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.

The genesis of the Google phone project is described in this Boston Globe article by Scott Kirsner.

The Open Handset Alliance will release its SDK on November 12th, 2007. The iPhone SDK will not be released until four months later. Microsoft and Symbian already have not only mature SDKs, but vigorous development communities: in mid-2007 Windows Mobile had 650 thousand registered developers, and Forum Nokia had 2 million registered individuals and 440 companies in its “Platinum Program.”

As usual with a new development environment, it’s a chicken and egg situation, but the chicken is coming out in pretty good shape; if the base platform debuts with comparable functionality to what the iPhone came out with, it’s a low-risk proposition for the phone OEMs, and Google’s magic coattails will ensure hysterical enthusiasm in the developer community.

The Open Handset Alliance was announced today by Google and 30 or so other companies. Until now the highest-profile open source handset operating environment was OpenMoko.

The list of participants has no real surprises in it. Nokia isn’t on the list, most likely because this project competes head on with Symbian. This may also help to explain why Sony Ericsson isn’t a supporter yet, either. But the other three of the top five handset manufacturers are members: Motorola, Samsung and LG. All of these ship Symbian-based phones, but they also ship Windows based phones, so they are already pursuing an OS-agnostic strategy. Open standards are less helpful to a market leader than to its competitors.

Of course the other leading smartphone OS vendors are also missing from the list: Microsoft, Apple, Palm and RIM.

Ebay is there because this massively benefits Skype.

Silicon vendors retain more control of their destiny when there is a competitive software community, so it makes sense that TI is aboard even though it is the market leader in cellphone chips. Intel is another chip vendor that is a member. Intel can normally be relied on to support this type of open platform initiative, and although Intel sold its handset-related businesses in 2006, its low power CPU efforts may evolve from ultra-mobile PCs down to smartphones in a few years.

Among MNOs Verizon and AT&T Mobile are notorious for their walled-garden policies, so it makes sense that they aren’t on the list, though Sprint and T-Mobile are, which is an encouraging indication.

At the launch of the iPhone Steve Jobs said that the reason there would be no SDK for the iPhone was that AT&T didn’t want their network brought down by a rogue application. I ridiculed this excuse in an Internet Telephony column. Even so, the carriers do have a valid objection to completely open platforms: their subscribers will call them for support when the phone crashes. For this reason, applications that use sensitive APIs in Symbian must be “Symbian signed.” When he announced the iPhone SDK, Steve Jobs alluded to this as a model that Apple may follow.

So Sprint’s and T-Mobile’s participation in this initiative is very interesting. Sprint’s press release says:

Unlike other wireless carriers, Sprint allows data users to freely browse the Internet outside its portal and has done so since first offering access to the Internet on its phones in 2001.

Open Internet access is actually available from all the major US MNOs other than Verizon; AT&T ships the best handset for this, the iPhone. But the iPhone doesn’t (officially) let users load whatever software they want onto the phone. Symbian and Windows-based phones generally do, and again all the major MNOs ship handsets based on these operating systems. An open source handset goes a big step further, but who benefits depends on what parts of the source code are published, and what APIs are exposed by the proprietary parts of the system. As a rule of thumb, one would think that giving developers this greater degree of control over the system will increase their scope for innovation.

Steve Jobs on the iPhone:

I don’t want people to think of this as a computer.

Juha Putkiranta, senior vice president, Multimedia, Nokia, on the N95 phone:

The Nokia N95 is the ultimate multimedia computer.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a good article about T-Mobile’s UMA trial in Seattle. It says that T-Mobile may be rolling it out nationally as early as next month, despite some trial particpants’ complaints about handoff and battery life issues. T-Mobile will be offering a home router to help with QoS and battery life. I presume that for the battery life this is just WMM Power Save (802.11e APSD) since that is what the phones in the trial (Samsung T709 and Nokia 6136) support. For QoS side I expect these APs will support WMM (802.11e EDCF), but they could also support some proprietary QoS on the WAN access link, the way that the AT&T CallVantage routers do, which would be interesting.

There is some background on the trial here.

The article goes on to put the trial into the context of other FMC deployments, from BT Fusion, Telecom Italia and Orange. The article quotes a Verizon Wireless spokesman saying that they aren’t convinced that Wi-Fi can deliver high enough voice quality to carry Verizon branded calls. This is amusing bearing in mind the usual quality of a cellular call in a residence.

The article also quotes Frank Hanzlik, the head of the Wi-Fi Alliance as saying that business FMC may have more potential than consumer. I agree.

Reuters picked up on one little sentence buried in a Nokia press release entitled “Nokia Demonstrates Leadership in Technologies for Internet on Mobile Devices at Web 2.0 Expo.” The relevant paragraph, in its entirety, reads:

“Nokia Shows Commitment to WiMAX as Web 2.0 Enabler

“Nokia is dedicating significant research, development and intellectual property to WiMAX and supports efforts in making it a global broadband standard. The combination of WiMAX broadband technology and Web 2.0 services offers people an enriched high-speed Internet experience free from the desktop PC. Nokia plans to bring its first WiMAX enabled mobile device to market in early 2008.”

With no apparent evidence, the headline of the Reuter’s story mentioned the word “phone,” and the Internet echo chamber commenced to spawn dozens of stories saying that Nokia is going to release a WiMAX phone in 2008. Actually it looks more as though they are talking about an Internet Tablet like their N800, which is much less exciting.

A Nokia phone based on WiMAX would either have to have a regular cellular radio for the voice channel, or it would use WiMAX for voice. A phone that uses WiMAX for voice would most likely be aimed at a wireless Internet provider that doesn’t have a cellular network, for example ClearWire in the USA. This would put a date on their anticipated entry into mobile voice over WiMAX to compete with the incumbent cellular operators.

But that’s not what the press release says.