Going wireless to boost business mobility

Motorola's global vice president and general manager of the Enterprise WLAN Division, Sujai Hajela explains the art of using a wireless network for business mobility and much more to Vishnu Anand of CyberMedia News.

Tell us a bit about wireless for business mobility.

There are three trends Motorola has understood, that has urged us to come up with a product line and a concept.

According to a Gartner report, 70 per cent of all connections will be wireless in nature. Secondly, the number of portable computing devices, the laptops and the hand-held PDAs have outnumbered the number of desktop PCs in the world. Thirdly, applications that embrace wireless capabilities of a network are growing by leaps and bounds.

These three trends have been instrumental in Motorola's decision to fine tune its enterprise wireless mobility initiatives and create an umbrella theme - 'using a wireless network for business mobility'.

How can an enterprise leverage from Motorola's wireless products?

Motorola's wireless repertoire promises to customers three things that are extremely vital to businesses - reliability, security and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO).

With regard to reliability, Motorola provides more resilience, with more efficient access point technology that enables faster movement of data and eliminates the need for complex network structuring. For security, Motorola believes in being implicit as compared to being partial.

This means the security standards are incorporated within the network, and not as a patch-on, which may or may not be followed till the end point.

In contrast to wired networks, where security regulations and standards were devised after the network was in place, wireless networks have incorporated security within the framework.

To give an overall business benefit to the company, we ensure that total cost of ownership is reduced by our efficient wireless access points that can carry streams of video, audio and 'meshed' streams simultaneously via dynamic priorities.

In India and many other places in Asia, enterprises would have deployed their own networks - wired or otherwise. How does Motorola help them upgrade?

The fact that Motorola's enterprise wireless offerings are vendor neutral and can co-exist with wired networks. An ideal scenario would be to incorporate wireless networks as extensions to the existing networks. This could either be done for, let's say new branches, or a ramp-up.

Ideally, of course, we would like to see more wireless-only networks, but Motorola does realize that it could take some time before this can happen.

We are happy that quite a few new enterprises are seeing business sense in installing wireless networks for better efficiency and faster return-on-investments, while enterprises that have a wired system in place are planning to leverage more out of them by providing wireless extensions and access to newer operations.

In the weeks to come, what can we expect from Motorola with respect to wireless infrastructure offerings?

Unlike popular notion, the concept of a mesh network does not necessarily have to do with city or town-wide connectivity. Motorola has brought the mesh inside of the enterprise or the office.

Taking one step towards the wireless workplace, the mesh can connect all your hardware devices, and the data travels from access point to access point - via wireless. The devices may even be in a branch office and the mesh will ensure seamless and uninterrupted connectivity.

Another interesting offshoot of this would be the ability to make voice calls over this meshed network, as opposed to using a telecommunications operator. The same network can be used for transfer of voice across the network, at almost a zero cost. Provisioning for this remains only a policy decision by the company.