Wireless fosters 'real time' mind-set

Wireless connectivity is changing the business mind-set at EMS Technologies.

Employees at the Atlanta company now expect to connect to corporate data and applications wherever they are and whenever they need to. That means decisions at all levels can be made, and acted upon, faster than ever.

This emphasis on real-time decision making is made possible as a companywide wireless LAN (WLAN) and Research in Motion BlackBerry wireless e-mail handsets become more prevalent, enabling a new culture of multitasking collaboration.

"Expectations have changed," says Michael Hancock, manager of information technology services. "People used to be surprised that we had wireless LAN access. Now, they're surprised if we don't."

"They expect [now] to get to all the same resources with the same performance as when they're connected to a wire," says John Dunbar, CIO for EMS.

EMS is a technology company that had $310 million in revenue in fiscal 2005 from several divisions. Among them are LXE, which makes a range of rugged wireless computers, scanners and RFID equipment; and Defense & Space Systems, which builds defense electronics for wireless communications and electronic warfare. About 1,500 employees are in offices and manufacturing sites around the world.

This spring, EMS completed its rollout of a companywide WLAN, to give employees mobility within buildings and among offices, and to give visiting business partners and customers secure Internet access.

To simplify the rollout and leverage a lean IT budget, Dunbar focused on brands and technologies with which his department was familiar. "We saw the big benefit of this in standardizing on hardware and software," he says. "That made it more secure, more pervasive and gave us centralized administration."

The WLAN is not large, but it is spread throughout the company. About 35 Cisco Aironet 1300 access points form the WLAN infrastructure, which is managed by Cisco's Wireless LAN Solutions Engine. In the past, some divisions deployed Lucent access points, which had to be managed separately by an administrator logging on to each one. Because the new WLAN is small, EMS chose not to go with Cisco's WLAN controller-based architecture.

For authentication, EMS uses the Protected Extensible Authentication Protocol (PEAP), crafted by Cisco, Microsoft and RSA Security. PEAP is supported in the Cisco access points, and in Microsoft's Windows XP operating system, which is the EMS laptop standard. The authentication process via a RADIUS server is largely automatic.

In the past, to access a division-specific WLAN, users had to manually enter the access point Service Set Identifier and an encryption key just to associate to the access point, then go through a separate VPN logon, Dunbar says.

The IT group has created a separate virtual LAN (VLAN) to give visitors wireless access to the Internet, while blocking them from the EMS backbone.