Cisco’s Motion announcement on May 28th was huge for enterprise mobility. It defined some new terms which we will be hearing a lot: “Cisco Motion,” “Mobility Services Architecture” and “Mobility Services Engine.” Cisco Motion is the name of the “vision.” The Mobility Services Engine 3350 is a $20,000 appliance that embodies the Mobility Services Architecture, which is a part of Cisco’s Service Oriented Network Architecture.

Cisco has published a lot of useful information about these new products. A good place to start is the launch webinar, which includes an informative Powerpoint presentation. The Mobility Services Architecture is described in a white paper. There are two press releases: a conventional press release consisting of written words, and a “social media release” consisting of links to YouTube clips and podcasts.

What we’re doing here is abstracting the network control element of the architecture and the services and application integration piece. This reflects what we have been talking about for the last 2 plus years around the Services Oriented Network Architecture. It’s about how we can drive new capabilities into the network, that can be married up with a host of different applications and turned into a solution for our customers. It’s not just applications running over the network. Increasingly with this architecture, it is about applications running “with” the network.

Ben Gibson, Senior Director Mobility Solutions, Cisco Systems

Cisco describes the MSE as a “platform for partnering,” the idea being that it exposes network-level information through an open application programming interface (API) to applications delivered by independent software vendors (ISVs).

Adding wirelessness to the IP world generates network-layer information that can be useful to applications, notably information about the location of known devices, and the intrusion of unknown devices. The MSE orders that information and presents it through the API.

Cisco Motion also addresses some downsides of mobility. Adding mobility to the IT world brings a lot of new headaches:

• There are multiple network types (currently cellular and Wi-Fi, later WiMAX)
• There is a profusion of new device types (currently smart phones) which must be managed and tracked
• There is a wave of innovation in consumer applications. Employees are demanding these applications in the enterprise environment.
• Mobility also complicates compliance with data confidentiality regulations like PCI and HIPAA.

So far Cisco has identified four categories of application that can run on the MSE: Context-Aware applications, Wireless Intrusion Prevention Systems, Client Management and Intelligent Roaming.

Context Aware Applications
“Context Aware applications” seems to be Cisco’s term for applications that do asset tracking. Cisco is partnering with ISVs in both horizontal and vertical markets. These ISVs are OAT, Intellidot, Aeroscout, Pango/Innerwireless and Airetrak. The Context-Aware software is scheduled to ship in June 2008.

Adaptive Wireless Intrusion Prevention Systems

Overlay wireless intrusion prevention systems add devices to monitor wireless traffic looking for rogue access points and clients. The innovation here appears to be that the MSE exposes information from the access points and wireless controllers that eliminates the need for these overlay devices. IPS software running on the MSE can substitute for the overlay IPS, while yielding equivalent depth of reporting and features. A further benefit of running the IPS over the MSE API is that the same software will be able to handle future wireless networks in addition to Wi-Fi. The Adaptive WIPS software is scheduled to ship in the second half of 2008.

Mobile Intelligent Roaming

This is enterprise Fixed-Mobile Convergence. The MSE isn’t a mobility controller; it issues an event up through the API when it determines that the Wi-Fi network needs to hand the call off to the cellular network. This event is handled by mobility controller software from an ISV. Cisco’s launch partners for this are Nokia for phones, and Agito on the mobility controller side. The Mobile Intelligent Roaming software is scheduled to ship in the second half of 2008.

Secure Client Manager

This works with Cisco’s 802.1X and CCX products. Cisco estimates that 80% of IT’s wireless and mobility effort goes to client troubleshooting and security provisioning. The Secure Client Manager will help mitigate this problem for the imminent wave of mobile devices. The Secure Client Manager is scheduled to ship in the first half of 2009.

Unified Wireless Network Software

Cisco Motion requires a new software load for the access points and WLAN controllers: the Cisco Unified Wireless Network Software Release 5.1, which shipped in May 2008.

Parvesh Sethi is Cisco’s Vice President, Advanced Services. In his keynote at the Communications Developer Conference this week in Santa Clara, he described an interesting use case for future wireless devices:

Your phone automatically notifies the hotel when you arrive - no need to stand in line to check in. Your assigned room number appears on your phone screen. The phone acts as a wireless key for your room. In your room the hotel puts targeted ads onto your phone’s screen.

The bulk of his talk consisted of advice for developers. The two main themes were “leverage the power of the network” and “exploit the long tail.”

The power of the network bit is to be expected from Cisco. The long tail part was a theme at many of the other presentations in the conference. For those who haven’t read the book, the idea is that the enormous reach of the web at relatively minuscule cost allows products that in the past would have been too narrow in appeal now to be commercially viable, and when combined with enough other low-volume products, to be lucrative. For example, a book that sells two copies a month isn’t worth carrying in a retail bookshop. But an online bookstore with a hundred thousand such titles would glean annual revenues in the tens of millions of dollars.

Sethi explained that custom programming for a particular enterprise used to be prohibitively expensive. But now the Web is packed with useful components that you can invoke through simple APIs. Web development environments automatically take care of the hard stuff for you, stuff like security, transcoding, QoS, authentication. Application acceleration is available right in the network. The open application development environment makes it possible for people to add their own value. This unleashes the long tail effect for the component vendors.

The example Sethi gave for this type of application was a real-world one, from an individual Subway franchisee - not Subway Corporate. The application runs on a Cisco phone. When an employee arrives in the morning, he logs in on the phone. This means no need for a time clock. Suppose four employees are scheduled to work a shift, but only three clock in. Previously one would have to start calling to find a substitute, leaving only two to perform the work. Now the phone system starts outdialing automatically, calling down the list of substitutes until one responds with a touchtone. Meanwhile, back in the store, the phone reminds the employees about essential process steps, like putting the bread in the oven. If the employee doesn’t acknowledge that he has done it, the system calls the supervisor to snitch. Sethi claimed that this application yielded a 30% increase in lunchtime revenue in its first month of operation.

Openness of the development environment, the ability for users to modify Cisco’s system and incorporate it into applications built on a whole set of such open components was one of four “Pillars of UC development” that Sethi identified. The other three were security, simplicity and virtuality (access to the application via any device, any where).

Cisco has two main customer constituencies: network service providers and business IT departments. One of WebEx’s crown jewels is its MediaTone network. This is a global private network, with dedicated fiberoptic links and multiple peering points to the Internet. If Cisco doesn’t sell this off, they will be competing with their customers in one of their primary markets. Unlikely to fly, though Cisco sometimes doesn’t seem to mind treading on toes.

This leaves the remainder of WebEx, the application (SaaS) side. It’s a natural complement to two of Cisco’s current business lines, filling a gap between their Unified Communications Manager (VoIP PBX) products and their high-end telepresence offerings.

As Cisco gets into more and more of the software services that run over IP networks, they end up competing more and more with Microsoft among others, and in an odd way for an Internet company.

Cisco rode the Internet Protocol to the stars. An article of faith amongst the IP illuminati is that the network must be stupid. This means that we conceive of the Internet as an amorphous connectivity cloud with computers on its periphery. Some of them are clients and some of them are servers. The Internet doesn’t care which is which. This is very powerful, because anybody with an IP address can set up a web site (a.k.a network service). This is anathema to the traditional network service providers who want to provide value (get revenue) in the network beyond mere connectivity. The Internet world (like Google) and the PC world (like Microsoft and Intel) love the stupid network model because it lets them innovate. The owners of the wires hate it because it forces them into the role of mere connectivity providers, since they are incapable of innovation at the service level.

But Cisco’s bread and butter is network equipment. Cisco doesn’t sell servers. So every service that migrates from the stupid network model to the intelligent network model increases Cisco’s potential market. Cisco hasn’t yet apostatized, but these actions are building gravitation in that direction. They have already ported their IP PBX to IOS, and they are allegedly even warming up to IMS!

Background
Forbes article on the acquisition.
CNET interview with WebEx CEO Subrah Iyar.

This morning’s keynote speech at VoiceCon by Cisco’s Charlie Giancarlo was polished and entertaining. What jumped out for me was his description of telepresence. He had just demoed video phone calls, then went on to telepresence. My immediate thought was, “yes, a video phone call with a bigger screen.” But Charlie must have met this reaction before because he started to stress the radical nature of telepresence. As you know, telepresence is the idea of putting a bunch of big-screen LCDs around a conference table so it looks as though people are sitting there. HP and Dreamworks have had a system called Halo for a couple of years, but it’s hugely expensive.

Charlie’s point about the novelty of telepresence is that you have to experience it to understand it. He said that after a few minutes of a meeting, you forget that the person isn’t really there, and the subjective nature of the interaction is that it is face-to-face.

The second surprise from Charlie was that the Cisco version of telepresence has a total cost of around $10,000 per month per telepresence room. This seems to be a lot lower than the cost of Halo.

I can believe that you have to experience it to understand it, because of Tivo. TV viewing is a completely different (and much better) experience with Tivo. Tivo owners are all evangelists. They tell their Tivo-less friends that they will love it if they just try it. The friends believe it, but they don’t bother to get a Tivo. Then, when they do, their reaction is “why didn’t you tell me?” and they become ignored evangelists, too. But I still don’t have a Slingbox.