Analyst: Inter-Network Mobility Technology Is Poised For Growth

But the problem is, according to Yankee studies, enterprise IT end users have so far proved indifferent to IMM.

The technology, which resolves both session maintenance and security issues for workers roaming from network to network, is an idea whose enterprise time hasn't quite come, according to Yankee analyst Eugene Signorini.

"Enterprise in general hasn't seen the business case for wide area data solutions," Signorini said.

Public safety and some field-force oriented companies such as utilities adapted IMM early for pragmatic reasons: their staffs needed to maintain constant wireless sessions as they moved from location to location.

Corporations have been less eager to embrace the technology, and that has kept the IMM market fairly stagnant in the $10 million annual range, according to Yankee Group estimates in its 2003 Corporate Wireless Survey.

Business hesitation may be changing, Signorini said, as a result of both wider deployment of both wireless LANs and WANs and the devices that access them, as well as a growing sense of the value of session maintenance and, especially, session security for mobile and roaming employees.

With current enterprise wireless LAN deployment at a 37 percent level (based on the 600 U.S. companies surveyed by Yankee) and corporate wireless WANs hovering just below the 20 percent mark, Signorini said critical mass for IMM adoption could arrive in the next five years as more networks of each type come online. According to his research, average time for enterprise WLAN deployment is a bit more than more a year, while WWAN setup takes a typical company approximately two years.

He anticipated device accessibility issues to be overcome more rapidly, as a result of the increasing numbers of off-the-shelf 802.11-equipped mobile devices as well as wide-area wireless PC cards. In the analyst's view the growing number of public Wi-Fi hot spots, and their growing popularity with the workforce, could also accelerate demand for IMM security and session maintenance services.

Another factor that could overcome corporate resistance is the technology's ability to have network prioritization preferences embedded in its features, helping enterprises ensure that mobile workers in zones served by competing wireless WAN providers are accessing the one whose pricing arrangement is most favorable.

For key players in the industry, identified by Yankee as including NetMotion Wireless, Columbitech and Netseal, another large step toward wider enterprise acceptance could come via partnerships with industry majors such as Cisco.

"IMM technology is all grown up and ready for the market," he said. "It's just matter of time until the market is ready for it.

This story courtesy of TechWeb .