Cisco Sets Wireless In 'Motion' With New Mobility Appliance

Cisco Motion and its accompanying Partner Motion channel program are built around a new product, Cisco's 3300 Series Mobility Services Engine (MSE). The appliance, which sits on a controller-based wireless LAN, provides software-based services such as wireless asset tracking, wireless intrusion prevention, security management and seamless roaming between Wi-Fi and cellular networks.

Cisco is opening the appliance's API to ISVs and other technology partners so that they can integrate with and build applications for Cisco MSE.

"Mobility applications typically run over the network, but there are a lot of places where they can run with the network," said Ben Gibson, senior director of mobility solutions at Cisco, San Jose, Calif., describing Cisco MSE an appliance designed for heavy processing, high memory and high storage.

Gaining access to more network information improves the performances of wireless services such as enterprise fixed-mobile convergence, said Pejman Roshan, vice president of marketing and co-founder of Agito Networks, Sunnyvale, Calif., which has integrated its RoamAnywhere Mobility Router with Cisco MSE. RoamAnywhere provides seamless hand-off of phone calls between an enterprise wireless network and public cellular networks.

"We can only see what's going on with the access point we're connected to. If the other access point has a high load, we might not be able to hand over the call to it. MSE would be able to tell us, and we could make the decision on whether to move to cellular earlier than we would have because we've got new information from the network," Roshan said.

Solution providers focusing simply on wireless technology might be missing the boat, said Nadeem Ahmad, director of global technology at Dimension Data, a solution provider in Reston, Va.

"The key point is that wireless technology is not the show alone. The show is how you use it to provide mobile services to improve productivity and process efficiencies," Ahmad said. "What Cisco is doing is spot-on."

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