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May 31, 2007

Nature Will Find a Way: Security and Mobility

One of our readers wrote in recently on the Mobility Quotient to ask about security.

Actually, he was very prescient. Security is a top line issue for Mobility and came out strongly in the research. We found that most companies did not monitor their air space for wireless threats (e.g., rogue access points) and that many companies may have been out of compliance from a PCI/HIPPA or other regulatory perspective. In general, security, rather than cost, as an inhibitor to mobility initiatives, especially in large enterprises.

Since mobility is about freedom, like in all societies or systems, you want the assurance you are moving securely. As devices become more personalized and smaller, there is a greater risk involved in losing them. It is a real problem.

This is not a new argument, though.

When IBM introduced the PC decades ago, IT administrators accustomed to mainframe or mini-computers were terrified about the transition from “green screens” and secure “glasshouses” to computers that could be easily moved off the premises. We know the result of that battle: as the Sam Neill character said in Jurassic Park: “nature found a way.”

All of the solutions we have launched (not just in the past week) have both strong security and compliance approaches designed in -- rather than bolted on.

Stay tuned in this space for more debate on this subject.

Posted by Alan Cohen at 10:48 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 22, 2007

What's Your Mobilty IQ?

It’s natural to blend our two lives – work and personal. Who hasn’t shopped for a Christmas gift at work, or downloaded a song. And likewise, who hasn’t spent time at home working in the evenings – the tradeoff for leaving early one afternoon to meet a friend or see a child’s school program.

So it’s not surprising then to see that mobility technologies have made their way into the workplace in a substantial way. A new survey, the Cisco Mobility Quotient, of businesses around the globe reveals what many of us live every day: that mobility is a part of human life, and we’ve brought it into the workplace whether IT likes it or not. Wireless LAN usage is at 65%, while the majority also report that laptops and smart phones have been deployed.

What is also not surprising - viewed from both sides – is that this so far has been primarily a reactive trend. Proactive mobility strategies are non-existent in over 60% of those surveyed. As an end user, it’s frustrating to not get access to the type of capabilities I can have at home – such as using the wireless LAN capability in my smartphone over the business wireless network.

And I can sympathize as well with those running IT organizations – inundated by the number of new technologies and the new threats that they can bring to the business.

At Interop and in Second Life, Cisco will be showcasing a broad array of mobility solutions and introducing new ones tailored to industry requirements. Each industry, each business, has their own specific objectives which mobility can play a key role in addressing. Learn more at www.cisco.com/go/mobility.

Those that embrace mobility despite the challenges can gain significant business advantage. Also hear tomorrow from one industry leader, Robert Kos, VP of Information Technology at Barnes and Noble as he discusses the breadth of enterprise mobility solutions they are using and how they improve the customer experience. You can tune in live from Interop at 10:30 AM PST to Your Business Moves with You: Cisco Mobility Solutions, or catch a replay anytime you like at the same URL.

Catch the webcast, and perhaps hear something that might inspire a new way to use mobility for your business.

Posted by Lynn Lucas at 05:00 AM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

May 20, 2007

You Business Moves With You

“Every day sees humanity more victorious in the struggle with space and time.”
Guglielmo Marconi

This week we are bringing a new, expanded view of business mobility to the marketplace. Traditionally, mobility's chasm was a cell phone: most people defined mobility by the device they carried. While devices play a key role in how mobility can be experienced, mobility is more than cell phones or smart phones. It is more than wireless networks. It is more than voice applications or satellite communications. Business Mobility is being about to interact, to complete, to experience:

- collaboration among people,
- insight into data and processes, and
- awareness and utilization of assets (people or things)

These are capabilities tthat you would have when you are in the office, when, simply you are not – whether you are moving around your office/campus, are on the go, at home or half way around the world. Business Mobility is about the experience of business when you are not in the office. It is about experience not devices.

The great thing about mobility is how its removes the obstacles to communications derived by time and space -- it is, in Tom Friedman's words, "the great sterioid." One of the forces that flatten the world. But mobility is an innately human property. From birth, as soon as we can move, we crawl on all fours. We move across geographic, education, cultural, social and economic planes on a regular basis (someday we might actually teleport, across time and space). And when someone violates the rules of most societies, what do we do? We incarcerate them, hence immobilizing them.

The changing nature of business is driving business decision makers to adopt, to drive mobility in their businesses. Some key factors include:

- Large distributed global work forces, suppliers and customers
- The nomadic nature of much work
- Requirements for business continuity due to natural and man-made disasters
- The green movement driving us all to travel less, burn less fossil fuel

And most significantly, the changing work force drives mobility, The Mobility Generation that I have blogged about previously is changing the nature of work, of collaboration of when, where and how they work. In a business environment where there is a worldwide talent shortage, attracting and retaining talent, is a sine qua non for successful enterprises of all sizes. (http://blogs.cisco.com/wireless/2006/06/mobility_generation_a_fathers.html).

In addition, we are introducing the Mobility Quotient today: http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2007/prod_052107.html?CMP=ILC-001 The Mobility Quotient baselines readiness to support today's mobile workforce in order to perform their job, no matter where they are - within the office, at home or on the go.

Cisco, working collaboratively with partners across the spectrum – application partners, system integrators, service provider partners, reseller partners -- is launching a new vision of mobility: one where you business moves with you, where rich collaboration is the starting point. An experience where technologies are designed to work together to support mobility – including wired and wireless networks, unified communications and security – where are baked in, not bolted on. It is a mobility play where services in the network such as location, identity, security, presence and device status are enablers of customer business processes. It is a mobility play where rich APIs (e.g., SOAP, XML) open the network for mobile business. And it was developed collaboratively, both within Cisco and with partners across the spectrum.

We drove mobility with a top down vision of how businesses work, then created solutions, and drove products to meet those needs. We did not start with a smartphone and said, define mobility around "this."

We also learned in a collaborative, Web 2.0, Mobile world, sometimes we would take the technology market, sometimes we would follows others leads. In industries like Retail and Oil and Gas, key technology and integration partners led and we followed. In other, horizontal collaboration mobility plays, we led the dance and asked partners to join us to richen the experience.

You do not have to visit our booth at Interop this week to lean about Cisco’s Business Mobility focus. You can tune into our Webcast or Second Life press conference from the show floor this Tuesday. There are a range of podcasts, VODs, press releases, white papers, and web links to allow you share our mobility experience wherever you, on any device, across any network, at any time. Details can easily be found at: http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/index.html

Or as John Mayer sings

“One day our generation
Is gonna rule the population
So we keep on waiting
Waiting on the world to change”

Wait No Longer. Now Business Mobility Changes Everything.

Posted by Alan Cohen at 12:33 PM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

May 07, 2007

Video in the Consumer Mobility Experience

On this blog, we tend to focus most heavily on the business mobility or business-class wireless experience. Given, at Cisco, we play a key role in the business IT marketplace, it is not surprising to work this aperture.

Mobility just as much as many social networking or Web 2.0 technologies really has a strong consumer angle. Even in the Enterprise WLAN segment was driven by the broadband rollout (extending the connection across the household) and was marketed brilliantly by Intel with its pervasive Centrino campaign.

When I look at my teenagers, I find they have a deeper and wider social fabric with their friends then I did at their age. My daughter writes a fashion blog that is read around the world and my son seems to run the Golden State Warriors middle school fan club from his cell phone via text messaging.

One of the key debates in the industry resides around the role video will play in Mobility. Despite Matt Glenn's non-furtive jabs at my perspective on video mail, I do think that a lot of consumer content may not be appropriate for the small screen and business applications will be. When the video iPod came out, I rushed to put a few films on it for a trip to Asia. What a rude surprise. Try watching Pirates of the Caribbean on a 2.5 inch square screen. Mobility is an extension of the Internet and the TV/Cable network, but it is not a substitute. While you may be willing to watch certain items on a small screen, it might be only when there is no alternative.

Interestingly, I think a lot of training and messaging Video-on-Demand (VODs) are probably highly appropriate, much more than entertainment or even sports. Real-time mobile face-to-face video conference will also be compellling, especially if the alternative is just a call. When the actual experience matters, the dramatic drop in flat panel pricing is one sweet gift. While lots of applications will morph to mobile devices, a smart phone is not a clean substitute for a computer or television monitor.

Yes, there are lots of hybrid devices – including those cool Sony Vaios – coming, but is Spiderman really Spiderman if you miss most of the web-spinning, falling-through-air approach.

So I think short video mails and training kinds of videos will take off on mobile devices, and we will see a reversal of trends where business markets lead consumer markets in video applications.

In the words of no less an entertainment genius than Groucho Marx:

“Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh... now you tell me what you know. “

Posted by Alan Cohen at 03:07 PM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

May 01, 2007

The Mobile Millennial Generation

If you want to find out why Wi-Fi is a must have in retaining and attracting talent among the Millennial Generation, watch this video.

Posted by Isabelle Guis at 07:55 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)