Enterprise mobility - It’s more than connecting on the go.
The new Nortel vision of mobility redefines the possibilities
for communication and collaboration in dynamic, distributed
enterprises. It’s a surprising but very real statistic: 50 to 70
percent of office space is unoccupied during normal business
hours (International Telework Association and Council). Where
are these people? Some are elsewhere in the building or visiting
another company site. Others are working at home or on the road.
With the widespread adoption of telecommuting, wireless and
various other “virtual office” technologies, this trend will
only increase. How can companies ensure that time and distance
do not become barriers to productive collaboration? What’s the
best way to enable geographically dispersed teams to work
together in ways that are natural, convenient and effective?
Ever since the adoption of the cellular phone in the 1980s, and
the surge in wireless everything in the ’90s, businesses have
answered these questions with various “mobility” technologies
(http://www.sbc-one.com/mobility/index.php), such as in-building
wireless LANs and cellular phone service. But as we take stock,
halfway through yet another decade, enterprises have only
scratched the surface of the ever-expanding possibilities. As
key standards and technologies mature and new innovations reach
the market, it’s time to raise the bar on what constitutes real
mobility for the dynamic, distributed enterprise.
Enterprise mobility must make network boundaries invisible to
the user.
Some vendors would have you believe that if you can wander
around the premises with your laptop or PDA, you have arrived…
or that mobility is achieved if you simply have wireless
communications of some sort. But in reality, this is far too
narrow a definition. Sure, wireless communications enable people
to get away without losing touch, but is the wireless device the
only way your users want to connect when away from their desks?
Chances are, even guests in your own conference rooms or visitor
offices are offered only wired Ethernet access to the Internet.
Enterprise mobility should extend seamlessly beyond the
boundaries of your company’s buildings. Users should be able to
roam across town, on the road, or around the world anywhere
within the reach of a LAN, MAN or WAN. And users should be able
to connect in many ways when they are away from their offices
such as via wireless LANs (WLANs)
(http://www.sbc-one.com/products/large/applications/mobility/wlan
2200.php), from an Ethernet jack in a hotel room over DSL or
cable modem connections from home, or someday with WiMax.
Enterprise mobility should be more than just having some way to
connect when you’re away.
Today, people carry a host of portable communication devices
laptops, pagers, PDAs, multi-mode cell phones, two-way radio
phones, etc. That’s fine and well if you don’t mind juggling a
smorgasbord of electronics. Just watch business travelers
unloading their pockets and briefcases at airport security, and
it’s easy to see that we’ve traded some inconvenience for
convenience.
Enterprise mobility should be about more than discrete mobile
services. It should be more than carrying a device for e-mail
and Web access, another for voice calls and another for urgent
alerts. Mobility should capitalize on unified applications and
multi-purpose access enabling users to not just connect, but
fully engage, from afar. A consistent, quality user experience
requires converged business applications that users can easily
access in many ways both wired and wireless.
Enterprise mobility must be secure everywhere. It does seem like
a paradox; the very openness that makes mobility applications
useful would seem to make them equally vulnerable. You need free
and easy flow across unsecured environments yet stringent
protections against unauthorized or malicious access.
Enterprise mobility can resolve these challenges with a full
array of security solutions that are easy to deploy and
inter-operate seamlessly with existing network components such
as routers, firewalls and existing authentication mechanisms.
Collectively, these three elements point to a new model of
communicating and collaborating across the dynamic,
multilocation enterprise: a consistent, reliable, secure
communications experience - anytime, anywhere and on whatever
device you are using.
Towards a new vision of enterprise mobility
If we can embrace this broader perspective of mobility,
enterprises really will achieve their stated goals of improving
productivity, reaching new markets and delivering superior
customer care. The technology enablers are here or on the very
close horizon. Here’s a sampling in the table below.
Capitalizing on these technologies, we can redefine the
possibilities. Let’s take a closer look at the three key
dimensions of a new vision of enterprise “mobility”.
Enterprise Mobility Dimension #1
Eliminate network boundaries (or at least make them invisible to
users).
Real mobility must span wired and wireless domains.
The new vision of mobility encompasses three classes of
bandwidth:
> Wired bandwidth to the user’s desktop, enough bandwidth to
support highspeed Internet access, IP Telephony and multimedia
applications
> Wireless WAN bandwidth, available just about anywhere,
embracing enterprise WLANs, public WLAN hotspots, campus and
metro wireless mesh networks and 2G and 3G public wireless
services
> Nomadic bandwidth a combination of wired and wireless
options for occasional, on-demand use by outof- office users,
who may be at home, in a hotel or at enterprise and public WLAN
hotspots
Edholm’s Law of Bandwidth observes that bandwidth in each of
these categories increases over time yet retains a constant
relationship (Phil Edholm, IEEE Spectrum, July 2004). The major
implication is that the more plentiful and economical bandwidth
becomes, the more applications naturally migrate from the
desktop to mobile campus workers, teleworkers and road warriors.
To be useful though, basic connectivity for these applications
must be natural, convenient and simple for end users, whether
they are connecting on wireless or wired devices. This ideal
capitalizes on the growing trend toward devices that have
multiple connectivity options, such as public wireless/WLAN
dualand tri-mode operation, wired Ethernet and even dial modem
in a single device.
At Nortel, we’re already making it as simple as possible to use
these different modes for wired and wireless connectivity. For
the path of last resort dial modems a method is provided
that makes it easy to select the most costeffective number to
call based on dialing phone number.
The goal is a seamless experience that transcends traditional
network boundaries. Users can roam from floor to floor in a
building or campus, across the city and around the world.
Wherever they roam, they enjoy non-disruptive voice, data and
multimedia sessions, with little or no noticeable impact as they
move around or cross networks. Dynamic network analysis
transparently determines the most applicable connection point
for data, voice and multimedia sessions.
You can achieve this ideal in progressive stages.
The first step toward this goal is a scenario whereby WLAN data
and IP Telephony users can roam across subnet boundaries in a
campus environment. IPsec mobility uses IPsec VPN
sessions/tunnels that support a persistent IPsec connection. The
connection doesn’t “break” when the user roams between
enterprise WLANs, WLAN hotspots and public wireless services.
The next step comes with the emergence of dual-mode wireless
smart phones and voice-enabled PDAs complementing public
wireless and WLAN capabilities. When loaded with IP Telephony or
multimedia clients running over IPsec VPNs, these devices will
enable on-premises users to set up and receive sessions over the
public network or an enterprise WLAN.
The final step is for seamless WLAN/public wireless roaming
services based on IP networking and Session Initiation Protocol
(SIP). With this approach, enterprises can either use their own
IP Telephony or unified communications system or subscribe to a
hosted offering from a service provider.
On the wired side, true mobility embraces IP Telephony to
simplify and enhance the user experience across network domains,
enable new levels of convergence and profoundly change the way
employees, partners and customers communicate.
Enterprise Mobility Dimension #2
Provide a consistent, highquality user experience.
Unified communications simplify today’s patchwork of devices and
services.
Mobility today is delivered in a highly fragmented world of
multiple devices, multiple phone numbers, multiple mailboxes,
multiple security procedures, device-dependent interfaces and
disjointed communication applications (such as telephony, IM and
conferencing). This scenario is further complicated by the
proliferation of mobile devices, ranging from smart phones and
PDAs to tablet PCs and laptops, running under a handful of
different operating systems. The new vision of mobility
establishes a consistent quality of experience across these
various devices, with “unified” communications that:
> Integrate presence across a broad range of activities and user
devices, such as phones, PCs, laptops and PDAs
> Converge asynchronous communications (such as e-mail, voice
mail, short message services) and synchronous communications
(such as IM, voice, video and application sharing)
> Enrich mobile communications with voice and multimedia
capabilities
“Engaged” applications redefine the possibilities for
collaboration and customer care.
With the attributes of unified communications in place,
applications can engage, not just connect. The network can
deliver critical and time-sensitive information precisely when,
where and how users need it. For example, imagine your customer
support center being able to locate and engage the specialist
that can best meet the client’s needs, drawing on a
geographically distributed pool of specialists. Imagine a supply
chain management application that brings the right people
together anytime, anywhere to resolve a supply or delivery
issue. Or a collaboration application that makes it easy for
dispersed creative teams to spawn new innovations.
The pivotal glue for this vision is SIP a signaling and
control protocol for initiating sessions between and among
users, regardless of the media being used. SIP enables
communications sessions to understand and preserve “presence”
attributes associated with a person’s location or activities.
When SIP is embedded in business telephony, users can connect
over any device anytime, anywhere.
Here are some other examples of unified communications available
today or being rolled out:
> Speech-activated voice mail, e-mail and fax handling by phone.
Handsfree access to messages allows mobile workers to remain
productive while away from the office.
> Web-based messaging and personal mailbox administration. Users
can access messages and manage their personal mailbox from any
Internet browser.
> Voice portals. Hands-free access delivers any information on
the intranet, including pricing, supply, product and financial
data.
> Speaker verification/passwords provide hands-free user
authentication or another level of security.
> Access to Web portals from public PCs (no client software
required) provides unified mail retrieval; voice mail, fax and
e-mail handling; booking and handling of conference bridges; and
multimedia collaboration with personal call routing rules.
> Location services offer location-based authentication and
privileges, locationbased presence and I/O management (such as
using a PDA to control display of detailed images on a nearby
highresolution monitor).
Applications such as these make it intuitive and easy to use
mobility applications applying technology to drive ever closer
to recreating the in-person experience.
Uses are not just connected and engaged. They’re in control.
The frenetic culture of the Internet Age brainwashes us to
believe that we must be constantly available to everyone, all
the time. The notion is that collaboration and connection must
be instant, on demand or else productivity will suffer. In
reality, this kind of neverending connectivity can stifle the
very productivity it purports to create. When employees can be
interrupted at any time, gone is the focused opportunity to
research and reflect, conduct private meetings with important
clients and dedicate one’s focus to the task at hand.
Where mobility does have the potential to over-run its users,
our vision of mobility gives users dominion over exactly how and
when their communications follow them and when they leave them
alone.
End users enjoy a high degree of control as to how their
presence is communicated (or hidden), and how incoming sessions
are handled based on caller, media used, time of day and
ultimately even on location. They have tremendous flexibility to
customize their communications to suit their work requirements,
schedule and preferences.
With our vision of unified communications, users have a single
control panel from which to access directory information, launch
and/or receive multimedia sessions, participate in multi-party
calls, initiate IM or application sharing sessions, track the
availability of coworkers (via presence) and manage their
availability (via personal agents).
