Cisco spawns the 'mobility-enabled network'

Networking leader tackles multidimensional convergence

Industry analysis by expert Joanie Wexler, plus links to the day's wireless news headlines

Network convergence consists of many dimensions. Finally, the industry seems to be doing something about stitching them all together.

Cisco last week announced its Mobile Services Engine 3300 platform, a pivotal component of the company’s “Cisco Motion” vision for business mobility. Simplistically, the MSE sits above the company’s wireless LAN controller with an API to shuttle information, gathered across disparate wired and wireless networks and devices, upstream into back-end applications.

Considering that it’s a proverbial vendor “vision,” Cisco Motion nonetheless has the potential to be a really good thing.

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Network convergence consists of many dimensions. Finally, the industry seems to be doing something about stitching them all together.

Cisco last week announced its Mobile Services Engine 3300 platform, a pivotal component of the company’s “Cisco Motion” vision for business mobility. Simplistically, the MSE sits above the company’s wireless LAN controller with an API to shuttle information, gathered across disparate wired and wireless networks and devices, upstream into back-end applications.

Considering that it’s a proverbial vendor “vision,” Cisco Motion nonetheless has the potential to be a really good thing.

First, I’ve been harping for years about the need for a standard wireless API that would allow a common way for mobile networks to transmit meaningful data to upstream devices and applications - such as sending user location information to PBXs for interpretation by E-911 applications. Instead, vendors tend to expose their APIs to an application partner here and there. Certain applications get served wirelessly this way, but must be developed one WLAN infrastructure at a time.

If we can’t have an industry-standard API, at least we can have an open API to allow today’s application and connectivity islands to finally start intermingling with one another.

Meanwhile, Cisco has come up with a term that I think finally does the complex situation that is “convergence” justice without being such a tongue-twister that it’s impossible to remember. Brett Galloway, senior VP of Cisco’s wireless and security technology group, calls the new connectivity landscape simply the “mobility-enabled network.”

I like it. It’s friendlier than the Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) mouthful Cisco has coined, though the two terms seem to mean basically the same thing. And it describes what it is: a network - and all that entails, at all seven OSI layers - that can be used the same way, whether in a wired or mobile situation.

My take is that the mobility-enabled network is about pulling together the pockets of convergence - VoIP, unified messaging, seamless inter-network roaming and so forth - that have themselves been built in silos across LANs and WANs, servers and databases. Who better to do it than the company that employs the people who work on all of networking’s seven layers?

Read more about wireless & mobile in Network World's Wireless & Mobile section.

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.