and IT leaders should begin the process of enabling Seamless Mobile Collaboration.

Seamless Mobile Collaboration: It’s Not Complex

One topic that confuses many IT managers is that they believe to realize SMC value they must first deploy a Unified WLAN and Wired network, then add Unified Communications, and then extend Unified Communication to mobile end-points. In the retail example above, SMC was achieved with a mix of technologies such as IP, WLAN, VoWAN, legacy phone systems, etc. SMC can be delivered with a host of different technologies. SMC does not require a complete pervasive deployment of Unified Networking plus Unified Communications before you can start to get SMC benefits to your mobile end-points. It comes back to identifying business goals that can be achieved by equipping employees with mobile technologies to deliver value. In the retail environment increased customer service was the goal, which was achieved by deploying a WLAN and enabling VoWLAN capability which gave that business the best return as they were goaling to improve customer experience and responsiveness. While this is a good place to start for the retail stores, it doesn’t require that IT deploy that same solution in their corporate headquarters. It comes back to analyzing business processes and objectives first and the SMC solution will follow. With the first SMC project completed it will surely build and extend to processes, divisions and/or organization once the business experiences the value created.

With all of that said, once the iPhone is equipped with FMC it will deliver the best SMC as moving between voice and data wireless networks will be seamless. And I can thank my family for giving me not only a great birthday gift but good fodder for this Lippis Report.

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With wireless networking being more secure then wired, IT leaders have been able to deliver solutions to meet a global mobility need; and there are multiple mobility need drivers. For starters business process knows no time zones, thanks to corporations seeking competitive advantage by creating global virtual teams and personalizing customer experiences. A new generation of workers demand mobility solutions in their work environment and personal lives. Unifying wired and wireless networks also delivers business continuity attributes. And as on-line communications reduces face-to-face meetings, travel and real estate requirements, unified networks contributes to a lower carbon foot print and a Green friendly work environment. For CIOs and CFOs unified networking is smart business too as it enables cost reduction through network and service integration. Chris Kozup Senior Manager Mobility Solutions Marketing for Cisco Systems is my guest as we discuss strategies for unifying wired and wireless networking. Enjoy, Nick

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There is an industry trend to integrate unified networks and unified communications to improve reach and business responsiveness. Industry insiders describe the extending of IP telephony features to mobile end points such as cellphones, PDAs and smart phones with the term fixed mobile convergence. The level of integration associated with fixed mobile convergence is usually limited to providing the user a single v-mail box and ringing either their mobile or desktop phone when an inbound call is placed. The linking of unified networking and unified communications offers a richer set of business experiences such as collaboration, calendar synching, data application access and much more. This experience is called Seamless Mobile Collaboration. Lynn Lucas, Director of Mobility Solutions for Cisco Systems joins me to discuss how mobility plus unified networks and communications are evolving to deliver business value. Enjoy, Nick

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By Avaya

It’s well known that wireless headsets make office and mobile professionals more productive. Technology advances have made wireless headsets practical and increased product choices. A manager responsible for

the smooth functioning of a business needs to select wisely to get the full convenience, compatibility, and productivity benefits of wireless headsets. Choices of radio technology, range, user density, security, cell phone and Wi-Fi compatibility can be confusing. This paper reviews the strengths and weaknesses of the technologies available today: analog, DECTTM (Digital Enhanced Cordless Technology) and Bluetooth®.

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by Avaya

Avaya has recently introduced three wireless headset systems for professional use, and all three are built on the DECT 6.0 technology. DECT 6.0 products, which operate in the 1.9GHz radio band, offer the best audio quality and best range/battery life balance on the market. The AWH65, an evolution of the AWH55 wireless headset system, is the first headset in the US to take advantage of the newly available DECT 6.0 technology. The AWH65 was followed by two additional systems for office and contact center use: Supra Elite Wireless and AWH75. Avaya headsets complement the existing family of office products, and take audio quality to the next level with DECT 6.0

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by Avaya

Decision makers in the enterprise are increasingly faced with more choices regarding their phone systems and associated equipment. IT professionals must make critical decisions about their company’s equipment, yet have less time to evaluate various options. The purpose of this white paper is to provide specific information regarding wireless headsets to ensure the purchase of the equipment that best fits the needs of your organization.

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By Luc Roy, VP Product Planning, Siemens Communications

So, what´s the big deal about Voice over Wireless LAN (VoWLAN) anyway? What is a dual mode phone and how does Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) work? These are the questions that many early adopters of WLAN technology are asking as they consider adding voice services onto their existing WLAN. At the same time smart companies that are new to WLAN technology are looking to future-proof their investment by deploying voice-ready WiFi networks from the start. For both new and existing WLAN customers, a little planning and analysis now will save a lot of time and money in the future.

Why all the new interest in VoWLAN and FMC? The short answer is that for many enterprises VoWLAN and FMC have the potential for large cost and productivity improvement benefits. FMC and dual mode cellular devices are beginning to deliver on the promise of a single device with a single phone number using a single voice mail.

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By Cisco Systems

Organizations worldwide have reworked their business processes to take advantage of such powerful new technologies as the Internet, IP communications, and mobility. But even with a plethora of options to reach fellow employees too often employees still cannot reach one another efficiently. The result is delay in business processes as project participants must wait for returned phone calls or e-mail before proceeding. Cisco Unified Communications is helping businesses communicate more efficiently by extending and enhancing the mobility component of Cisco Unified Communications. The combination is allowing knowledge workers who are mobile to also enjoy the efficiencies and speed of Cisco Unified Communications.

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By CipherOptics

Recent improvements have made Layer 2 WAN services a viable, scalable and cost-effective alternative to traditional WAN services. Extending LAN traffic across the corporate backbone at native speed is welcomed as application performance is significantly improved. While there are many Layer 2 services available such as Metro-Ethernet, Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS) and private Ethernet Line Services, all require encryption services to protect corporate IT assets.

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By Avaya

Avaya and IBM have leveraged their considerable individual technologies and platforms and roadmaps to create a combined vision to make real-time and non-real-time collaboration a reality for enterprises.

Integrating the powerful communications applications from Avaya with market-leading IBM Lotus software for business applications results in unity of communications. This unity removes the barriers of time, geography, isolated applications, messaging formats, communication modes, and choice of device. Information and communications are then liberated from virtually any access limitation. The mantra of anytime-and-anywhere communications is now being united with any way.

Learn how enterprises can now increase productivity in measurable ways by allowing:

• “click-to-communicate” from familiar desktop interfaces;
• integrate in-house audio and Web conferencing to reduce expense and make meetings more effective;
• integrate e-mail, voice mail and calendars into a single client;
• reduce total cost of ownership on server management;
• extend functionality to mobile and remote workers

Also learn when and how to make integration decisions as well as the unique capabilities afforded by the powerful combination of Avaya/IBM by downloading this white paper.

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I am redefining the term for enterprise-based fixed mobile convergence (FMC) with Mobile Unified Communications. FMC is the linking of fixed telephony end-points such as desktop phones and messaging with mobile devices. Unified Communications is making FMC obsolete as business and IT leaders search for solutions to provide mobile executives with the same features on the road as they have in the office. All the major IP telephony providers are busy extending their UC features and interfaces to mobile devices, which far outstrips the single vmail box, PBX features on mobile phones and fixed/mobile phone ringing tricks provided by FMC. IP telephony companies such as Avaya have purchased Traverse Networks to extend their mobile UC offering while Cisco purchased Orative to do the same. The offerings of both companies deliver value far above traditional FMC capabilities.

To make this point, we´ll focus this Lippis Report on Avaya´s FMC to Mobile Unified Communications MUC offering. Clearly there are many other firms such as Cisco, Siemens, Nortel, Mitel, Alcatel-Lucent that are on the same FMC to MUC journey and in another Lippis Report we may profile each of these firms.

Avaya has an over-arching mobility umbrella, which is referenced internally as the one-X experience for mobility. The goal is to provide executives the same communications experience when moving from a fixed desk environment to a mobile environment. To achieve this common experience the features and capabilities available in a fixed environment transpose out to a mobile environment. What´s meant by mobile environment are devices that are not only a cellular phone, but also PDAs and softphones. The key is to provide the same rich PBX functionality on mobile devices as are available on fixed station sets, so executives have access to features such as call transfer, hold, and about 20 other features that are typically exposed, without needing to learn anything new. In addition to the one-X experience Avaya has conducted integration with Microsoft, Lotus Notes, Dominos, IBM Websphere and others that are both fixed and mobile.

Early FMC: Extension to Cellular

A few years back Avaya released the extension to cellular capability, which is the basis of its FMC offering. Extension to cellular provides dual ringing, meaning that an executive can ring multiple extensions. This enables executives to have a single number and single voicemail capabilities. One can call your enterprise phone and that rings you on your multiple devices as you wish. Also a single voicemail box provides access to both fixed and mobile messaging. Then Avaya added the ability to use PBX features through the extension to cellular capability.

During 2005 Avaya released a software client to make it easier to use those features on Nokia phones. This is called the one-X Mobile Client. What Avaya has done is continue development on the one-X Mobile Client and now has released a dual mode version, which allows executives to switch between GSM and Wifi. When executives are in the campus the dual mode phone will use SIP over WiFi for communications and while outside the campus or office building the phone switches back to GSM.

Dual Mode Phones

The extension to cellular, dual mode capabilities and one-X Mobile Client combine into a flexible mobile experience, which many in the industry find interesting. Interest in the WiFi portion of the dual mode phones are rooted in a least cost routing play where IT departments are able to reduce cellular cost by shifting mobile minutes to their IP telephony infrastructure when employees are roaming within their buildings. In fact, many executives use their mobile devices as their main communicating end-point even when inside an enterprise campus. There´s also a single mode GSM-only phone with Windows Mobile support on the horizon which provides all the One-X features such as conferencing, transfer, hold, single voicemail, and single number and about 20 other common features.

The Avaya FMC capabilities are inherent in its communications manager server whereas many other solutions in the industry require an additional server or a third party box to deliver FMC features. That will tend to drive up solution cost. Building on this FMC foundation Avaya is now extending the feature set into a Mobile Unified Communications environment.

Enter Traverse Networks and Mobile Unified Communications

With the Traverse Networks acquisition Avaya is able to bring in additional capability such as visual voicemail where voicemails actually appear on a mobile device visually. Voicemail looks like an email allowing the executive to manage, listen, call back parties, forward, etc., voicemails. Another cool feature is the ability to synchronize call logs between an enterprise desktop phone and mobile device. Profiling is yet another MUC feature giving the executive control over who can call in, who is put into voicemail, who is transferred, etc. Traverse provides Avaya with the ability to provide MUC over a variety of phones and end-points such as the Blackberry, Nokia and others.

Mobile is Not Just Wireless

Being mobile doesn´t mean wireless; it also means being remote and leveraging VPN technology to communicate. Avaya offers a VPN phone, which is essentially a desk set phone that operates remotely over a VPN. It works like this: you take your desk set, which has VPN capability in it and is programmed to your corporate VPN. Many executives take it home when working remotely and plug it into their home router and it VPNs back into the corporate network transferring all the office phone features to the home office.

Making Mobility Easier

Avaya has added specific buttons for mobility. For example, the call forward capability has its own button. On the new 9600 series phones there is a hard key to transfer a call to a mobile end-point to keep busy executives on the go. It´s simple in that once an executive hits the transfer button in mid- sentence her cellular phone will automatically be dialed and the call is moved so the conversation can continue while she walks out of the building.

In short what Avaya is doing is not just about mobility, but how do you seamlessly go between both fixed and mobile environments. Most executives travel between a mobile and enterprise environment and back continually during the day. When executives are mobile within a campus or building Avaya has a fairly rich grouping of WiFi only phones, which are perfect as a campus/building roaming communicating device as they eliminate cellular minutes from being consumed within the office.

FMC vs. MUC

Avaya is known for its survivability and its core IP telephony infrastructure. That ties right into its mobility offerings. Mobility also comes into play as a major factor in disaster planning and business continuity, offering employees options and capabilities to communicate without an office setting. FMC provides a simple set of mobility voice features which will be rapidly outdated as companies such as Cisco, Siemens, Mitel, Alcatel-Lucent, Microsoft/Nortel and Avaya extend their unified communication portfolios over mobile end-points.

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By Firetide

Wireless networks provide mobility for laptop and PDA users who no longer need wires to stay connected to their workplace and the Internet. Ironically, the very devices that provide wireless service need lots of wiring themselves to connect to private networks and the Internet. This white paper presents a viable alternative to all those wires – the wireless mesh network. The paper covers basic mesh concepts and technologies, key capabilities needed to deploy an effective and robust solution, and target applications in both private and public networks.

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By QuesCom

When multi-national corporations connect their VoIP traffic through traditional global service provider offerings, cost usually soars. But GSM infrastructure can be leveraged to provide site-to-site connectivity for both intra- and inter- country communications thanks to GSM gateways and SIP trunking.

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by Avaya, case study

With continuing growth and separate telephone systems across 26 locations, Grene Vision Group was unable to operate effectively as a single company. It deployed Avaya Media Servers, Avaya Media Gateways, and Avaya telephony applications in a networked IP telephony architecture to gain interoperability, mobility, scalability, and availability.

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By Avaya, case study

Providing mobility services and tools for its highly mobile workforce would not only help the company meet its business goals but would also create an in-house model for Avaya customers who were implementing mobility strategies in their own businesses. With a focus on the same mobility strategies prescribed to its customers, Avaya implemented IP Telephony-enabled mobility applications to equip its employees with wired and wireless mobility solutions, allowing them to conduct business seamlessly whether in the office, in a remote location or on the road.

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By Avaya

An account representative working from a customer site. A shipping supervisor roaming the warehouse floor. A salesperson living in airport lounges and hotel rooms. Business has seen the future, and it´s mobile. According to the Yankee Group´s December 2006 Report, Enterprises Strive to Better Connect the Mobile Workforce, in the US more than 50 million workers will be mobile in 2007. This represents 42% of the workforce ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ‚Äö√Ñ√∫ an increase of 31% since 2002. Many companies now spend more on wireless than wireline ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ‚Äö√Ñ√∫ in some cases, without even knowing it. And the trend towards a fully mobile workforce is expected to accelerate. Mobility provides convenience, flexibility and efficiency and is also a key component of both business continuity planning and a Unified Communications strategy.

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by Cisco Systems

Cisco offers a full portfolio of products with which to build a network that is fully converged end to end. Having this broad scope requires Cisco to understand the unique requirements of each of these places in the network and how they must all work. With the introduction of the new Cisco Catalyst® 6500 Supervisor Engine 32 Programmable Intelligent Services Accelerator (PISA) and the Cisco 7201 Router, Cisco expands its WAN services aggregation portfolio with offerings that help ensure business success through the consistent, secure, and optimized delivery of advanced technologies and services.

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As wireless LANS become more prevalent in enterprises, however, legitimate concerns about security and reliable service must be addressed. Today more than ever, it is crucial that key mobile business applications are delivered securely and scaleably to employees and business partners. As a result, for the wireless, as well as for the wired LAN, IT administrators need to establish and implement security and application availability policies that facilitate these productivity-enhancing networks.

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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.

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By Cisco Systems

Today´s work environment is fast-paced and increasingly requires near time responses to partners and customers. With almost all employees mobile, connecting people with other people, information and key assets is core to achieving business objectives. By enabling mobility, the workforce is empowered with Insight, Collaboration and Awareness providing increased productivity and improving decision-making. To deliver these three core mobility components, Cisco® has developed a framework based on a secure all IP network, intelligent network services, devices and applications.

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By Cisco Systems

WLANs are rapidly becoming pervasive among enterprises. The availability of wireless voice clients, the introduction of dual-mode (wireless and cellular) smart phones, and the increased productivity realized by enabling a mobile workforce are moving WLANs from a convenience to a critical element of the enterprise network infrastructure. When deploying a wireless LAN infrastructure to support voice applications, it is useful to understand Voice Ready WLAN design principles and how they differ from conventional WLAN networks that only support data applications. This white paper discusses the principles of designing a Voice Ready WLAN.

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By Avaya

Avaya is a recognized leader in mobile enterprise communications. They have helped thousands of organizations develop strategies to successfully meet the challenges presented by a rapidly changing work environment. Avaya´s professional services organization has developed enterprise mobility strategy best practices, which are documented in this 35-page white paper and provide a wide range of options and strategies for developing a mobility strategy for your organization.

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Lynn Lucas, Cisco’s Director of Mobility Solutions joins the Lippis Report podcast to discuss a strategy to unify enterprise mobility. Wireless LAN architecture choices have shifted from thick to thin, to integrated vs. overlay and now from a unified approach to wireless LANs to a unified approach to enterprise mobility. A discussion of mobility usually stirs up a range of topics including cell phones, PDAs, G3, VoWLAN, WLANs, 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. We need a Mobility architecture for Enterprise Networks. Listen to this podcast and gain a unified approach to enterprise mobility.

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There are strong economic and technical drivers transforming branch office operations. Business leaders are growing their branch office operations at a rate of nearly 10% per year. There are multiple factors behind this growth including expanding out of region and global operations, mergers and acquisitions plus tapping into a larger pool of employees and increasing existing employee retention. Not only has there been a large spike in the number of branch office employees but they are also fueling corporate growth strategies and represent a larger share of corporate intellectual property and decision-making. It´s no wonder then that IT budget consumption to support branch office operations is as high as 70%! It is for all these reasons that the corporate network business platform needs to be extended to include branch offices. In this Lippis Report we´ll show you how.

Networking has evolved from a connectivity service to a strategic business platform thanks to the integration of services embedded into the network fabric. Networking technology anticipates systemic changes in how business applications will be written and deployed across networks so as to support unforeseen and future requirements. In doing so branch office network solutions have increasingly integrated services such as network security, application intelligence, IP telephony and wireless LAN access points to increase branch office employees´ productivity while reducing cost. The result of this evolution is that branch office networks are mission critical resources that deliver a wide range of services to the point of being an integral component of the strategic network business platform.

The Old Branch Office Network Model

Overlay after Overlay = High Cost and Unreliability

As branch office network requirements grew many IT leaders simply added networking services through appliances to meet their needs. This was a simple solution with relatively low capital cost to provide IP telephony, WLANs, network security, etc. But as requirements have grown over the past five years so too have the number of appliances. Many IT executives now realized that they had too many appliances to support, all with different management interfaces and configuration rules. Not only does adding multiple appliances increase capital cost but operational cost skyrockets as well. Remember that the average number of branch office locations is nearly 100, which means every branch office investment is increased by two orders of magnitude. With operational cost representing some 90+ percent of branch office network total cost of ownership adding appliances, in retrospect, is penny wise but pound-foolish. In addition to high operational cost reliability is decreased as the number of appliances which can malfunction increases.

Too Many Slow Speed WAN Links

Branch office operations are typically supported through multiple networks such as voice, data, security, fax, etc. Many of these networks, in particular fax, voice and security are aging networks based upon TDM technology. These older analog networks have become more expensive as service providers increase tariffs to entice IT leaders to migrate to new broadband and IP-based networks. As branch offices are usually many miles away from central offices, this distance increases the price of phone and data lines, which tends to limit the amount of bandwidth per branch location a corporation can justify. In the old branch office network model, with as many as four lines entering a branch office to support four separate IT services, wide area network resources or bandwidth tends to be limited for any one service. Inconsistent WAN service among branch locations is another characteristic of older branch office networks thanks to offices being distributed over large geographic distances and between multiple service providers. So not only is bandwidth limited but WAN management is expensive and problematic as netops is forced to manage multiple service providers.

Lack of Network Design = Poor Security + Inconsistent Performance + Lack of Preparation

With the growth of branch offices taking many IT leaders by surprise, many have not architected a solution for their remote offices; rather they have built out their networks in a piece meal fashion. As a result many branch office networks are not fractal, meaning that there is no consistency in design. In short these branch office locations are equipped with different devices and vendors. This inconsistency of design often results in mixed performance between branch office locations. Perhaps most importantly is the fact that piece meal branch office design is less secure, since it is nearly impossible to update all branch office locations with the latest security enhancements and/or exploit signatures. Further, many have limited business continuity plans and are not prepared for man-made or natural disasters. Lack of a mobility solution is a key indictor of this design flaw.

Branch Office Network Best Practices

Thoughtful Design = Improved Performance + Security + Business Continuity

As mentioned above branch office operations are driving growth initiatives and are empowered with decision-making authority. Consequently traffic patterns are following this shift in corporate authority and responsibility. Traffic patterns used to flow hierarchically from headquarters to regional offices to branch offices. Now branch-to-branch flows are layered on top of hierarchical traffic to support executive decision making in the field between branch locations. Branch office network design needs to incorporate this requirement with flexible WAN services and routing.

Integration = Lower TCO + High Reliability

Much of the vendor community has embraced the concept of integrated services in branch office network devices. There are many suppliers of branch office network equipment such as Cisco, Avaya/Juniper, Nortel, Silver Peak, NetD, etc. SilverPeak and NetD are small players in the market. Cisco is by far the market leader having shipped more than 2.3 million Integrated Services Routers (ISR). Their growth rate is impressive too. It took Cisco 18 months to ship 1 million ISRs, but only 9 months to ship their second million — an impressive growth rate. With over 2 million ISRs in production, Cisco is turning the ISR into a business platform equipped with its own ecosystem. More on this below.

Branch office networks require thoughtful design, as its business function is mission critical and TCO high. In fact branch office network TCO is best managed through architecture development and integrated equipment. The best design attributes include the following:

• Consistent design in both network equipment and WAN service
• Converged IP telephony, fax, security and data networking into an Ethernet/IP fabric
• Support for mixed traffic flows both hierarchically and branch-to-branch
• Business continuity and disaster planning through mobility and redundancy in both equipment and WAN access
• Layered network security with multiple defenses included SSL and IPSec VPN, firewall, IPS and Network Access Control/Network Access Protection

The level of integration should be weighted heavily when IT leaders are evaluating branch office network equipment. The latest security, IP telephony, video/surveillance and data technologies should be integrated into a single network device on top of switching and routing functionality. Management and configuration should be simplified with a single interface to all functions as well as virtualized interfaces so that secops, netops, etc may configure and monitor their respective organizational responsibilities. Careful review should be applied to WAN capabilities not only in terms of link support such as DSL, Cable, T1/EI, ISDN, frame relay, MPLS, etc., but WAN optimization and acceleration functionality as well in order to improve the branch office user experience by minimizing network delays in application access. Network security functionality should be comprehensive with integrated VPN, firewall, IPS, NAC, NAP and tunneling. Wireless and wireline Ethernet access should be transparent and integrated with access points being built into equipment, supporting business continuity planning. Functionality such as Power over Ethernet (PoE), real time dial and/or broadband backup should be table stakes.

3G = Diverse Access or Main WAN Link

As mentioned above, Cisco is turning the ISR into a platform. The best example of this came recently in late March ´07 when it announced 3G wireless support in its 1841, 2800 and 3800 ISRs. What was significant in this announcement was that it was made with Verizon Wireless, Sprint, AT&T and Telefonica and Moviles. While 3G is being introduced as a consumer technology, Cisco was able to use the 2.3 million ISRs as a platform to bring this technology to the enterprise. 3G will offer bandwidth between 300kbs to 1Mbs, depending on the service. This joint announcement between Cisco and service providers gives the service providers instant access to the enterprise market to sell new 3G services while offering IT leaders a truly diverse link to branch offices at less than $100 per month or a new primary high speed link option.

By architecting the branch office and integrating its IP telephony, security and management into the corporate IP network, branch office networks become an extension of the corporate network business platform. As branch office operation trends are a result of market realities, business leaders will only increase their corporate investment. To maximize the benefit of more than 70% of IT spend on remote offices, architecting networks with integrated services equipment is clearly the direction of best industry practices.

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The campus network is a structural component of the network business platform. No other part of IT has the ability to deliver real corporate value like the campus network does. A disproportionate number of IT and business assets flow across and interact with a campus network. The evolution of computing and applications toward integrating personal and back-office computing environments is occurring over and in the campus network and in its wake is re-defining IT architecture and its relationship to the business platform. As the lines and boundaries of data center, storage, computing, applications and networking blend and blur IT architecture will evolve into a single corporate asset which spans the entire campus network, from the data center, through the campus, across desktops and laptops to mobile end-points. The campus network is changing into an agile and flexible fabric, able to change its configuration and properties based upon application flow to deliver optimized application performance with the goal of improved user experience and satisfaction. In short, campus networking requirements and thus design are fundamentally changing.

IT departments are required to support real-time multimedia services, seamless wired and wireless connectivity, virtualized resources, Web 2.0 applications and much more. On top of these new requirements is the fact that it´s been over six years since the Y2K build-out and many IT departments have not updated their campus networks since then. The result is that many campus networks are based on old technology while businesses require new applications and demands.

Shift in Traffic Profiles

Applications such as Microsoft´s Vista OS and Office Groove 2007 with their peer-to-peer developer links will wreak havoc on networks designed for client-server flows. Readers note, all campus networks were designed for client-server flows. Peer-to-peer networking allows Microsoft to short circuit Linux by minimizing data centers´ client-server flows with new computer-to-computer traffic. But it´s not just Microsoft who is leading the change away from client-server; Google is, too, as are services like BitTorrent, eDonkey/eMule, YouTube, Skype and many others.

Peer-to-peer networking is well on its way to dominating traffic types. CableLabs, the research organization of the North American cable industry, believes that BitTorrent could represent 55% of the upstream traffic on the cable company’s access network. CacheLogic puts that number at roughly 35% of all traffic on the Internet. As peer-to-peer networking grows traffic profiles and patterns will shift away from client-server toward a more multi-directional and unpredictable patterns. Unified Communications and communications-enablement are two additional and very large drivers delivering real-time collaboration among employees, suppliers, partners and customers which need to be factored into campus network design.

Campus Network Architecture

Campus network architecture needs to anticipate and support these trends by incorporating attributes that embrace these dynamics. Campus networks need to be application fluent, support virtualization, provide non-stop or fault tolerant operation with integrated security and be flexible enough to support all types of traffic flows. Yes, speed has always been a hallmark of campus networks, which have traditionally driven Ethernet´s five year, ten-time increase in speed cycle.

It´s not that bandwidth isn´t important; it is and industry data proves the point. Gigabit to the desktop is driving the need for 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks. 10 Gigabit Ethernet as well as 10/100/1000 multi-speed card sales are up while fast Ethernet is flat to down. The IEEE Higher Speed Study Group recently started the standards process for 100 Gbs Ethernet. So speed is very much a part of campus networks and will continue to be, but it´s not the sole attribute. Scale is no longer simply associated with connectivity, control and availability, but now campus network services need to scale to support new requirements.

With that said, campus network architecture is and will continue to be based upon a three-tier physical structure of end-point connectivity aggregating into a distribution layer which is connected via a core. In multi-building campus networks, cores are connected via high speed 1 to 10Gbs links going to 40 and eventually 100Gbs. This physical architecture will remain the same; however the placement of services and intelligence will change to support the networked business platform. For example, electrical power is not normally thought of in terms of networking, but it´s a service that the network is now delivering. Power over Ethernet or PoE is a major requirement for a campus network to support as it provides power for unified communications end-points, wireless access points, surveillance cameras, etc.

Guiding Principals

The bottom line is that a new campus network architecture is emerging that is based upon logical services rather than physical components. Network architecture is the bridge between business strategy and evolution. The best way to think about the new design rules for campus networks is through the use of guiding principals. I offer the following six design principals which will transform your campus network into a network business platform:

Principal One: Design for Fault-Tolerant or Non-Stop Communications

As campus networks are critical infrastructure components their operation needs to be designed for 100% up time, ensuring application availability. This is accomplished through redundant links and equipment so that a resilient campus infrastructure is realized. Redundant power systems in switches and routers will ensure that loss of power will not bring down the business platform, especially as voice and surveillance systems, in addition to critical data, flow across and interact with campus network elements. The ability to perform full image in-service software upgrades is important to keep the campus operational during times of upgrade while in service maintenance ensures business continues even when elements are being maintained.

As networks support more applications (voice, video, building control, surveillance systems, etc.) their status as a critical business platform increases. For example, network outages usually always result in loss of business, lower customer satisfaction and loss of business productivity. Adhering to Principal One, fault-tolerant communications will reduce downtime, increase productivity and customer/employee satisfaction, thanks to high availability. Principal One will also reduce network outages that translate into business outage with their resulting consequences of lost reputation and even potential law-suits.

Principal Two: Think Virtual

Virtualization offers powerful benefits in the areas of dynamic resource allocation and service utilization by carving out logically separate networks and control domains within a shared infrastructure. Virtualization maximizes asset utilization in the campus network. Some examples are helpful. Virtualization of the network layer allows a company to support multiple diverse business policy environments. Many corporations require separation of data, workflow, work product and information flow. This could be due to regulatory issues, a merger, outsourcing and diverse lines of business or private/government-focused divisions within a corporation.

Virtualization of the network layer also allows a company to collapse multiple parallel networks such as video surveillance, HVAC, Voice over IP, Video over IP and data onto a single network infrastructure while providing isolation of these networks safeguarding data or organizational control. Virtualization can also apply to functions performed by the network by integrated network modules in campus switches, such as firewalls and application services. The ability to virtualize these devices allows a single device to serve multiple lines of business or multiple security zones with separate management and reporting that is often necessary.

Virtualization enables the construction of secure guest or contractor access to defined network resources. It also allows IT executives to segregate departments for compliance requirements such as separating human resources from finance. These virtualized segmentations are logical and thus can be guided by business requirements.

Principal Three: Operational Management Excellence

Perhaps the most overlooked and undervalued principal during equipment acquisition is operational management. This is due to the difficulty of assigning budget to operational tools and network gear with built-in software features. But its value is deep. Operational management can accelerate service implementation, ease and lower the cost of management, automate infrastructure management and facilitate plus document changes.

Traffic flow analysis plays a large role in operational management. For example, traffic flow analysis through tools like deep packet inspection provides an in-depth view of the campus network traffic breakdown and associated performance. This insight allows IT executives to plan for growth, tweak application performance, optimize existing infrastructure and locate problems. Some vendors provide solutions to provide the ability to track network assets as well as ?¢‚Ǩ?ìTagged" non-network assets such as hospital equipment, A/V devices, and potentially unwanted devices like rogue Access Points providing IT operational personnel with a full view of the network and all devices and applications which reside within it. The benefit to IT executives is lowered operational costs when automation is able to provide information necessary to control the network, locate assets, and accelerate deployment of new features, applications and business initiatives.

Principal Three is key to enabling businesses to change and grow, thus meeting its objectives. Strong and automated operational management delivers a benefit to users by minimizing user downtime in network maintenance/operations.

Principal Four: Design for Integrated Security

Principal Four states that the campus network will support integrated security services, which include pervasive security policies and built-in protections for access, identities, resources and content. Without integrated network security IT executives cannot deliver on availability or reliability. Guaranteed uptimes, non-stop performance and business process protections will be impossible to achieve; and there are the many regulatory and legislative conformance requirements to deal with as well.

Integrated security ensures regulatory requirements, safeguards client identity and application/data confidentiality and provides pro-active threat detection and containment. From a business reliability point of view, integrated security is an absolute must principal.

Principal Five: Ensure Application Fluency

Application fluency is one of the most important principals, as it will have a direct impact on user experience. Application fluency or awareness means that the campus network recognizes applications, and controls traffic accordingly to ensure delivery. Application fluency allows the campus network to react to network congestion and guarantee response times at the application layer for critical applications. Many applications are imbedded in web browser windows; therefore, campus networks need to see deep into traffic flows to provide service level performance required by most critical applications. The ability to look deep into network traffic provides security benefits as well. Deep packet inspection in the campus network allows it to protect itself from malicious or misbehaving applications. Principals Three and Five are linked in that they both build upon packet inspection.

Principal Six: Unified Network Services For Mobility

There are multiple networking options for mobile users and data center connectivity. The campus network plays an important role in unifying these networks so that people can connect to any resource and/or person through any device and obtain consistent services and performance independent of wired or wireless access. Consider mobility. To deliver mobility, the ability to support diverse media end-points such as cell phones, laptops, PDAs, desktops, phones, video terminals, etc., using diverse media connectivity including wireless, wired and cellular, becomes essential for the network to deliver. Campus networks which are able to offer mobile solutions where wireless services are built directly into switching and routing platforms allow the enterprise to extend services throughout the campus. This approach offers an electrical power advantage also, as scalable power services to closet switches in which to power phones, access points and other end-points are provisioned and can scale as future power service requirements grow.

Principal Six delivers the business value of offering any application to any screen´s end-point, which increases productivity thanks to increased application access.

If you follow the six guiding principals your company will be rewarded with a more responsive business that achieves its business goals and objectives through IT. Business process will run smoother as operations shift from reactive to a more proactive management posture. An improved productivity and user experience will result too. Peace of mind through network security and business continuity will also be achieved as will lower operational cost.

Clearly these benefits are subjective and highly dependent upon pre-existing network conditions. In my experience very few IT organizations architect their networks. Rather they choose vendors, equipment, software and services for each requirement or project with which they are confronted. The result is similar to house construction. Often consumers can choose a builder´s package and save a few dollars or do it right and hire an architect to customize a solution for their needs. The architected solutions can cost more and at times take slightly longer but the pay-back is big. You can always tell an architected home. The rooms are pleasing to the eye, the space is planned out and works well, rooms flow into each other and the home sits perfectly on its land. The builder´s package often comes with odd-sized rooms, a poor flow, disproportionate windows and doors and the feeling that something is just not right. Often times additional work is done and paid for to fix these anomalies or the buyer lives with dissatisfaction.

In IT an architected solution is business driven and provides an excellent experience for employees, customers, partners and suppliers. The interfaces work well, performance is within human delay tolerances, shifting between applications is painless and work just flows. The IT systems are not frustrating and fatiguing to work with, but support business process as effortlessly as possible.

The time to use the above guiding principals is every time a new project is being evaluated. Have the IT team review every major design decision by applying each of the guiding principals and discussing them, one by one, to ensure that the campus network design supports the principals. Don´t move forward until there is agreement that the architecture supports the principal. Over time the campus network will take on more and more of the attributes identified above.

While I discuss the pay-off above, there is one other item to consider. Campus networks will evolve to be more responsive to applications to the point of auto-configuring to improve application performance and user experience. For example, a group may start a telepresense session and the network will detect this event and respond by configuring VLANs and QoS to ensure excellent performance. Building a campus network with the above principals will set your campus network up to be able to deliver that type of dynamic application agility.

The campus network is a structural component of the network business platform which means it demands thoughtfulness in design.

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The network is the new business platform. Networking is evolving well beyond its initial role as a connectivity service as unified communications, network access control, network virtualization, mobility, application fluency, location services, etc., are embedded into the network fabric and are ?¢‚Ǩ?ìcallable" entities to application developers. This increased value in networking which can be molded and shaped by IT developers to achieve corporate goals is the genesis of the new business platform. Business platforms are launch points, which deliver value to customers, suppliers and partners while offering corporate differentiation.

The term business platform has multiple meanings depending on who´s using it. IT vendors have taken the term to usually mean a programming language, operating system, database or all of the above. Management consultants usually define business platform as an infrastructure by which business is enabled and conducted. In this Lippis Report I propose that the IP network is the new business platform. Networking is taking this new strategic position within corporate boards and IT executive management due to the growing number of services, which are embedded in the network infrastructure.

In eras gone by computing environments were business platforms. First it was IBM´s system 360 mainframe architecture, which automated back office business process and extended that process around an organization thanks to SNA. Then Digital Equipment Corporation, HP and Data General´s mini-computers extended back office automation further by lower computing price points so that business units and departments could automate their own business process. During this time, local area networks and peer-to-peer networking such as DecNet, TCP/IP, OSI, et al., was invented to connect these systems in an effort to share these expensive resources. Then came Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Michael Dell et al., who ushered in the personal computing era to speed up personal business process with spreadsheets, presentation development, communications, etc. At the same time as the PC came to market networking became big business as its main service was to connect PCs and peripherals over local and wide areas.

The computing players continue to compete over operating system features and price points. But the real value to corporate operations and the next major wave of productivity is in the linking and integrating of the personal and back-office computing environments. This linking will evolve into a single corporate asset that resides deeply within its corporate network. Networking has evolved well past its connectivity service which was the basis of its value proposition to IT. Services such as unified communications, IT security, location services, storage access and mobility are the new building blocks of the new business platform. All of these network services are callable entities, which can be molded and shaped by developers as Web Services and SOA becomes the de-facto IT developer environment. No longer will IT developers and networking departments be at odds as developers routinely write applications assuming LAN performance. IT developers will write directly to the network rather than to a computer, which resides in a data center or department.

Right now there is a huge industry battle taking shape in the unified communications space with Microsoft/Nortel´s ICA challenging Cisco and Avaya. The winner will be corporations as competition over unified communications will spark innovation and downward price point reduction. Unified communications will lead to communications enablement or what Microsoft/Nortel call ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨business transformation" in which IT developers embed communications deeply into business process by writing corporate applications which invoke communications to speed up workflow by eliminating human and system delay from business process. Communications-enablement is the key example of how the network is the new business platform as unified communications is based upon IP telephony being embedded into a corporate IP network.

The network infrastructure players are busy adding value to their offerings by integrating network virtualization, service expansion and device consolidation, unified networking, non-stop networking, application fluency, and on-demand secure access. Please see Lippis Report Issue 71: Networking Futures The Direction Ahead for more detail on this topic.

With the above as background, the following podcast discussion between Nick Lippis, President Lippis Enterprises and Zeus Kerravala, SVP of The Yankee Group´s Enterprise Research defines the network as the new business platform.

Nick: Zeus and I are sharing thoughts on the network as the new business platform. If you look at all of the resources that an IT department has at its disposal to deliver business value, clearly they have desktop resources or assets, server assets, data center assets, back office software, so forth and so on. If you think about the network itself, it´s the only true horizontal IT asset. Meaning that, it touches all things that an IT department has by default, because it connects all these devices together. The concept is that there are a couple of things that are happening with the network. When the network has been evolving from a connectivity resource, which is the basic resource that it has always provided to connect things up and provide connectivity into a broader range of services that can deliver deeper business value. Now with the confluence of a couple of key trends, such as web services and SOA, and all the different kinds of services that are being bundled and embedded into networks today such as policy services, network management, presence services, IP telephony services, security services, location services, there are a lot of services buried and bundled within a network fabric. But now these services are being opened up to be called upon by developers, so now no longer does a developer need to know where a particular resource might be in their IT arsenal, but can essentially call services and allow the network to find them. That´s the concept we´re going to explore here with pros and cons. We´re calling it the network as a new business platform.

Zeus: I think to start, there are a number of things that happened technologically that enabled us now and the combination of virtualization and IT networks actually allow us to take things that used to be physical resources and make them virtual resources that we can scatter around a network. The impact that IT networks have can´t be understated. When you think about how things work at the IP layer, you no longer need to know where they are, but that they´re there because of the way IP protocol works. When you think of how your email works on your laptop, you plug into a network. You don´t care really where it is, it just magically goes and finds it. You can extend that all the way down to the data center of the computing platforms. If you think of VM running on a bank of blade servers, you can actually create a bunch of logical servers that become part of the network and get called as you need resources. You can do the same things with storage resources or a lot of things that you mentioned with regards where presence of authentication or identity can be replicated that way as well. The development of virtualization IP networks makes the network the computing platform for the virtual enterprise.

Nick: That´s a great way to put it as the network to the platform for the virtual enterprise. That´s a great tagline. That sounds great.

Zeus: I think that we should trademark that.

Nick: I love this concept because the way that the marketplace or the industry has been evolving is that we offer new services into the network in the form of appliances. We have switches, routers, access points, and all the major foundational technology, but now whenever we´re looking for a new service to be added it´s added by an appliance. That appliance over time then gets absorbed into other parts of that core network, whether it be switches or routers, and so forth. There´s a natural revolution on how technology is introduced and tested in the marketplace, how the market can consume it and modify it and then the vendors can optimize its placement and deployment within an enterprise. Moore´s Law and Metcalf´s Law are combining to predict that IP networking is becoming a big black hole, sucking in all previous generations of legacy technology, and we´ve seen this over and over again in our industry, from the huge $600 billion telecommunications networks being absorbed and replaced in essence enhanced by IP networks; the national entertainment systems that we use that produce our TV entertainment is also in the midst of a major shift and a black hole moving into IP. We see this in essence through TiVo, Apple iTUNES, downloading movies, and having those devices within an IP fabric. You have all of that mobility, freedom and flexibility to move them around in your home or office. You can display them on different kinds of things. This whole concept of the network as this business platform is basically the movement towards which the industry is moving us. Moore and Metcalf guide us as every generation of legacy technology is engulfed by the IP network. There is an unleashing of innovation around that particular technology that opens up possibilities that we´ve never had before. Look at communications and what we´ve had on phones, features stayed static for a good hundred years as it migrated from analog to digital. We moved digital to IP over the last ten years. The progression and the rate of change have just been huge – off the charts. The same thing will be just as true as we start to move more and more legacy services into IP. As we get more of these services into the IP fabric, it opens up opportunity for developers that were never there before; or, they were there, but the interfaces of the sockets to connect something that´s kind of off network to on network is huge and they break with limited functionality and so forth. There is a new framework emerging in the marketplace that networking beyond all the other assets we have in an IT arsenal is becoming the central area for business development wrapping applications and services around profit drivers.

Zeus: I think that you touched on a lot of points there. If you look at the example of VoIP, I think that will be the first of many VoIP´s to follow integrated into the network. If the network vendors and operators aren´t careful it can also be run right on top of it. Some of these have become verbs in everyday life. You look at something like skype; ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨we´re going to skype each other now." Slingbox is another example of that. Where we´ve taken cable TV, which was once a service that had to be bought as part of the network, and moved in and virtualized it to be something that runs on the network. Now I can take my cable TV and use something like Slingbox and be able to pipe that wherever I want. So now it´s allowed me to virtualize something that was once tied to a network. What´s often missed in the industry is the impact that VoIP has had. It´s never been about convergence Nick. If we wanted convergence we would have done ATM. Voice over IP, the first part of IP was doing it over IP. When you do things over IP you make them portable and accessible anywhere. Many of these services that we have today, I have no idea where they´re hosted, where they´re run, I have no idea if they´re in the US; I just use them and they work great. Extend that down away from an application, down to components of applications, maybe someone offers a global authentication service. Maybe one of the mobile operators offers to become fact of standard resource for location-based services. There is infinite possibility here. I think that no one thought enough about this and the network. We´ve rapidly shifted into an environment where the huge hoops in SKYPE figured out this method and a way to do this. You´ll see much more advancement to this in the next few years. The advent of multi-core processors makes it possible to run many more things virtually and allows us to do more with this black hole that you´ve aligned.

Nick: It´s interesting as I look at the confluence of a lot of these trends; Steve Jobs did a great job with the introduction of the iPHONE. We have communications highly integrated into a network fabric. The man-machine metaphor is simple and intuitive; you have business, entertainment, and communications access. It´s a great example of things to come as the industry wraps its mind around the possibility available as all IT assets are sucked into the IP black hole.

Zeus: One of the difficult things for IT departments to deal with though, and I focus a lot of our research at Yankee around this concept, is consumerization of the enterprise. A lot of the technology that we use today for business purposes; things like instant messaging, skype for business, even email to some extent, was a consumer technology that eventually found its way into the enterprise. The consumerization of the enterprise continues to happen at a faster and faster pace and what IT doesn´t want to become is a bottleneck. I think that cattling all these different technologies is a challenge, because they´re all delivered over IP. It does make it easier, but I think that´s where the innovation is being done right now.

Nick: That´s a great point. I think you hit it right on the head. The rate of change is clearly a lot faster in a consumer space because obviously you don´t have to think about a lot of installed base. Wireless LANS were a great example of that. We were building them in project 802.11 for enterprise use, but vendors figured out that we have a security problem in the enterprise marketplace, but we don´t necessarily have that problem in the home market, so they decided to go there first and drive the price points down so we can enter into that marketplace. Price points were low enough thanks to our Asian manufacturing and production; we were able to get it into the marketplace. People experienced it and then they wanted it into their offices. VoIP has been to a degree the same way with skype, Vonnage, and other types of VoIP based services. So we´ve seen these waves of technology that have been focused on the consumer space that have made their way into the enterprise. I think that what that does to IT organizations is that it makes it hard for them if they´re not proactive or getting ahead of this curve. It makes it hard for them to take advantage of.

Zeus: I think the reason that it scaled to consumer businesses is because the way they have gone to market. One of the things that companies have to prepare for is the concept of an IT department of one. So, you Nick Lippis are able to facilitate what you want to do with your systems. The example I use for that is, take a look at consumer space right now. The companies that are of high value YouTube, MySpace, SecondLife, CraigsList, eBay, this list goes on and on, these companies don´t do anything except facilitate. What they´ve done is created an environment where there is a web portal built and they´ve created tools to allow people to self administer and self create content; self collaborate. CraigsList is a really bad interface, but it´s very simple and plain and relatively easy to use. The concept is the structure that´s been put in place is a facilitation structure. Companies need to look at and take some lessons from these social networking sites, auction sites and put some structure in to allow the users to become the IT department of one. So all the policy and security features remain in place, but you allow the user to be able to create any conflict, collaborate with whoever they want and not let IT be that bottle neck. The network then allows for the facilitation to happen.

Nick: That´s a great point and an interesting model. The popular sites are facilitators and aggregators; well more facilitators than anything else.

Zeus: Yeah, they don´t do anything.

Nick: IT departments have been the direct opposite. They´ll basically do everything for you, or they try to do everything for you. Mainly because you have professionals in non-IT jobs who believe it´s not their job to do anything around IT. Where you have more IT savvy professionals, is the next generation coming out of engineering and business schools, that understand the technology and want to have more control over it rather than having it spoon fed and dictated over to them. So I think that´s an interesting model on how IT departments might take advantage of the support dimension and the creative environment where their services can be highly customized towards individuals and business and allow that interest, innovation, and the drive they have to take IT and use it for their business. This allows them to do that without their IT being dictated to them, but IT provides general guidelines, an interface, an architecture and allows them to have it with some constraints and control around security.

Zeus: I certainly think it´s generational. I don´t think that my Dad would want to become an IT department of one, but I do think that my ten year old will. In some sense we are the watershed group of workers.

Nick: To take advantage of the network as the business platform, IT departments do not have to abandon any of their IT resources but wrap their mind around the network as a basic building foundation for a business platform and move away from these stove pipe vertical kinds of development that they normally go through.

Zeus: It comes back to IT as the creator and IT as the facilitator. The way you do that is to create an underlying foundation of technology that can be served up from the network to different types of devices, end-points, or networks. Keep all that stuff transparent to the user. For instance, with yourself you don´t really care what kind of network this is running on or what kind of devices this is running on. In the infrastructure there is a place to facilitate all of that yourself. For the IT department it´s important to be forward thinking enough to be willing to relinquish a lot of control of creation of what the user sees and does and become a facilitator of information and resources then the actual creator of the actual end product. I think that the end user actually knows what they want, or at least they soon will and what they would like is the ability to do that.

Nick: We should spend another Podcast on the new role of IT in this network platform environment. I think that there are a lot of great concepts that you´ve put out on the table. What does this mean for an organization design point of view, a social contract, with users and IT departments as well? There´s a whole set of thinking that can be developed here.

Zeus: It´s an interesting concept that I think is going to be coming upon people a lot faster than they thought, and they´ll need to prepare for it sooner. I think that we can take a lot of lessons from the consumer space. If my thesis is right, and I think it is, that the rate of change that the enterprise has compacted from consumer technology will slowly increase not diminish.

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Zeus Kerravala, SVP of The Yankee Group´s Enterprise Research joins Nick Lippis to discuss and define the network as the new business platform. Networking is evolving well beyond its initial role as a connectivity service as location, unified communications, network access control, network virtualization, mobility, application fluency etc are embedded into the network fabric and are ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨callable" entities to application developers. This increased value in networking that can be molded and shaped by IT developers to achieve corporate goals is the genesis of the new business platform. Zeus and I define and discuss the importance of this new role for networking within IT and the boardroom.

Listen to the Podcast

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Two events which have had the largest impact on business this century are the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and corporate scandals/bankruptcies of Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Adelphia, et al. These two events ushered in sweeping changes in disaster preparedness and corporate governance. Often preparedness plus regulatory/legislative/presidential orders are linked and managed under an umbrella term of ?¢‚Ǩ?ìcompliance" and ?¢‚Ǩ?ìbusiness continuity". Most if not all public concerns have a compliance officer who is tasked with planning, budgeting and implementing business continuity. Depending on the size of the firm, a compliance budget can be huge, measured in the tens of millions of dollars or more. In the networking industry business continuity is being addressed as network architecture attributes.

One of the first projects I did as a young engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid 1980s was to design and implement a 400-mile private fiber optic network. This was unheard of at the time; a company building its own fiber optic network. But the ROI was strong with savings of 10s of millions of dollars and unlimited bandwidth available between 90 buildings. After the project was completed my manager´s boss was concerned about an outage or disaster hitting, which would wipe out communications for an unknown about of time. I was tasked with a vulnerability identification and disaster plan. I analyzed all the fiber routes and identified single points of failure. The topology was a distributed star with approximately 30 buildings being homed to three major sites. To avoid loosing communications to one of these major sites I proposed a back up microwave system, redundant fiber and equipment, special contract clauses and cost with contractors to increase fiber restoration priority for Digital, and changing the physical topology from star to ring to assure two paths to every building. In the end, the topology was changed to a ring, a new contractor contract was signed and spare equipment and fiber was housed on Digital property. The business continuity plan cost the project a few million dollars but was justified on the cost of lost business and productivity to Digital.

Today network architects can leverage key attributes associated with their corporate networks to deliver business continuity without incurring huge cost as I had to back in the 1980s. I identify a few of these network attributes here.

Mobility

Mobility is being added to corporate networks. Smartphones and PDAs offer access to e-mail and voice communications independent of a physical building. As explored in Lippis Report Issue 72, the mobile industry is quickly moving to connect mobile end-points to enterprise IT services such as IP telephony features and functions, calendar synchronization, presence, data bases, etc. The barriers for mobile devices to access enterprise data will be eliminated. In addition to smartphones and PDAs, WLANs offer mobility to laptop and desktop users. Most important is the fact that network administrators can deploy a WLAN solution quickly, offering network access to knowledge workers in short order, assuming that internet access is available. In short, the combination of mobile service providers and WLANs offer network architects redundant network access to corporate infrastructure. In addition WLANs can be constructed quickly for operations located in an alternative facility.

IP Telephony

One of the key network attributes of IP telephony is that it´s based on IP. That is, end-point addresses are assigned by a DHCP server eliminating the time and cost associated with moves, adds and changes. So, IP telephony users can plug their soft or hard IP phone into a network jack and be presented with connectivity, which includes their preferences and settings. No operator needs to be available. This was a key network attribute for many in the financial services industry in NY during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack. These firms were able to bring their network and communications operations back on-line one day after the attacks thanks to IP telephony´s mobility features.

Network Access Control

Stratifying, segmenting and controlling user access to conform to regulatory compliance requirements is a business continuity requirement. Controlling guest, contractor and user access to network segments, applications, data, work product and services with visibility into a user´s behavior and use of IT resources provides a level of flexibility network and IT departments have not had in LAN systems. Network Access Control or NAC solutions are helping compliance managers meet regulatory requirements. To comply with various regulations, organizations need a means to segment users so that only authorized users can access sensitive data and demonstrate compliance to auditors. For example, some organizations need to restrict access to credit card data to comply with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standard. Hospitals and medical facilities must protect patient records to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Enterprises need the ability to restrict access to critical information based on a user´s role. In addition, to prove they have effective controls in place, organizations need a means to audit data and application usage and to document that access is indeed restricted. A NAC solution will protect sensitive data, limit the scope of an audit to a subset of user and server systems subject to the regulation and provide reports and views, which are friendly to auditors.

NACs are being funded with compliance budgets if they provide the following key services: policy-based access controls which track all user activity and traffic flows on the network; application access control at layer 7 limits whose applications a user can run on the network; documented polices that allow IT to document what control policies are in place and to whom they apply. This is a key auditing tool for demonstrating that users excluded by a policy cannot reach sensitive data. Further controls include activity reports for both users and application/services; user reports including every application, server, and resource a user touched in a given timeframe; application/service reports providing details about all users who ran a particular application or accessed a particular resource during a given period.

Network Management

Network management systems have taken on a new role beyond element management to compliance management. Compliance auditors have influence and when they tell a Board of Directors (BoD) to audit the network for compliance, the network needs to be audited. Network management systems are enforcing regulatory requirements and demonstrating compliance. For example, when configuring network change orders on a router, the approval process needs to be documented. If a router configuration change is made a corporation needs to show who did it and when.

CIOs are getting pressure from their BoD to audit their networks. If a node in the network goes down, is the network still in compliance? Does a configuration change bring the network out of compliance? Whom do you trust to do the configuration changes knowing that they have to be documented and journaled? If you have an encrypted link and a node goes down are you still encrypted?

A centralized change entitlement system can control configuration changes and provide tools to produce reports and compliance validation. New rules such as HIPAA, encryption, safety of information, encrypted medical data at point of access, etc., are required by most today. These regulatory requirements can be configured and its changes tracked at the physical layer of the network and network management can now support regulation auditors with reports in a form they understand. Some network management systems such as Cisco Works include templates for customers to configure compliance tracking for requirement such as HIPAA, PCI, etc.

WAN Bandwidth

Some of my high-end clients are able to cost justify gigabit links across the country and into Europe. Gigabit Ethernet over the wide area fundamentally changes corporate asset placement decisions as LAN-like performance is now available over the WAN. This means that shadow data centers can be placed on different continents. Business continuity can be assured for data centers and major IT resources as single geographic points of failure/disaster can be eliminated. Also placement of employees can be reviewed and analyzed too; as application performance becomes independent of geography, so too can employees.

Other important network architecture attributes are broadband access to home and remote offices, IP addressing and the role of highly available DHCP servers and Communications-Enabled Business Process. We´ll get to these topics in future Lippis Reports.

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2006 was a transitional year for our industry as key technologies matured to the point of being ready for prime time. It was a year of big acquisitions and mergers as the industry restructures to a smaller number of equipment suppliers and service providers. As the world moves to wireless and triple-play services the service providers consolidated down to a smaller number of large providers. The consolidation of AT&T/SBC & BellSouth, Verizon and MCI, Sprint and Nextel, etc., drove equipment supplier consolidation of Lucent and Alcatel, Siemens and Nokia, Ericsson and Marconi, et al. In the enterprise market lots of smaller acquisitions marked the year without any large mega deals. The big deals will happen in 2007 as Siemens Communications is looking for a new partner, Nortel pins its hopes on its Microsoft ICA initiative, Juniper is rumored to be looking to buy into the enterprise market and consolidation occurs in the switching and network appliance markets.

Private Equity Financiers Enter Market

2007 could be the year that financial sponsors such as KKR, BlackRock, et al., private equity players enter the enterprise networking market. These firms have invested in a small number of high technology deals primarily in the semi-conductor market. The private equity players do have an appetite to structure a multi-billion dollar deal that would stitch together a 10 to 20 billion networking concern that would be the clear number two to Cisco. The dynamics would be something like this. A private equity player or group of them would purchase switching, IP telephony, routing, network security, data center networking, professional services and other players into a large private company. The new company would rationalize product lines, develop a comprehensive architecture, up and cross sell customers and when the time was right, bring the company public providing exit for the initial investors.

3Com/Huawei The Flash Point?

There are many opportunities to aggregate a large networking concern by acquiring all or parts of firms such as Juniper, Alcatel´s enterprise business, Siemens Communications, Extreme, Foundry, ProCurve Networking by HP, Telcordia, NetApp, Enterasys, UTStarcom, 3Com/Huawei, et al. Last month 3Com announced that it was buying out the 49% stake of its partner Huawei for some $882M. It invested $160M in the JV back in 2003. This will leave 3Com with only $32M in cash but a large product line, potentially the Huawei brand and entry into China. 3Com could be the starting point from which private equity players build their networking giant.

Strategic Investors

If private equity firms find that networking is too rich for their taste, then the market will continue on its path of acquisition through strategic investors. Companies such as Cisco, Juniper, Avaya, Nortel et al will selectively acquire smaller players and integrate them into a growth through acquisition strategy.

There is no doubt that 2007 will bring further consolidation and paradoxically a more favorable IPO market as successful companies such as Riverbed have demonstrated. I say paradoxically since a slow down in spending is what usually ignites consolidation which one would think is a poor climate for IPOs. But our industry has lots of moving parts with newer growth market segments being rewarded with favorable valuations while either slow growth or dominated markets are hammered. It´s just the financial markets way of bringing in the new and getting rid of the old. Mitel and Crossbeam are two firms to keep an eye on as both are readying IPOs and could be industry bell weathers. So yes, small companies will exit by acquisition or IPO while the biggest of players seek mergers and strategic acquisitions for competitive gain.

One of the biggest 2006 announcements that promised to deliver an industry sea change was Microsoft´s entry into IP telephony with its unified communications architecture and ecosystem. Competition between Cisco and Microsoft will intensify in 2007 as both look to capture large shares of new markets such as unified communications, IT security and home networking. As these two giants prepare for battle, look for them to beef up their war chests with a larger number of acquisitions than usual.

So factoring all of the above what are the mega trends for 2007? Here´s my list:

Unified Communications: With Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft/Nortel, Siemens, Alcatel, Sphere, ShoreTel, et al., all geared up to deliver unified communications, 2007 will deliver a single launch point on the end-point for multiple communication applications. Knowledge workers will not have to jump in and out of desktop applications to access voice mail, e-mail, IM, chat, voice, video conferencing, etc. Finally the industry is moving toward a unified and integrated approach to communication access which will deliver increased productivity and speed workflow. I use the term end-point here as a general user interface or man-machine metaphor which enables communication. That metaphor may be a smartphone, desktop, laptop, cell phone, softphone, etc.

Communications Enablement: Communications enablement is one of the most exciting technologies which the industry will be promoting in 2007. In short, communications-enabled business process injects communications into workflow that can be triggered by some event, i.e., the movement of corporate stock by some predetermined percent, a hospital ?¢‚Ǩ?ìcode blue", a train derailment, a man made or natural catastrophe, a sales opportunity, etc. In short, key events require response and orchestrated communications between the right professionals to cease opportunities or conduct damage control. Software developers will be offered common web services tools and IT government models such as SOA to call upon communication services while automating business process through business planning modeling tools. Communications enablement will have a larger favorable impact than business process reengineering did in the late ?¢‚ǨÀú80s and early ?¢‚ǨÀú90s as corporations discover the efficiency and agility gains afforded by weaving communications into business process. In short, communications enablement is the orchestrator of communications in response to some event.

Mobile Networking: The initial conditions are set for the integration of enterprise IT services to be delivered over mobile end-points. 2007 will deliver a wide range of smartphones that link IP telephony features, directory, presence, scheduling and access to a wide range of corporate IT data and applications. The key difference between 2006 and 2007 will be that smartphones will be extensions of corporate IT resources rather than separate voice and e-mail tools. Mobile e-mail eliminated the stress of getting back to your office only to find a few hundred e-mails waiting for you. The next generation of smartphones capable of accessing corporate data will move a workforce to new levels of productivity while mobile by enabling workflow and communications to be conducted while in motion. Look for thought leadership from Cisco and Avaya as both have recently acquired Orative and Traverse Networks respectively.

The Year of SIP: I have said that 2005 and 2006 would be the year of SIP or Session Initiation Protocol and I have been wrong two years straight. You would think that I would call it quits and cut my losses, but no, I do think that 2007 will be the year of SIP. It has to be, with all the major IP telephony provides, mobile equipment suppliers, service providers and software companies building architecture, products and services around SIP for multi-model communications; it has to take hold this year just by sheer numbers.

The Network as a Business Platform: Network infrastructure has transcended its initial purpose of delivering a connectivity service into a business platform. By business platform, I mean the basis upon which to deliver competitive differentiation. The corporate network is the only horizontal IT asset. Other IT assets are vertical meaning that they are desktops, servers, data centers, storage and siloed applications. All of these IT resources are important but they primarily work in isolation. The corporate network is the only IT resource that touches all IT assets. This placement advantage makes the network an ideal resource in which to embed services that are required by all employees and IT systems. Services such as location, communication, security, mobility, storage, application acceleration, IT applications, et al., are being embedded into this fabric. During 2007 IT developers will be able to call upon these services while writing corporate applications. The tools will be the same as mentioned above, Web Services/SOA, but the location will be in the network making the network a strategic corporate asset.

The Year of NAC Appliances: Data points are building into trend lines that suggest 2007 will be the year of Network Access Control or NAC deployments. The data points are many. First and perhaps most important is that network and IT executives have turned the corner in their thinking from general interest to budgeted NAC projects as there are approximately 1500 companies who have deployed a commercial NAC solution today. There are non-commercial NAC implementations too, such as NESSUS scans which, if counted would drive the 1500 deployments up significantly. The number of NAC customers should well surpass 5000 in 2007 and there´s nothing to slow it down. With Microsoft´s Network Access Protection or NAP being dependent upon its Network Policy Server (NPS) in Longhorn, NAP will not be relevant until well into 2008. The real discussion in IT conference rooms will focus around spending budget on NAC appliance approaches. Enterprise buyers have become very pragmatic in solving their network access control problems. These problems are quickly turning into funded projects.

Branch Networking: Around the Americas and Western Europe businesses have been de-centralizing their workforce over the past 10 years. Over the past 5 years corporate employee pools have become more distributed and spread out, thanks to broadband deployment, a huge increase in working at home and branch office operations. Point in fact, Cisco has sold over 2 million ISRs to date in 2006 and the growth rate is not slowing down. With a huge surge in branch office networking, service providers and equipment suppliers have been innovating to deliver the same IT experience to branch office workers as their counter-parts in regional and headquarter facilities. 2007 will bring with it a wide range of innovation to branch office networking including encryption and tunneling to secure links, integration of communications, routing, switching, security, WLANs, storage and WAN optimization features.

Hosted IP Services: Hosted IP services including VoIP, messaging, contact centers, et al., will boom in 2007 for the small to medium sized business. In 2006 there were nearly 120 service providers worldwide who announced some version of a hosted IP service. There is a pent up demand for hosted IP services which will start to be satisfied in 2007 as these services ramp up.

Peer-to-peer networking: The client-server model of computing is on its last legs and will be replaced by a peer-to-peer model. You can thank Microsoft for that as it desires to diminish the value of Linux servers by embedding peer-to-peer hooks into its much awaited Longhorn operating system. This shift will have large consequences as traffic patterns will shift significantly requiring many network/IT business decision makers to re-architect their networks.

So 2007 may bring about a huge structural change to the industry as private equity concerns do their investment diligence and decide if it´s worth tens of billions to stitch up a networking powerhouse. For sure the industry will continue down the road of the big acquiring the small with a few spectacular IPOs in 2007. 2006´s transitional year set up the third and strategic phase of IP telephony which is driving networking into a more strategic corporate asset role.

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Mobile wireless technologies are enhancing personal and professional lives. Let me give you a hard example. Someone in my family was recently hospitalized. For anyone this is a traumatic event filled with fear, anxiety, sadness, anger, hope, compassion and love. In between these emotions I started to notice how the hospital staff, patients and parents were connected. Yes, there were lots of direct face-to-face communications with hospital staff. But the loudspeaker paging systems that used to broadcast the usual ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨Calling Dr. —— ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨ have been replaced with a hospital staff equipped with mobile end-points reducing overhead noise and increasing communications as one-on-one connections replace broadcasts. For patients and parents, WLANs permeated this facility, allowing them internet access for communication with remote family members, checking e-mail, keeping colleagues and clients informed, researching medical journals or even allowing the patient to play a game of internet checkers with a remote family member. Mobile phones served the purpose to keep family members connected while traveling to and from the hospital and provide status and updates. It´s this kind of professional and personal value that mobile networking is adding to every industry sector. Mobile networking and communications value is huge.

A Mobile World

While the mobile industry started with cellular technology providing person-to-person voice communications, the current evolution is based upon access to data applications and back-end enterprise systems for mobile end-points. Some industry personalities talk about Fixed-to-Mobile convergence, but I think its far greater then a convergence. The shift toward mobility is a replacement from the fixed end-point world of today.

The industry is quickly moving beyond simple services that link mobile and fixed end-points such as ringing your mobile end-point while you are away from your desktop. During November, Avaya purchased Traverse and Cisco purchased Orative to connect their enterprise- based IP telephony features and functions with mobile end-points such as calendar synchronization, presence and other enterprise services. The barriers for mobile devices to access enterprise data will be eliminated over time as wireless and wired access technologies become unified. The trend line that is developing for mobile networking is nothing short of huge. By 2010 50% of internet services will be accessed by mobile end-points. Here are a few important data points that I follow and would like to share with you here:

Desktop PC shipment growth will be flat at about 150 million per year out into 2010. At the same time laptop shipments will continue to grow, reaching some 180 million in 2010. Note that laptop shipments have already out paced desktops. The super-high growth is in smartphones, with nearly 300 million shipping in 2010 up from approximately 80 million today. If you layer the hyper-growth of RFID tags into these dynamics, then the number of internet end-points may very well hit one trillion in 2010 up from over a billion today. Note that over 56.5 million high-frequency RFID tag ICs were shipped in 2005 and the market is growing at some 400% CAGR. The bottom line, mobile end-points will be the preferred access method for most people and devices on the planet over the next 5 years.

Clearly the communications end-point is changing towards a mobile device. So what does that mean for the mix of IP phones, softphones and smartphones? Here is some insight into one of my client´s end-point transitions. Over the next 4 years this client will transition its current 150K end-points to the following make up: smartphones will grow from 1K to 60K; office fixed IP phones will transition from 1K to 35K; all employees will have softphones on laptops; the typical employee will have a smartphone and softphone with less than 40% equipped with office IP phones; the total number of end-points will decline from 150K to 110K while the number of employees remains constant at 100K. In short say good by to fixed analog, digital and even IP phones.

One key driver for this change towards mobile end-points is economics. This same client has seen a decline in wire line use of 15% volume and unit cost per year. They see their wireless minute consumption growing at approximately 28% CAGR across multiple mobile providers. The unit cost of mobile vs. wire line is much more favorable to mobile driving wireless minute usage growth way up.

Wither the Mobile Provider?

Mobile service provider pricing, IP end-point devices and high speed wireless technologies are all fueling the mobile world. The mobile industry will be re-structured over the next several years. High powered smartphones with skype, Google talk, et al., softphones with high speed internet access, pose a threat to mobile providers as customers are equipped with an alternative method of voice communications which bypass their mobile wireless plans. Already some smartphones come with skype client software installed allowing consumers to make calls to other skype users for free on mobile devices. As this method improves mobile providers will be hard at work thinking of ways to either block or add value to this feature set. The risk is nothing short of changing the business model for how mobile providers generate revenues and stay in business.

The Corridor Warrior

The boom in mobile networking is primarily due to changes in business. During the last recession businesses pushed decision making down into organizations closer to customers. This transition fostered the real need for mobile businesses. Not only are sales employees the mobile staff, but everyone is now mobile or requires mobile connectivity with access to enterprise e-mail and data.

The hospital example mentioned above is but one example of the new ?¢‚Ǩ?ìCorridor Warrior". Many professionals are mobile within their campus, building, etc., and benefit from a streamlined smartphone with WLAN plus GSM dual mode networking providing access to enterprise resources independent of network connection. For those on the go all day, carrying a laptop as their primary communications tool is too cumbersome. The Corridor Warrior fits many work profiles such as knowledge workers who manage their days by transitioning between conference rooms with little time spent in their offices. The doctors, nurses and hospital staff benefit tremendously by being equipped with a light weight mobile device that allows them to stay in touch via voice or e-mail, plus being able to access patient data. Corridor warrior hospital staff increases the care they provide, reduces mistakes and communication errors which account for nearly 100K preventable hospital deaths per year.

Enterprise Network Architecture Plan

As an IT business decision maker you need a comprehensive mobile networking and communications plan that includes the following:

• Annual service contract with one or two mobile providers
• WLAN plan that incorporates new technologies such as 802.1n and is tightly integrated into wired Ethernet control and service points
• An IP telephony architecture that supports mobility as a key attribute allowing features and functions to be seamlessly supported across fixed and mobile platforms
• An end-point transition plan that outlines fixed, smartphones and softphone end-points over a period of time
• A smartphone requirements statement and implementation plan
• An application development environment plan that serves up enterprise data to mobile end-points
• A network access control plan that protects IT resources from a wide range of access methods

And of course all of the above needs to be defined through the filter of business requirements. But that shouldn´t be too hard as I´m sure most of your business unit´s requirements are way ahead of your mobile networking and communication plans.

Enterprise mobility is all about productivity and work product quality. Just think how much more productive health care providers will be when all of their instrumentation is connected to a network where doctors can access patient vital signs, medical history, medications, etc., right on their smartphones while talking with patients and parents. The quality of the care will increase and so too will patient and parent comfort that the doctors have all the right information to make the right decision.

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by Colubris Networks

Enterprises need their wireless infrastructure to be future-proof, similar to their wired Ethernet network. Unfortunately, as they try to add voice and other multimedia applications to the wireless local area network (WLAN), many enterprises today are discovering that their wireless infrastructure is anything but future-proof. To support the next-generation of wireless enterprise applications, WLANs need to be able to accommodate voice, video and data.

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1. “Number of network endpoints hits one trillion, up from over a billion today.”
2. “Cross continental and country gigabit WAN links are the norm for global 2000.”
3. “50% of Internet services will be accessed by mobile devices.”
4. “Nearly 300 million Smartphones ship this year alone, up from ˜ 80M today.
   50% in last 18 months.“
5. “Softphones available on 100% of desktops/laptops shipped.”
6. “Fixed phone usage drops by 80%.”
7. “Location, communication, security, mobility et al network services replace connectivity as network’s primary value.”
8. “Number of communications software developers grow to millions from thousands writing to Network “Programmable Interfaces (NPI). A boom in networked applications erupts.”
9. “Communications enabled business process is a contributor to corporate annual productivity increases, on the order of 1.5 to 3%.”
10. “The networked business value by extracting human and system delay in workflow; is widely recognized.”

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by DATACOMM RESEARCH COMPANY for Aruba Networks

Fixed-Mobile Convergence (FMC) is touted as the way to provide end-users the same portfolio of services regardless of which devices and networks they happen to be using. There´s just one problem with this definition: It´s long on vision and short on cost-benefit analysis. Fortunately, the FMC value proposition is more compelling. FMC combines different technologies to provide the optimal solution for each requirement. Specifically, FMC harnesses mobile phone networks and wireless local area networks (WLANs) to give end-users the services they want in the places they want, with the best performance and at the lowest cost.

Download this white paper to find out how.

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by Research in Motion (RIM)

A new breed of mobile worker is transforming the workplace: roaming the corridors of factories, offices and other business locations, armed with handhelds linked to a WLAN. Referred to as Corridor Warriors, they benefit from mobile voice and data communications within campuses, satellite sites, warehouses, retail outlets, distribution centers, medical facilities and many other environments. Workers within this increasingly important segment of the mobile workforce, who often belong to a team, share a common need: to stay in touch and stay connected to information throughout the day.

The Corridor Warrior vision elevates communication to a new level, where the strategic benefits and business values may not be readily apparent. Understanding the case for the Corridor Warrior requires relaxing some pre-conceived notions and considering different usage scenarios designed to enhance business productivity and improve efficiency. The business case, as presented in the pages of this paper, is strong and compelling.

To understand the Corridor Warrior business case download this white paper.

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What direction is networking taking? Throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s networking was dominated by IBM´s SNA and to a lesser degree the defunct Digital Equipment Corporation´s DECnet. These wide-area protocols were offered primarily to enterprises while the DoD was experimenting with TCP/IP as a means to provide communications during a cold war nuclear nightmare scenario. Within buildings, terminal servers gave way to LANs, which we started connecting via LAN bridges. These bridges were not structurally stable in scale so the industry offered up routers to segment and control data traffic. This departure from SNA toward TCP/IP was a structural change in the industry, which spawned present day networking. There is no alternative to TCP/IP, no discontinuity technology that promises to alter the status quo. Is the industry on a predictable trajectory of faster, better and cheaper? Or is there a new framework amassing that is rooted in the interaction between Moore´s Law and Metcalf´s Law?

It used to be that the IT industry was segmented around the OSI model. Service providers offered layer 1 connectivity while networking players offered layers 1-3. Software and computing companies were at layer 7. I never really could figure out layers 4 though 6 and neither did the industry as there are no companies that focus in these layers. One result of the computing and networking laws interacting is that the OSI model no longer segments the industry.

Computing, software, telecommunications and networking are coming together in ways that no one would have predicted. Moore´s Law predicts the doubling of computer power while its cost is halved every eighteen months, which has been amazingly accurate for decades. Metcalf´s Law talks about the increasing value of a network as the number of end-points connected increases. More powerful end-points and servers are being connected into bigger and bigger networks, which enable new possibilities and innovation.

If the web browser was the launch point of the commercial internet, then we are eleven years into its evolution. The first phase of this evolution was and still is primarily an efficiency change agent. Business planners and entrepreneurs looked at businesses and their process and extracted cost and delay both human and system thanks to the internet. This efficiency agent led to the boom and bust of 2001 and the more rational times of the past five years. The second phase of internet evolution has more to do with changing and re-structuring industries than individual business as Moore´s and Metcalf´s laws expand.

There is a bi-directional flow of ideas and technology between computing/software, telecommunications and networking which promises to be disruptive. This is being played out now on multiple levels and is evident everywhere. In the consumer space, there are huge acquisitions of companies in different OSI segments. Two of the most impressive are e-Bay´s purchase of skype for $2.6 billion adding communications value to its e-commerce exchange. Another big acquisition was Google who seized the opportunity to sell ads in the new on-demand video model of YouTube for $1.65 billion. e-Bay and Google are layer 7 companies purchasing what were traditionally layer 1 services, that is communications and video delivery for huge dollars. While high visibility and valued acquisitions will continue in the consumer market space, in the enterprise market there will be multiple manifestations of this structural change in the IT and telecommunications industries.

The competitive and partnering combinations will only become more creative. For example, Microsoft and Cisco´s increasing competitive postures around unified communications and network security is a prime example of how layers 7 and 3 are going head to head. Microsoft´s new relationship with Nortel around unified communications marks a turning point in communications toward software and services. Avaya has stated that its strategic goal is to transform its company into a software and services concern. Cisco´s relationship with companies such as SAP point to a trend that networking is becoming a development platform offering up callable services. Cisco´s introduction of TelePresence is yet another example of a traditional layer 3 company offering a layer 7 service.

Sure there are plenty of industry initiatives such as replacing the $600 billion TDM telecommunications infrastructure with VoIP and TCP/IP. Data centers are being redesigned thanks to lower cost, high speed wide and local area bandwidth plus appliance consolidation. Callable services such as security, telephony, location, management, etc., are being embedded within network infrastructure. Communications are being embedded into applications. Network access is getting smarter thanks to access control, wireless technologies and their linking into policy managers and directory so IT services are offered to the right people at the right time in the right place. Branch office network devices are being offered via integrated platforms that deliver security, routing, wired and wireless connectivity, VPNs and IP telephony. Networks are playing a larger role in application delivery by increasing performance, security and monitoring. And on and on and on. All of these initiatives make for a healthy industry and they are building upon a TCP/IP foundation.

Because of all of the above, networking has moved well beyond a simple connectivity service. Networking is sounding and looking a lot like computing as service points and attributes blur. The following 7 trends prove the point.

Network Virtualization: Virtualization was first applied to data center design but it´s now a network architecture attribute. Virtualizing a network separates its physical and logical attributes providing flexibility to segment management in ways that fit an IT organization. One example of this is in the area of network appliances. As appliances become more horizontal in their functionality by integrating firewall, routing, IP telephony, VPN, etc., the groups responsible for their management will access configuration and management tools which the appliance will virtualize to their particular functions. Network resources will become increasingly virtual, that is the network will deliver its various services everywhere an end-point is plugged in, independent of physical location while management can be centralized, distributed or some combination of both.

Service Expansion and Device Consolidation: Networking was connectivity and the tweaking and segmenting of traffic through prioritization techniques such as Quality of Service (QoS) and virtual local area networks (VLANs). While managing connectivity through VLANs and QoS are important they represent an old model of networking. Services such as network admission control (NAC), IP telephony (VoIP), TelePresence etc., are the new services that are being embedded and ?¢‚Ǩ?ìcallable" within the network. At the same time that services are being expanded networking devices are being consolidated. Network equipment such as switches and routers has added features such as firewalls, WLAN, call managers, IPS/IDS, etc. With the pending boom in TelePresence services look for advanced QoS capabilities to be added to switches and routers. In short, more services will be added in the network but with fewer devices.

Unified Networking: Networking access is becoming unified for both end-points and server access. On the user side, wireless access, both WLAN and mobile/cellular, are the hot new areas of network access growth. Laptops have outpaced desktop computers in terms of shipments while smartphones and/or PDAs are being shipped annually in the millions. But network access is becoming unified and transparent to users even as the shift from fixed to mobile access continues. As the number of access points and media alternatives such as LAN, WLAN, GSM, WAN, etc., increase, end-points will simply connect in to a network and deliver appropriate services for that person and associated end-point. With networking becoming unified and access universal any end-point will be offered networking and its allowed applications.

In addition to end-point networking being unified so too is datacenter networking. Datacenter access is a hot area with huge advancements whether it’s through blade switches, top of rack or a centralized architecture. And there will be a lot of activity and innovations happening on this front as various datacenter-networking technologies become unified.

Non-stop Networking: Just like large computing systems and data centers, non-stop operation was a key design point. With all business process flowing over networks, the same non-stop availability attributes are being applied to networking. Maintenance windows, which include down time, will be a luxury of the past. Organizations can´t afford downtime and their networks can´t stop. Techniques and technologies such as auto-recovery, hard swap of hardware and software, redundant design, etc., will increasingly be a part of a networking environment.

Application Fluency: Networks used to be a conduit through which applications would flow. But many application developers still assume LAN type performance for their applications, ignoring WAN limitations and performance degradation. To increase application performance delivery, networks are becoming fluent in a wide variety of applications. Networks increasingly understand application flow, format and content to speed up throughput.

On-Demand Secure Access: Network access will surely become secure as the industry embraces access control. Network access is becoming ubiquitous and on-demand thanks to advances in wireless technologies and services.

Value Added Service Providers: The service providers are increasingly offering more managed services on a global scale. Service providers would provide layer 1 services such as private lines, frame relay and now MPLS. But they too have been moving up the stack by offering managed routers and firewalls. Over the next business cycle service providers will be offering hosted IP services and more sophisticated managed services especially focused on the branch office network area. Many will catch the new TelePresence wave as well and offer business-to-business TelePresence services.

Network virtualization, service expansion and device consolidation, unified networking, non-stop networking, application fluency, on-demand secure access and value added service providers are but a few of the advancements that are being made in networking. With all of this intelligence and functionality moving into the network fabric, one overarching shift will be that application developers will ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨call" network services while automating business process. Their tools will be the same, web services/SOA, but the physical location of the services in which they call will not be in a data center or department cluster, etc., but will also be in the network, increasing performance, flexibility and reliability. The network is the only horizontal IT resource available to IT executives and it´s taking on more and more computing attributes and IT projects. You can pick your term to describe the road ahead: intelligent network, smart network, next generation network, etc. I prefer to call it just computer networking.

So is the industry on a predictable trajectory or is there a new framework amassing that is rooted in the interaction between Moore´s Law and Metcalf´s Law? It´s a new framework that´s amassing with implications far greater than I have time to write about here. But stay tuned, we´ll write and podcast on the next computer networking industry here at the Lippis Report.

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by Accuvoice

Cook County was in a jam. It needed to increase three operations: 1) the level of customer service to its citizens; 2) its system capacity for employees of County departments and hospitals; and 3) its ability to handle after-hours inquiries. It needed to all this without hiring additional personnel. So how did it do it? For starters it deployed an Avaya IPT Contact Center over a private network, layered with Avaya and Accuvoice Self Service applications to give callers 24/7 access to County information and databases. To facilitate higher levels of productivity and flexibility among County employees, Cook County deployed an Avaya Mobility Solutions. To find out how Cook County stayed on budget and increased services download this paper.

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Data points are building into trend lines that suggest 2007 will be the year of Network Access Control or NAC deployments. The data points are many. First and perhaps most important is that network and IT executives have turned the corner in their thinking from general interest to budgeted NAC projects as there are approximately 1500 companies who have deployed a commercial NAC solution today. There are non-commercial NAC implementations too, such as NESSUS scans which, if counted would drive the 1500 deployments up significantly. The number of NAC customers should well surpass 5000 in 2007 and there´s nothing to slow it down. With Microsoft´s Network Access Protection or NAP being dependent upon its Network Policy Server (NPS) in Longhorn, NAP will not be relevant until well into 2008. The real discussion in IT conference rooms will focus around spending budget on NAC appliance and/or infrastructure approaches. Enterprise buyers have become very pragmatic in solving their network access control problems. These problems are quickly turning into funded projects. Here are the reasons why 2007 will be the year of NAC.

A quick note on the term NAC. I use NAC as a generic, non-vendor term to describe access control to networked resources. In general NAC provides access control by assessing the posture of a computer´s health and its compliance to policy. The result of this posture check may be to grant access, grant limited access or quarantine a computer for remediation. NAC is media independent, meaning access can be LAN, WLAN, or WAN. During the posture check process NAC vendors are differentiating and innovating on ways to add value to the access control service, such as segmenting users, apply quality of service, monitoring behavior, etc.

Reason One: NAC Solves Real Problems

There are a set of real budgeted security problems that corporations need to solve. These include:

1. Controlling guest and contractor access
2. Protecting high-value corporate data and applications
3. Stratifying, segmenting and controlling user access to conform with regulatory compliance
4. Mitigating exploits from propagating throughout a corporate network

Of the 1500 companies mentioned above, NAC solutions have primarily solved controlling guest and contractor access security problems. But NAC solutions are diving deeper into applications and user behavior thanks to identity management allowing NAC to be part of the corporate regulatory compliance solution. This is big as NAC project expansions are being funded by compliance budget and championed by the CFO, CSO, CIO and Chief Legal Officer (CLO) in board meetings. But I´m ahead of myself. Let´s review the four key security problems NAC solves.

Problem One: Controlling Guest and Contractor Access

The adaptive corporation must offer Internet access to employees, customers, partners and other people who visit their premises. Hotel guests demand Internet access while corporate visitors expect they´ll be able to sit in a lobby or conference room, open their laptop, and connect to the Internet. Network executives must ensure that guests can´t reach corporate assets, such as data, applications, or services such as voice over IP (VoIP). In short, while visiting your corporation, guests need network access to do their job, such as making a presentation, demo-ing a product, accessing a support web-site, etc. Everyone needs access to the internet to be productive, even when visiting another company. In addition, enterprises demand that guests can´t spread exploits.

Contractors by definition require deeper access to IT resources. Contractor responsibility varies from service personnel who maintain everything from data center servers to MRI machines, as well as on-site contractors who perform functions ranging from project management to accounting. Contractors often need LAN access to perform their jobs. However, that access must be limited. An outsourced IT staff responsible for managing server blades in the data center should be restricted to accessing only those devices. Similarly, a contract accountant should have LAN access limited to a few key applications, such as email and accounting packages, and select data sets. Since data isn’t always protected as well as it should be within the enterprise, and getting to a safe data protection model is a hurdle, the network is being used to enforce controls on what assets the contractors can have access to. Ultimately NAC will provide these controls with data protection policy.

Contractor access is potentially more vulnerable and poses a higher security threat than guest. NAC solutions have leveraged identity management to offer deeper ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨controlled" access to IT resources as a means of mitigating this higher risk. Some IT departments learn the contractor´s identity by adding it to the corporate identity store such as Active Directory or RADIUS database or by creating a set of common user names that apply to all contractors working on a similar project. Other IT groups leverage role-based controls which define policies that control access to applications and resources based on a contractor´s or user´s group association or role within the enterprise. Some NAC solutions offer host posture check for end-points which are not owned or managed by the enterprise, thus mitigating exploit propagation. Other NAC solutions require non-managed end-point traffic to flow through in-line threat management or traffic management devices close to the end-point, where more trust might be applied to managed desktops and a more efficient path to resources can be dynamically plumbed.

Problem Two: Protecting High-value Corporate Data and Applications

This is an area where NAC will have a significant impact on corporations during 2007. In short the problem here is to secure access to KEY data, applications, work product and services. Most enterprises have sensitive financial and human resources data that only appropriate staff access. For example, a university needs to limit access to its grading system to faculty. IP telephony is a good example of a service needing protection. In a contact center, the IP telephony service is essential, so IT must protect the call processor to ensure uninterrupted voice service.

It´s not feasible for IT to explicitly define what data and which applications each user can access. As mentioned above data protection is difficult and evolving, but it´s a direction the industry requires. NAC contributes to data protection by cooperating with data access policies and enforcing access to critical resources. IT should have the ability to identify particular applications and resources and specify which users are allowed to use them. NAC solutions tie users to traffic and the path of traffic flows (or restrictions) offering IT the ability to control and see what resources and applications a given user has tried to use as well as what they have used. NAC ties users to paths of access to data and applications. Just as above, by applying role-based control but in real time IT can specify which users can access which resources. Another benefit is that NAC solutions enable individual user traffic engineering, application access control and visibility into these flows.

Problem Three: Stratifying, Segmenting and Controlling User Access to Conform with Regulatory Compliance Requirements

Controlling guest, contractor and user access to network segments, applications, data, work product and services with visibility into a user´s behavior and use of IT resources provides a level of flexibility network and IT departments have not had in LAN systems. One key area that will drive NAC solutions deeper into organizations in 2007 is regulatory compliance. To comply with various regulations, organizations need a means to segment users so that only authorized users can access sensitive data and demonstrate compliance to auditors. For example, some organizations need to restrict access to credit card data to comply with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standard. Hospitals and medical facilities must protect patient records to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Enterprises need the ability to restrict access to critical information based on a user´s role. In addition, to prove they have effective controls in place, organizations need a means to audit data and application usage and to document that access is indeed restricted. A good NAC solution will protect sensitive data, limit the scope of an audit to a subset of user and server systems subject to the regulation and provide reports and views which are friendly to auditors.

NAC can be funded with compliance budgets if they provide the following key services: policy-based access controls which track all user activity and traffic flows on the network; application access control at layer 7 limits which applications a user can run on the network; documented polices that allow IT to document what control policies are in place and to whom they apply. This is a key auditing tool for demonstrating that users excluded by a policy cannot reach sensitive data. Further controls include activity reports for both users and application/services; user reports including every application, server, and resource a user touched in a given timeframe; application/service reports providing details about all users who ran a particular application or accessed a particular resource during a given period.

Problem Four: Mitigating Exploits from Propagating Throughout A Corporate Network

This has been the main value proposition promoted by NAC vendors, which is to assess an end-point´s posture and determine if it´s in compliance with corporate security standards for computing. If the end-point fails the posture check then the end-point is placed into a quarantine VLAN, remediated, and then its posture can be reassessed. The vendor community is building up this core NAC feature set by standardizing on the process and expanding deeper into user and application control. This is not to say that NAC access control is matured and further investment will be limited.

Behavior anomaly detection is the next huge investment area being added to NAC as well as various post access control features. NAC vendors must address post-NAC monitoring or post access control since the initial NAC event determines the computer´s behavior which should be expected. The initial NAC event provides the profile definition necessary to monitor behavior. Post access control is the most significant NAC feature set going forward. Network and IT departments will look to understand a computer´s relationship to ongoing real-time monitoring and how a user’s behavior impacts network activity. This insight is gained through behavior monitoring.

Reason Two: More Potent NAC Technology

The second reason why 2007 will be the year of NAC is because the technology is maturing in smaller deployable increments. NAC solutions are becoming increasingly potent as defenses to mitigate against LAN attacks and tools to hasten audits and assure regulatory compliance. Much of NAC´s value comes from the fact that NAC solutions are being tightly linked with identity management software. Most, if not all, NAC providers deliver their own identity management software which enables identity-based access control. That is, NAC solutions are capable of identifying users, guests, contractors, etc., and applying access rules uniquely to each person based upon their role in the enterprise. Identity management is increasingly being linked with applications too, offering IT management greater granularity of access control.

While creating policy which runs role-based access control can be daunting, the good news is that NAC is being packaged in multiple ways to address different sized problems. Many network and IT executives postponed their NAC deployments as its scope was overwhelming. In 2005 and early 2006 the industry thought of infrastructure NAC as the main approach to access control. But two things happened: infrastructure companies such as ProCurve offered appropriate scaled NAC infrastructure solutions while a host of companies including Cisco, ConSentry, Lockdown Networks, Nortel, Juniper, et al., added more value to their NAC appliances. This reduced the overwhelming scope and rationalized the infrastructure impact, product confusion and deployment choices. NAC appliances allow enterprises to be selective in where they place NAC and to experiment with policy. NAC appliances will also help bridge the gap in heterogeneous NAC environments as well as allow co-existence with non-NAP clients.

The key question is how will NAC appliances work with NAC infrastructure? For Cisco they are integrating their NAC appliance and infrastructure back-end and client components so that customers can pick and choose how they want to implement NAC across their companies. This allows customers to have the flexibility to accommodate different realities such as departmental budgets where one group (network infrastructure) may have more budget than another (e.g., the
security/infosec team), network typologies that can’t be upgraded but can be enhanced via an appliance and the need for NAP interoperability.

But there will not be a transition from NAC appliance to NAC infrastructure. In 2007 there will be an increase in overall NAC products and solutions whether appliance- or infrastructure-based. Chances are there could be a round of consolidation of the appliance vendors too, as customers gravitate towards
the major players.

So how will NAP and NAC evolve and will NAP slow down NAC? The fact is, NAC is the general framework for IT security while Microsoft´s NAP/NPS is a part of that framework. NAC and NAP will not compete but NAP will be part of a NAC framework. As mentioned in the opening NAP is really a 2008 event. Also what Microsoft´s NAP/NPS will do effectively is perform posture assessment by validating a computer´s health and provide remediation instructions if needed. NAC solutions will build upon NAP by performing enforcement based upon NAP posture data while NAP will pass posture/health data to NAC-based identity management. The bottom line is that NAC is here today solving real security access problems. With NAP/NPS a 2008 event, there is plenty of time for NAC vendors to collaborate and test interoperability with Microsoft as Cisco has been demonstrating. This fact has not gone unnoticed to most CIOs who look to maximize their large IT infrastructure investments. NAP/NPS will not slow down 2007 from being the year of NAC, but accelerate NAC deployments in 2008.

Reason Three: Growing Adoption Curve

The third reason 2007 is the year of NAC is that there is comfort in large numbers. While there are approximately 1500 NAC installations world wide today, our estimate of 5000 is just that, an estimate. The bottom line is that the number of commercial NAC deployments will more than double in 2007 including most of the F500 and all of the major financial services firms. As more firms deploy NAC, industry knowledge is created, fostering greater comfort that the technology has matured and is ready for prime time.

So is 2007 the year of NAC? It´s as easy as one, two, three: 1) NAC solves real problems; 2) NAC technology works; and 3) enterprises are deploying NAC. The data points are building and the trend line is becoming clear. 2007 is the year of NAC.

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We´ve covered Cisco´s network access control (NAC), Microsoft´s Network Access Protection (NAP) and the Trusted Computing Group´s Trusted Network Connect (TNC) security architectures. All of the above are infrastructure based network access control architectures with differing enforcement models and client requirements. The complexity, high cost and lack of availability of these access control approaches has given way to the rise of NAC appliances, which we explored in Lippis Report 64 ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨The Road to Network Admission Control," and Lippis Report podcast, ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨Network Admission Control Simplified." Many Lippis Report readers and podcast listeners told us that what is important to them is how their chosen infrastructure company is deploying access control. Most Network/IT executives see network access control from an infrastructure investment protection point of view. That is, there is little interest in switching major infrastructure vendors solely on network security. So in this edition of the Lippis Report, we asked Cisco Systems, ProCurve Networking by HP, Foundry Networks, Extreme Networks, Nortel, Juniper and 3Com to tell us about their network access control solutions.

The network access control market is by no means commoditized. There are significant differences between vendor offerings. There are client and/or clientless based approaches to network access control. Some integrate a policy manager into their offering, while others either provide a separate policy manager or rely upon a third party policy manager. Vendors differ on their support of endpoint operating systems and devices. Some vendors offer support for PCs, non-interactive devices such as printers and gaming consoles, IP phones, etc., while others only support specific Windows environments. Some provide the same solution for wired and wireless access, while others support only wired. There is also differentiation based upon existing network infrastructure. Some vendors offer an overlay security approach, which is independent of installed network switches, while others are highly dependent upon their switches being deployed to deliver security enforcement services. The breath and depth of partnering to deliver on remediation is also a differentiator.

We´ve asked all suppliers to address client requirements, access control enforcement, post access control, their unique differentiation and provide budget guidelines. We ask them to address all of this in just two paragraphs. Some went a little over, and we afforded them that leeway. I provide a cross-vendor assessment at the end. So without further ado, here are network access control solutions from Cisco Systems, ProCurve Networking by HP, Foundry Networks, Extreme Networks, Nortel, and Juniper.

Cisco Systems

In Cisco´s view, an effective NAC solution must be able to do at least four things:

• Authenticate and authorize any incoming user,
• Assess the posture of any incoming endpoint device,
• Quarantine that device if it fails to meet policy requirements,
• Remediate the device to bring it into compliance.

In terms of authentication, Cisco´s NAC Appliance natively integrates with Kerberos, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), RADIUS, Active Directory, S/Ident, and others. It supports single sign-on for VPN clients, wireless clients, and Windows Active Directory domains. Administrators can maintain multiple user profiles with different permission levels through the use of roles-based access control.

Posture assessment is performed either through network-based scans or through the use of an Agent, which works on Windows and Macintosh machines. Policies are either created through pre-configured rulesets for hundreds of third-party applications, such as antivirus and anti-spyware, or are customized for specific applications, such as in-house programs.

Cisco´s NAC Appliance performs quarantine (or access control enforcement) through a variety of network-based means, based on customer preferences. These methods include static or dynamic VLAN assignment, via 802.1x, DHCP, switch ports, ACLs, drop/filter packets, Layer 3 subnet isolation, and Layer 2 broadcast domain isolation.

Finally, Cisco´s NAC Appliance offers a variety of methods for remediation. Users can be guided through an Agent-based wizard, a set of web-based instructions, or automated launching of a Windows Update or SUS (Software Update Server) server. Post access control enforcement is accomplished through the Cisco Security Agent software, which mitigates new and evolving threats without requiring reconfigurations or emergency patch updates.

Cisco´s NAC Appliance differentiates based on three elements: 1) the ability of one product to perform all the functions of NAC regardless of the type of endpoint device (laptops, IP phones, game consoles, printers, etc.) or the method of network access (wireless, VPN, LAN, WAN); 2) over 30 deployment methodologies that can fit into any type of network environment; 3) the existence of over 1,000 customers who have purchased and deployed the Cisco NAC Appliance. In terms of budget guidelines, each deployment requires one Manager, and at least one Server. A 100-user license that includes the software and hardware for both Manager and Server is priced at $8,995.

ProCurve Networking by HP

ProCurve Networking by HP has a comprehensive security strategy called ProCurve ProActive Defense, delivering a trusted network infrastructure that is immune to threats, controllable for appropriate use and is able to protect data and integrity for all users. Part of this strategy includes a comprehensive infrastructure-based access control solution through ProCurve´s Identity-Driven Manager (IDM) 2.0 software.

ProCurve was a pioneer in the definition and development of many of the open security initiatives related to network access control, including an initiator of the 802.1x specification and is a consistent contributor to the Trusted Network Connect (TNC) specification from the Trusted Computing Group (TCG). In this effort, ProCurve was one of the first implementers of 802.1x controlled network ports.

ProCurve has continued to build upon its secure connection technologies by building in alternative methods of authentication, including a web-based authentication process and a MAC address based authentication process embedded in ProCurve network devices. Together these port-based access control features provide network administrators strong network access control capabilities at the network edge. In addition, ProCurve has added its Identity Driven Management (IDM) software, which allows administrators to create rules that dynamically adapt the network edge ports (and wireless connections) to the needs of the user.

With this solution, network administrators have the ability to allow and restrict access to the overall network, or resources on the network, based on the business need of users. These access rules can be applied based on user device connecting to the network, place, and time. In addition to the standards based ability to apply a user to an authentication, ProCurve has the ability to apply performance settings (QoS and rate limits) and detailed filtering capabilities (Access Control Lists). These unique ProCurve features are a combination of the ProCurve devices, and the IDM network access policy management.

The ProCurve access control solution is a unified solution, which covers both wired and wireless LAN environments. It integrates with the industry leading RADIUS authentication servers and provides the usual ProCurve value proposition of the best price-performance in the industry.

ProCurve ProActive Defense is the only approach offered today that has the built-in flexibility to meet not only today´s security challenges, but tomorrow´s, as well. Access control is done at the edge of the network: where your security posture should be deployed, versus tunneling everything into the core of the network. In summary, by uniquely melding offense and defense into a cohesive, easily managed and comprehensive architecture, ProCurve ProActive Defense is the best way to harness the full potential of networks, now and in the future.

Foundry Networks

Foundry Networks provides standards based NAC, which has been validated with various agent and agentless NAC solutions. Foundry’s edge chassis and stackable switches support all of the key Radius 802.1x, MAC, and Web authentication capabilities, and have been proven to work with a variety of Radius Servers and supplicants. This includes Microsoft’s IAS, FreeRadius, Cisco’s ACS, Infoblox, and Funk Software. Foundry’s access control infrastructure provides the flexibility to support any standard Radius server and client implementation, and does not lock customers into a proprietary high-cost solution.

Foundry’s edge based Layer 2/3 switches and routers have been validated with a number of agent and agentless NAC solutions including those from Symantec, Check Point, and StillSecure. These agents use Radius and 802.1x, to validate both the user and client health. The NAC policy server can automatically and dynamically switch the client to a guest, quarantine or production VLAN, depending upon the outcome of conformance test. Depending upon security policy, a user may be blocked out of the network completely, given limited or guest access. In addition, Foundry´s IronShield 360 security program adds anomaly detection services to its Layer 2/3 devices, which enable its IronView Network Manager (INM) to participate in remediation of anomalistic network behavior uncovered post admission control.

Foundry is a member of Microsoft’s Network Admission Protection (NAP) partner program where it´s working with Microsoft to insure that its´ switches and routers are fully interoperable with NAP software components for Windows Vista and Longhorn releases. Foundry is also collaborating with a number of NAC appliance vendors such as Lockdown Networks and Impulse Point to insure they can dynamically remediate Foundry equipment, include changing VLANs and other network address assignment, to insure that clients are properly placed on the production, quarantine, or remediation VLANs or disable their network access.

Extreme Networks

Extreme Networks offers the full-featured SentriantTM Access Guard (AG) solution for enterprises that require increased security at the edge where the network is dynamically protected from endpoint devices like PCs that do not comply with organizational security policies. This solution minimizes the threat of viruses and attacks originating from infected or unprotected endpoints.

Sentriant AG supports a variety of testing methods enabling a variety of network endpoints to be tested within any customer environment before they are allowed to access the network. The Sentriant AG also controls network access for various user types including employees, visitors, partners and remote users connecting over the wired or wireless Local Area Network (LAN) or Virtual Private Network (VPN).

Sentriant AG supports multiple enforcement mechanisms including Inline, DHCP, and 802.1x. By leveraging Extreme Networks’ standards-based 802.1x implementation on its award-winning Ethernet switches and ExtremeXOS® operating system, the Sentriant AG can place end-points in the appropriate VLANs (quarantine VLAN, guest VLAN or production VLAN) based on test results and further restrict access using more granular policy enforcement techniques such dynamic Access Control Lists (ACLs) and bandwidth rate limiting.
Key features include true agent-less testing, which requires no additional client-side software and features support within Windows 2000 and XP environments. Browser-based testing (ActiveX) or a lightweight, persistent agent is available for all Microsoft-supported versions of Windows. Mac OS X and Linux clients will be supported in a future software release

Nortel

The Nortel Secure Network Access (NSNA) appliance provides a unified access policy for admission control for wired, wireless and mobile workers. NSNA is an out-of-path appliance that delivers superior scalability and reduced latency for multimedia applications such as IP telephony and video, when compared with other solutions. NSNA provides a unique clientless solution that offers customers a flexible choice of deployment and enforcement models, including both VLAN and/or traffic filters. NSNA provides superior out-of-path performance by tightly integrating with network access elements such as Ethernet switches, WLAN controllers and VPN Gateways. The NSNA solution supports IP Phones, Windows, Linux, Mac OS and non-interactive devices such as printers and gaming consoles. In addition, NSNA supports customer environments with mixed deployments of Nortel and non-Nortel network elements such as non-Nortel Ethernet switches.

Nortel Secure Network Access (NSNA) delivers a unified access policy focusing on 4 key areas:

1. Authentication & Posture Assessment ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ‚Äö√Ñ√∫ using Nortel´s web-based and customizable captive portal technology to provide network access control based on user identity and system health with Nortel Tunnel Guard technology.
2. Authorization ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ‚Äö√Ñ√∫ using Nortel´s automated per-port firewall capability at the access layer to provide network resource control based on user profile and device identity.
3. Continuous Threat Analysis – continuous validation of user and device security compliance using real-time environmental threat information from network elements such as IDS and IPS.
4. Quarantine & Remediation – automated host quarantine and remediation triggered through continuous threat analysis events.

Nortel is committed to a standards-based deployment with broad interoperability as demonstrated through our work with Microsoft NAP and the Trusted Computing Group TNC frameworks. The list price for the NSNA 4050 appliance is $17,995 and includes a license for 200 concurrent users but incremental user licenses are also available.

Juniper

Juniper’s Unified Access Control (UAC) Solution includes the Infranet Controller, which serves as a centralized policy manager; the UAC Agent, which is a dynamically downloadable endpoint software and several forms of enforcement points.
The Controller is a hardened policy management server that consolidates user authentication, endpoint integrity verification and device location, and combines this information with policy to restrict network, resource, and application access. This policy is then passed to enforcement points within the network for dynamic access control.

Enforcement Points: UAC enforcement points encompass virtually all Juniper firewall/VPN platforms, including Juniper secure router FW/VPNs and Juniper’s Integrated Security Gateways with integrated IDP modules. This variety of enforcement platforms enables security from smaller firewalls to protect printer farms to 30Gbps models to enforce policy in the most traffic-intensive settings.

UAC Agent: The UAC Agent is a dynamically downloaded agent that can be provisioned from a Web browser by the Controller, and provides authentication and endpoint assessment capabilities before log in and throughout the user session. The Agent includes Host Checker, familiar from thousands of Juniper Secure Access SSL VPN deployments, which enables the administrator to scan endpoints for a variety of security applications/states, including antivirus, malware and personal firewalls. UAC also enables custom checks such as registry and port status and can do an MD5 checksum to verify validity.

Deployment is simplified with pre-defined Host Checker policies and automatic monitoring of AV signatures for the latest definition files. The agent also includes an integrated personal firewall for dynamic client-side enforcement of policies, as well as specific functionality for Windows devices that includes IPSec VPN (enables encryption from the endpoint to the firewall) and Single SignOn to Active Directory. UAC supports Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris platforms. UAC also supports agentless mode, for situations where it would be impossible to download the agent, such as with guest access.

UAC is unique in its Layer 3-7 overlay approach that does not require a forklift upgrade of existing infrastructure, which enables phased access control deployments to protect mission critical assets in campus wired/wireless, data center and remote office/branch office locations. Access control can be easily enabled with enforcement points that can be deployed in transparent mode, eliminating re-routing of network infrastructure. The solution also supports high availability across LAN and WAN for distributed network architectures. Access control rights can be provisioned in an extremely granular way, differentiating not only employees from guests, but within each classification as well. Also unique is the dynamically downloadable agent, as well as the ability to use the solution to realize IPSec to the desktop. The solution can be easily deployed as an overlay today with imminent plans to use standards to incorporate additional, cross vendor infrastructure elements, such as integration with 802.1X supplicants and RADIUS servers from the recent Funk acquisition.

Cross-Vendor Analysis

Here are my thoughts on the above submissions. They are not in any prioritized order. First, most vendors are offering a comprehensive offering with Cisco, ProCurve, Juniper and Nortel being ahead of Foundry and Extreme.

Cisco´s NAC security offering is two pronged: 1) the NAC appliance, which they discuss above and 2) infrastructure based NAC. The NAC appliance with integrated policy manager is an overlay security strategy with limited, if any, integration with its network infrastructure products. Cisco´s NAC approach is comprehensive, offering multiple configuration and design options across its four NAC stages: 1) Authenticate and authorize, 2) Posture assessment, 3) Quarantine and 4) Remediate.

ProCurve integrates enforcement at the port level of its switches, with a separate identity manager for policy management. Port level enforcement eliminates the need to tunnel traffic over the LAN/WAN, mitigating this vulnerability. ProCurve and others also inject QoS and rate limit at the authorization stage of access control.

Foundry and Extreme´s network security offerings are centered around their Layer 2/3 switch and routers. Foundry´s NAC strategy is based upon standard client and authorization technologies, partnering with Microsoft, NAC appliance suppliers and agent software concerns, with enforcement performed at the network edge. Extreme offers a clientless solution, which is independent of wired or WLAN access, where enforcement is conducted at the port level of its switches.

Nortel, like Cisco, describes an appliance/overlay approach to network access control. For Nortel this strategy allows it to address security requirements for both on and off base customers and prospects. The Nortel NSNA is a comprehensive offering with an aggressive price point. Its NSNA supports multiple access methods and endpoint devices, while Nortel promises to integrate NSNA features into its network infrastructure products. Nortel is the only infrastructure vendor here to provide a statement of direction to be integrated with Microsoft´s NAP and support of TNC simultaneously.

Juniper does not participate in the Ethernet switch market so its network security architecture is centered around its firewall/VPN/Router platforms. Juniper´s Unified Access Control (UAC) solution offers a controller for policy definition and management, an agent/client for endpoint posture assessment and enforcement within its infrastructure platforms. UAC offers high granularity of access control thanks to it controller and infrastructure enforcement. However, UAC must tunnel traffic across the LAN to implement its security services rather than at the port level. Juniper seems to have a distinctive WAN view of network security.

There are a few common threads across all suppliers. First is the support of 802.1x supplicant as the basis for a standard client now and into the future. Second is a growing trend to offer both client and clientless network access control approaches. Third, all network access control vendors limit network access by placing endpoints into either a specific VLAN (production, quarantine, and remediation) or denying access. There is a growing trend to go beyond simple static or dynamic VLAN assignment of clients after posture conformance testing toward increased granularity to Layer 3 subnet isolation, Layer 2 broadcast domains, switch ports, drop/filter packets and ACLs.

Clearly from the above, some vendors are further along then others. However, it doesn´t seem that a customer would be compelled to change infrastructure vendors solely on the basis of security features alone, as all suppliers are investing to deepen security services in their offerings. If NAC was a major competitive differentiator, then Enterasys would be stealing share from all of the above suppliers. The fact is that Enterasys is not taking share and owns approximately 2% of the Ethernet switch market. Network security is a must have and all suppliers are addressing the requirement.

While both Nortel and Cisco discuss NAC appliances above, neither is far along in integrating these appliances into their network infrastructure offerings. ProCurve and Extreme seem to have decided to skip the appliance step and go right to infrastructure based NAC, while Foundry is partnering with NAC appliance suppliers and simultaneously delivering NAC within its switches and routers. Vendors are responding to their unique customer requirements.

Budgeting for NAC is challenging. The best guideline is to budget between 30 to 50% of network acquisition cost for NAC. However, I have seen responses to NAC RFPs to be 100% of Ethernet switch purchase price. NAC appliances can bring that price point down in smaller installations, while mitigating most threats and vulnerabilities. However, a well-designed NAC based infrastructure can be cost effective too. Scale of the deployment is the key-determining factor.

Remember the industry is in the early adoption curve stage for NAC and there will be many new options available in the coming quarters. Threats and vulnerabilities are not going away, and NAC will be one of the most potent defenses in IT´s arsenal to mitigate exploits. It is important to start now and experiment with NAC implementations to develop policy, train staff and understand NAC´s strength and weaknesses, while fitting NAC into your munitions store.

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On June 25th, in San Francisco, Jeff Raikes, President of Microsoft´s Business Division, changed the IP telephony and communications landscape forever. He did this on so many levels with the company´s Unified Communications (UC) announcement. He boldly told IT executives to stop spending on IP telephony since Microsoft´s Unified Communications products will radically increase corporate productivity and change the cost of ownership of enterprise communications, thanks to software economics. He pushed aside Avaya, Cisco, Mitel, ShoreTel et al., by saying that these companies do not have the vision and ability to execute on the next wave of IP telephony. The next wave is the strategic phase that ushers in communications-enabled business process and brings with it a new communications experience for hundreds of millions of people. And you know, Raikes is right, most IP tel suppliers don´t have the next wave vision.

The existing IP telephony vendors, with the exception of Avaya and Siemens, have been focused on hardware. In the Lippis Report, we´ve been writing and podcasting about how applications are where the value is in IP tel. In short, you have to ask, what can you do with IP telephony that you couldn´t do with TDM-based PBXs? Today´s answer is, not much. The industry narrowed the gap between TDM and IP tel features, but Microsoft blew that gap away and answered the question by linking communications directly into office productivity tools such as Exchange, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Live meeting, etc., making it easy for professionals to connect and communicate independent of end-points. Tools such as click-to-call and click-to-conference will be embedded into familiar Microsoft software, eliminating learning curves, allowing professionals to quickly embrace the new functionality and communicate, and speeding up business process by extracting human delay from workflow.

Then on July 18th, Microsoft puts more muscle behind UC by announcing the Innovative Communications Alliance with Nortel. Steve Ballmer says that the relationship with Nortel will be as strategic and prosperous as Microsoft´s relationship has been with Intel, Dell and HP in the computing market. Simply put, over the next five years hundreds of millions of people will receive a new communications experience, thanks to the move to IP and Microsoft teaming with Nortel, who want to be a big part of this spending cycle. Nortel brings Microsoft credibility in voice communications and large enterprise systems, while Microsoft delivers a much needed boost of confidence to Nortel´s enterprise business. Microsoft will open up its access to IT executives to Nortel so they can tell a common UC story. This is access that Nortel could never get on its own.

This is a sea change. Microsoft is now a phone company and will use its massive distribution channel and developer community to change the communications industry forever. Its June 25th Unified Communications announcement was comprehensive and visionary. Microsoft is not only enabling VoIP in its office suite of software products, but offering a call manager, IP phones, and a developer environment which will unleash creativity into the IP tel market that has not had an organizing principal around application development until now. It has created an ecosystem around its Unified Communications for IP phones, application development and system integration. Like I said, it´s a broad vision embraced by many leading industry players.

Microsoft tapped its long-time ally in the system integration and professional services business, HP, to help large enterprise customers rollout and integrate its Unified Communications. It also tapped another long-time ally, Siemens Communications, and its systems integration and support services to integrate Siemens HiPath 8000 softswitch real-time telephony with Microsoft´s Exchange and Office Live Communications Server, utilizing the Siemens OpenScape communications broker capability.

Motorola, yet another long-time ally and powerhouse, was tapped by Microsoft to integrate Motorola´s HC700 series rugged mobile computing devices and the Motorola Q® smart phone with Unified Communications. Motorola and Microsoft will combine the presence awareness and instant messaging capabilities of Communications Server 2007 (see below) with Motorola´s Windows Mobile© 5.0-based devices through the integration of Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile with Motorola´s MOTOPRO® Mobility Suite and Wireless Services Manager (WSM) products. The end result will be to enable users to seamlessly communicate and collaborate across wired and wireless access networks.

HP, Siemens, Nortel and Motorola will allow Microsoft to address the large enterprise market. Another key part of Microsoft´s ecosystem is a group of companies to develop end points or devices such as IP phones, Universal Serial Bus (USB) handsets, wireless USB headsets, USB webcams, and PC monitors with built-in audio and video components which will have the Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 (see below) client embedded allowing communications with its Communications Server 2007, discussed below. Microsoft amassed an impressive list of companies including Polycom Inc., LG-Nortel Co. Ltd., Thomson Telecom, Logitech, Plantronics Inc., Samsung, and Tatung Co.

So what is Microsoft´s Unified Communications program? Microsoft´s approach to unified communications is a multi-modal approach of reaching people independent of end-point or communication application such as e-mail, IM, mobile, VoIP, audio, video and web-conferencing. While these communication applications are silos today, Microsoft´s Unified Communications seek to integrate and unify their access via a common software man-machine metaphor.

To deliver on the above, Microsoft announced communication enhancements as part of its Office System 2007 products. In late 2006 or early 2007 Microsoft is scheduled to release Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Speech Server 2007. Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 unified messaging will deliver a unified inbox experience that includes e-mail, voice mail, and faxing functionality, as well as new capabilities such as speech-based auto attendant, allowing users to access communications from any phone.

In essence Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 will be the traditional view of unified communications. Alone, this would be interesting but not compelling. The bulk or main thrust of Microsoft´s unified communications strategy will not be available until the second quarter of 2007, or approximately a year from now. Scheduled to ship next year are:

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007: This is the heart of unified communications and will be the focus of many developers. Think of Cisco´s Call Manager or Avaya´s Communications Manager. It´s a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) based real-time communication platform that enables presence-based VoIP call management, audio-, video-, and web-conferencing, and instant messaging communication within and across existing software applications, services and devices. Don´t look for Microsoft to open up its presence manager to any of the IP telephony vendors, except for Nortel and Siemens. This is key as presence will be the feature which will drive productivity and Microsoft will keep it off-limits to competitors.

Microsoft Office Communicator 2007: This is the client software that works with and communicates to Communications Server. Communicator is key as it unifies all the different modalities of communications into a single interface. It delivers a presence-based, enterprise VoIP ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨softphone"; secure, enterprise-grade instant messaging that allows for intercompany federation and connectivity to public instant messaging networks such as MSN©, AOL and Yahoo!; one-to-one and multiparty video- and audio-conferencing; and web-conferencing. Office Communicator 2007 will be available in desktop, browser-based and Windows Mobile©-based versions.

Microsoft Office Live Meeting: Improvements to Office Live Meeting include support for e-learning, enhanced audio and video capabilities including VoIP, a streamlined user interface, seamless integration with the Microsoft Office system, and simpler deployment.

Microsoft Office RoundTable®: This is a very cool conference IP phone with 360-degree video/camera support. When combined with Office Communications Server 2007, RoundTable delivers an immersive conferencing experience that extends the meeting environment across multiple locations. Meeting participants on site and in remote locations gaining a panoramic view of everyone in the conference room as well as close-up views of individual participants as they take turns speaking.

Microsoft Office Communicator phone experience: This is the partner/developer´s point of entry into the Microsoft Unified Communications ecosystem. Communicator-based software designed to run a set of new voice and video devices : including business-enabled IP desktop phones : from Polycom Inc., LG-Nortel Co. Ltd., and Thomson Telecom. This is a new ecosystem designed to run on dedicated communications devices in tandem with Office Communications Server 2007 to extend and enhance the Microsoft Unified Communications experience.

PC peripheral devices: Another important UC area as it seeks to break the proprietary hold the traditional telephony players have held over the industry by opening up the interface between end points and call control servers. These devices include USB handsets, wireless USB headsets, USB webcams and PC monitors with built-in audio and video components. Devices from industry partners GN Netcom Inc., Logitech, Motorola, Plantronics Inc., Samsung and Tatung Co. will work with Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 to deliver a communication experience on the PC.

Analysis

The Race For Developer Mindshare: Microsoft´s MSDN is the industry´s, if not the entire economy´s, best developer community. This is a key strategic advantage as Microsoft offers economic value to its MSDN partners by participating in its Unified Communication (UC) program. From a competitive point of view, the two largest IP telephony players, Avaya and Cisco, have developer programs. Avaya is much further along with its DevConnect program of nearly 3000 companies and its embrace of Web Services/SOA to either compete or complement Microsoft´s UC initiative. Cisco´s CTDP developer program has fewer members and is not as well-focused on communication application development. Look for Cisco and IBM to team on creating a developers ecosystem.

Developer Environment: It´s not clear what or which developer environment Microsoft has chosen for its developers. SIP is clearly the core technology of Communication Server 2007. Siemens, as one of Microsoft´s partners, brings OpenScape to the table with a Web Services-based application development interface. Cisco has its SONA, or Software Oriented Network Architecture, which is focused on protocols and application development interfaces. Avaya and Nortel are focused on Web Services/SOA with Avaya being much further along but with Nortel now teaming with Microsoft on development.

Feature Set Deficit/Scale: Microsoft has not communicated the feature set associated with Communications Server 2007. It is SIP-based so it will more than likely have SIP´s seven key features. But Communications Server 2007 will not be able to compete with the IP telephony industry´s 700 + phone features alone. The real question is how much do the 700 features matter? Many of these features were developed as custom features for customers over decades of work. How applicable they are is unclear. Nortel will integrate or link its Succession CSE 1000 with Microsoft´s Communications Server, expanding the feature set of UC to be competitive with IP telephony players. In addition to feature set, there is the question of reliability, security, performance, availability, and scale of Communication Server 2007. Let´s be honest; Microsoft has been challenged with all of these key architecture attributes over the years. The question is will Nortel be able to offer these attributes to UC?

Timing: Microsoft´s UC doesn´t get interesting until next year with the release of Communication Server 2007. While UC is bold and includes an ecosystem, the question of architecture stability rises in my mind. What I mean is that it usually takes Microsoft a few product releases to get a product stable, especially one with so many companies participating. To expect a rock-solid, stable, and secure UC on first release would be optimistic at best. Delaying IP telephony spending today to meet business requirements in the hopes of deploying UC tomorrow does not seem prudent.

Application Focus: Microsoft´s UC is focused on the desktop and personal communications. While this is important, what UC does not address is the linking of IT with communications to deliver communication-enabled business process. UC in essence focused on person-to-person communications leaving out system-to-person or system-to-system communications, which have the advantage of extracting ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨system" delay from business process. Nortel promises to bring system-to-person and system-to-system communications to UC through its System Integration business. The question here is can Nortel deliver as its Integration business is young.

Executive IT Will Now Make Communications Buying Decisions: The IP telephony players have seen their customer/audience shift over the years. Cisco helped move the purchasing and design decisions from telecommunication managers to network managers. Avaya and Siemens have started to shift the decision to executive IT departments thanks to their focus on Web Services/SOA. Microsoft has executive IT mindshare and credibility which will accelerate the purchase and design decision to this group, which may be a gift to the IP telephony market. Now executive IT will take charge of communications and be forced to do due diligence by reviewing all architectural options, opening the door and creating a seat at the table for the IP telephony vendors. The real challenge here is that there are many buyers within a single company who purchase e-mail, voice, IM, desktop software, network infrastructure and data center systems. The hope is that the user´s new communications experience will be so great that they will demand their IT executives to deploy UC. This scenario is a leap of faith, albeit a calculated one, that has been proven in the industry before with PCs, LANs, e-mail, etc all of which forced organizational change within IT.

Big Winners: Nortel is the largest winner in Microsoft´s UC announcement, thus far. Nortel has nothing to lose and everything to gain here as Microsoft gives it the tools and credibility to compete against Cisco and Avaya. Siemens may also be a winner as Microsoft will give Siemens´s OpenScape access to MSDN partners. If Siemens plays this opportunity right, it could be a significant communication platform that developers start writing to, broadening Siemens´ potential addressable market. Microsoft is the other potential big winner as it has put in play the $25 billion enterprise voice market, of which it plans to win a sizable share. Cisco is another big winner as nearly every company in the global economy will beef up i´s network infrastructure of switches and routers to accommodate UC.

The Challenged: Cisco´s IP Communications group, Avaya, Mitel, ShoreTel et al., will all be challenged to review their business plans and react to Microsoft´s UC initiative. Those companies who cling to the old model of proprietary phones connecting to an IP-PBX will be the first to lose in the next world of communications. Those who focus on application development, software, and services will be rewarded. Those who stick with hardware and old-fashioned approaches to unified messaging or siloed communication products will lose. The game has changed and for the good; communications is becoming a software and services world based upon general purpose hardware platforms and open end-points.

Advice for IT/Network Business Decision Makers: Microsoft´s UC is a vision and commitment. It could take Microsoft a few years to get it right, but it will get it right. In the near term, there isn´t much to do other than educate yourself on the architecture and how it could be put to work for your company. The key activity to do now is get your network infrastructure ready to support a converged network as Microsoft´s UC will be a converged network accelerator. I strongly encourage you to do an IP readiness assessment and implement service level management tools and techniques. Now is the time to do this planning.

If you are in the middle of an IP telephony roll-out then continue as the depreciation cycles are not seven years any longer, but closer to three. This gives you plenty of time to enjoy the benefits of your IP telephony system and plan how best to utilize UC when it´s available. If you are in the consideration phase with a deployment schedule in mid to late 2007, then you would be delinquent if you didn´t review UC. There will be a flurry of announcements and product enhancements from all the IP telephony vendors as they react to UC over the next year. Plan on giving yourself some time to allow the industry to react to UC, so that you can make an informed decision as to when and how best to deploy. It´s highly likely that all IP telephony vendors will interface into UC. In fact, this will be a competitive differentiation. Also remember, the fact is that your users will get UC on their computers as you deploy Microsoft Office System 2007. UC is inevitable; it will be part of your IT infrastructure.

Welcome to the third phase of IP telephony: the strategic phase, the communications-enabled business process phase. The economy will see another huge productivity boost as this phase takes hold. Business process will never be the same.

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Corporate telecommunication budgets are changing. Voice transmission and toll charges use to dominate service provider bills to corporate customers. Now with the huge growth of mobile services and attractive pricing plans, minutes have shifted toward mobile operators, resulting in mobile bills representing a larger share of corporate telecommunication spending. Case in point, one of our clients is experiencing a 15% decline in wireline and toll use, while wireless minutes are growing at approximately 28% CAGR (compound annual growth rate). The good news for them is that voice minute unit cost is dropping overall by some 3% annum. Another client spends $1.2 million and $600K per year on toll and mobile charges, respectively. The catch is this client has not summed up all mobile spending by employees in remote offices, international sites, etc. We estimate that there is an additional $600K per year of mobile charges buried in expense reports around the company; bringing mobile usage expenditures equal to toll charges. These are but two examples of a systemic change in enterprise communication spending.

This shift in spending is a solid indication of the importance mobility plays in the new enterprise that has emerged over the past eight years. This is represented in mobile phones, smart phones, PDA’s, blackberries, etc., which have become important business communication tools. No longer are mobile devices just for sales executives and road warriors but for everyone. In fact, many of our clients are implementing plans to supply nearly all employees with a smart mobile phone and desktop/laptop softphone. However, the ability to connect mobile phones with IP telephony solutions is one area that is lagging, until now.

The Wireless Advantage

Sprint is one service provider who is uniquely positioned to link the wireless and wired world by connecting CDMA end points i.e., mobile devices, with corporate communication systems. This will allow an increase in productivity by offering seamless access to messaging, common directory services, convenience buttons, follow-me, etc., from any device. Sprint has the vision and ability to execute its investment in IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), and with its acquisition of Nextel, the means to deliver on its Fixed-Mobile Convergence strategy. This strategy is to both link wireless and wired worlds with VoIP services, which deliver increased flexibility, price advantage and seamless mobility.

Sprint’s wireless integration to premise and hosted IP PBX is the next step in extending functionality to the wireless handset. Extending a call to a cellular phone by simultaneously ringing the desk handset and the cellular phone is a well-established technology. One of the leading features on the Avaya Communications Manager software is Extension to Cellular. Extension to Cellular allows the user to seamlessly transfer between desk phone and cell phone.

Sprint, along with Avaya, is taking that technology to the next level. Sprint’s wireless integration could extend the full functionality of Communication Manager to the cellular handset. Sprint has enabled and extended nearly fifteen most commonly used Communication Manager features to mobile phones. For example, 4-digit dialing, 6-way conference calling and all the key features that can be accessed on the desk set can also be accessed on the cellular phone. Wireless integration from Sprint allows legacy PBX access from mobile end points, linking the mobile office with legacy investment in premise based PBX too.

The combination of wireless integration and VoIP initiatives are allowing Sprint to offer new and innovative “Hosted IP Services”. Sprint is leveraging its IMS architecture, enabling the features of a premise based Avaya Communications Manager to be ‘extended’ to a wireless device, (such that the device is seen as a de facto extension of the enterprise). Sprint will add support for other premise solutions in the future. While there are several CPE solutions that enable single voice mail, find me, follow me, and abbreviated dialing from a wireless device, as in the Avaya Extension to Cellular, Sprint’s solution is distinctive in three ways.

1. Sprint can extend any and all features of the premise IP-PBX or legacy PBX to the wireless device
2. Sprint’s service is bilateral, where most CPE services are unilateral. The distinction is important since CPE solutions break down when the wireless device is called directly, as opposed to calling a ‘desk’ number that rings on the mobile device. Since Sprint provides signaling back to the IP-PBX for any call, it can offer IP-PBX or legacy PBX feature overlay independent of how the call came into the mobile device
3. Sprint offers seamless handoffs between desk and wireless device, so customers can take calls on the go that start from the desk phone

Given one and two above, mobile workers can communicate solely wirelessly, and still have the same level of connectivity and feature set they had as if they were using a desk device.

Leveraging IP WANs

Using IMS, Sprint can extend on-net calling to a wireless device, so that calls back into the enterprise do not count against plan minutes, thus reducing mobile bills. For example, on-net or intra-company calls originated from a mobile device will travel over a corporation’s private IP WAN, thus avoiding the consumption and billing of mobile minutes. In short, since a mobile device is an extension of a PBX or IP-PBX, all on-net calls travel over a corporation’s IP WAN independent of end point, i.e., a wired or wireless device. Sprint’s IMS architecture is extended to its hosted IP services by providing enterprise customers IP telephony services to both fixed and mobile end points.

Hosted IP Services

A Hosted IP Service is the hot new market of service providers offering converged voice and data networks. These services enable geographic independence, traffic volume and seasonal scalability while mitigating technology obsolescence risk. Until now, large enterprises were the only companies with the means to invest in premise based IP telephony based solutions. Early adopters saw the enhanced user productivity of these systems and calculated the ROI was worth the benefits. Now Sprint, in partnership with Avaya, is bringing these services to small and mid-sized companies previously excluded from these services mostly due to cost. Sprint’s third party hosting reduces administrative effort, maintains up-to-date capability, and removes any large capital investment in equipment. By removing equipment acquisition cost, Sprint and others are making IP Services available to a wider market segment.

IP contact centers and messaging systems are two popular Hosted IP Services. Hosted contact centers support agents independent of location, cost effectively scale call center growth or reduction, provide screen pops, coordinate call queues and automate voice menus to minimize hold time, and enable managers to supervise and monitor calls in batches or individually. The strategic value of the hosted IP contact center is increased employee efficiency in performing service tasks at a lower cost, which results in satisfied and loyal customers, at a better bottom line.

Hosted messaging systems allow users to easily manage multiple phones (mobile or corporate phones) and voicemail boxes, integrate voicemail, fax, and email, plus access voice and fax messages via a web browser. The strategic value of IP messaging systems are a single access point to collected voice, email, and fax messages regardless of end-device or geographic location of the user. This leads to a simplified user experience by combining previously independent messaging systems.

The Hosted IP Contact Center Sweet Spot: Small to Mid-Sized Firms

The larger a corporation, the greater the likelihood that an IP contact center is being planned and deployed. Forrester Research says that 33+% of companies with more then 20,000 employees, 21% with 20,000 to 5,000 employees, and 16% with 5,000 to 1,000 employees are using or are evaluating IP contact centers. For these firms there are four primary purchase decision factors: reliability, cost, manageability, and scalability.

As companies contemplate the move from legacy to IP, reliability is the biggest decision influence. Companies do not want to run the risk of downtime, interoperability failure with legacy systems, or lost business as a result of upgrade errors. Cost is the second most influential factor followed by the management complexity and ability to scale up or down. Small to mid-size firms have been essentially priced out of the IP contact center market. Many of these firms simply do not have budget or labor resources to create and manage in-house systems until now. Sprint is mitigating adoption concerns and is creating a solution for companies sharing these cost prohibited and migration fears with its Hosted IP Services.

Sprint’s Hosted Contact Center

Sprint’s Hosted Contact Center contains key features necessary in a call center such as simultaneous access to customer records while communicating with customers. Customer records or screen pops are distributed to agents independent of geographic location. Branch offices can be added and removed, as needed, to match business or seasonal growth. Sprint’s Hosted Contact Center solution connects with IP, TDM or analog networks. It also provides centralized queues or distributed flow to route the customer as necessary and avoid on-hold times. Call-center supervisors can manage employees by reviewing phone calls or real-time reports of call operations. Sprint reduces the risk of implementation and management costs through a fully configured and managed out-sourced system.

The centralized hosted service resides on Sprint premises with redundant Avaya network technology, thereby eliminating the potential for single-point of failure and providing business continuity. Barrier of entry pricing is reduced through a pay-per-seat subscription model, which guarantees predictable monthly expenses and avoids capital equipment acquisition. Sprint assumes all the management responsibility and provides up-to-date software and hardware upgrades. Call-centers can keep their existing agent devices and practices, minimizing training and increased ease-of-use. All of these benefits together provide a reliable service that lowers the barrier of contact center entry for small to medium sized firms.

Sprint’s Hosted Messaging

Sprint’s Hosted Messaging is a three-tiered solution to simplify management of multiple phones and voicemail boxes. Sprint’s “Basic Voice Messaging” allows standard voicemail capability without the need to bring this technology into a company’s premises. Its “Enhanced Messaging” allows the combination of voice, email and fax into one access point, which can be retrieved from any telephone or internet-ready browser. The “Mobile Messaging” service unifies wired and wireless messaging into one mailbox for easy access.

The benefits of Sprint’s Hosted Messaging include integration with existing networks, allowing users to keep familiar end-devices and increasing ease-of-use. This requires little or no capital investment, training, or management. Additional cost reduction is achieved through out-sourced pay-per-seat subscription models, which guarantee monthly expenses. The messaging system leads to improved productivity for employees as it simplifies existing solutions into one combined system accessible from any telephone or computer. Hosted messaging also resides on a redundant Avaya network within Sprint premises. This hosted IP service maintains reliability, reduces capital and operational cost, and scales to the number of users needing its features and capability.

Sprint is offering contact center and messaging via Hosted IP Services, which have, until now, been out of reach to the small and mid-sized enterprise markets. By reducing costs and guaranteeing reliability and interoperability with legacy systems, Sprint is reducing barriers to adoption. It’s linking of wireless and wireline messaging is but a first step in the full integration of mobile and private IP telephony communication systems. With mobility, such a strong and growing component to an enterprise’s communication needs, linking wireless with Hosted IP Services has the right ingredients for Sprint’s sale force to receive a warm enterprise reception.

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Cisco´s network security program has been a huge success. Its self-defending network ad campaign has won advertising awards and deservedly so as they communicate the power a network has to secure an IT environment in the simplest of terms. Cisco´s trusted network investments are as huge as its wins. It´s number one in terms of market share and revenues in Worldwide Firewall/VPN security appliances, and Network intrusion detection and prevention, according to IDC. They clearly have thought leadership and the prowess to organize a market segment around their security technology as its Network Admission Control or NAC program has demonstrated. But with all of Cisco´s success NAC remains elusive to most organizations. Why? Because it´s too complex and extremely costly.

Network Admission Control: A Primer

While anti-virus (AV) software is a first defense from exploits propagating throughout a network it´s not foolproof since most AV software is signature-based and so cannot block zero-day attacks. Also, in most if not all corporations, enterprises have both trusted and non-trusted end-points requesting access to IT resources over local, wide and wireless access networks. Network Admission Control or NAC provides a defensive solution to validate end-points, deliver a second level of defense mechanism, and protect IT assets from end-points it cannot control or that do not have AV installed.

Controlling admission to the network and containing exploits if and when they break through defenses is the job of embedded network security services. In a NAC environment, end-points requesting access to IT resources are assessed based upon their posture. If their posture does not conform to a set of policies defined by the IT department, they are quarantined into a safe VLAN until they are in compliance. The network may offer a pop-up menu instructing the user on how to bring his/her system into compliance. Once the end-point is in compliance, the user may access IT resources based upon programmed corporate rules and policies embedded in the back-end policy server(s).

Pre- and post-admission controls offer IT departments important tools to control that can access the LAN and what resources on the LAN those users can reach. Gone are the days when every employee plugged into the network and was offered universal access to all IT assets. Full access control not only controls admission to the LAN but also controls access to all networked resources. As part of this post-admission control, users can be assigned quality of service and placed into a stratified set of network services. For guest users, where IT departments do not have control over client software, controlling network access offers a check point to assess the guest posture, monitor for exploits, and apply policy such as permitting access only to the Internet.

NAC authenticates users and assesses the security posture of the end-point before it is allowed to come onto the LAN. This check is very important from a security and control point of view. NAC is distance independent meaning end-points from any location must first have their posture assessed before they are allowed access.

Building upon NAC is NIC or Network Incident Control. In addition to controlling network access, controlling the propagation of exploits or incident containment is the second most important embedded network security service. The network collects security posture of the network and is alarmed based upon anomalistic behavior. Once alarmed, the network has the ability to contain the exploit by shutting down ports, flows, VLANs, etc. NIC sounds great but most CSOs and CIOs say it will take a long time before they are comfortable with schemes like NIC and are willing to turn on the auto-pilot and let the network self defend.

NAC´s Woes

The concept of NAC and NIC are simple to explain but very difficult to implement, especially NIC. Enterprises want the ability to provide admittance control but they are taking a wait and see on buying Cisco. There are few large installations of NAC due to its high complexity, acquisition and operational cost. One firm recently purchased a new network infrastructure of catalyst switched and Cisco routers and spent some $600K doing so. To implement Cisco´s NAC across this environment would require an additional $500K of acquisition cost and the implementation of some 80 appliances across their network.