Ten years ago, the cutting edge of enterprise mobile application delivery was a BlackBerry. Road warriors were well-armed if they had secure mobile email, a calendar and their contact list. Wireless networks were slow and sporadic, and mobile devices didn't have the memory and processing capabilities to power a true mobile computing experience.
Today mobile workers have access to video-based communications, advanced collaboration applications, productivity applications and ERP systems that are limited more by screen size than by a device's computing power. Wireless cellular networks and enterprise wireless LANs are faster, more reliable and ubiquitous.
With better access to more applications from anywhere, mobile application delivery is no longer as simple as giving BlackBerrys to employees. In fact, most employees will refuse a BlackBerry. They want iPhones, iPads and Android devices. They have higher expectations for mobile applications, and if those expectations aren't met, their productivity suffers.
Although the technology is better, mobile application delivery still presents challenges for an IT organization. Wide area network and wireless LAN technologies are better at mobile application delivery, but selecting, designing and optimizing these networks remain challenging. Managing devices and delivering applications have only gotten more complex as the options available to users have exploded. In this edition of Networking 360, we explore some of these challenges and their solutions.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Mobile unified communications
Users won't plug in tablets, but mobile UC via Wi-Fi still dicey
Laptops, tablets and smartphones have become more than supplements to desktop computers and desk phones—they've evolved into multipurpose mobile unified communications (UC) devices capable of functioning as a user's primary phone, video conferencing endpoint and messaging platform.
As much as it would please IT organizations, users won't plug these devices into an Ethernet port. In the case of nearly all tablets and smartphones, they simply can't. But users will expect their mobile unified communications applications to perform on the enterprise wireless local area network (LAN) just as well as they would on the wired network, despite the fact that VoIP and video conferencing are far from Wi-Fi-friendly.
Not one user at YES Prep Public Schools, a charter school district for low-income students in Houston, has a traditional desk phone.
Delivering mobile applications
Multimedia mobile application delivery on wireless LAN
When professors at the University of Ottawa realized that just a few students accessing video from smartphones and tablets killed performance on the wireless network, the university's IT team challenged its wireless vendor Aruba Networks to come up with a mobile application delivery solution. That solution would have to enable dense groups of students to simultaneously access bandwidth-hungry apps like video without a problem.
The University of Ottawa's issue is common as universities and large enterprises have a growing number of users with personal smartphones and tablets overburdening legacy wireless LANs. Users of these devices tend to congregate into high-density groups; they rarely plug into Ethernet and they stream multimedia applications constantly.
Hosted mobile applications
Hosted mobile device management services on the rise
With the rise of tablets and smartphones in the enterprise, IT shops must consider using tools to monitor and manage mobile devices. But often these solutions are costly. Managed services company Virtela hopes to address this problem with a cloud-based mobile device management service that channel partners can resell on a monthly subscription plan.
Ryan Young, executive vice president and co-founder of Torrey Point Group, a Virtela channel partner, explains MDM services by saying, “Mobile device management services are the ability to monitor, secure and make real time changes to mobile devices, whether it’s in the central office or out in the field. It creates an unified management structure that enables a third party or a corporation themselves to manage, monitor and secure mobile devices that could contain sensitive corporate information.”