Wavelink Gets the Call at Cisco Architectural Trends 2011

On a personal note, it was a bit of a shock to go from a sunny Caribbean vacation to 16 degrees and 10 inches of snow in Minnesota. But that being said, I was excited nonetheless, to learn that we had been invited to participate in the 2011 Cisco Architectural Trends Event in Minneapolis right before Thanksgiving.

A lot of large organizations have been asking their Cisco Sales teams to learn more about how they can manage their Cisco 7921 and 7925 wireless phones with Avalanche. We conducted a training WebEx with a team of Cisco System Engineers last month, and the next thing we knew, we were packing our bags and heading to Minnesota to meet their customers.

It was a one day event with a full schedule of informative breakout sessions that were well attended by over 150 local and regional Cisco customers. We made some great new contacts and are looking forward to the opportunity to solve their Wireless Management challenges.

Stay tuned for more information on Avalanche and Cisco phones in the coming weeks, and in the meantime, here are a few photos I snapped while at the event.

Happy Holidays everyone!

Broadband Devices Driving Mobile Market Gains

I actually just saw this headline this morning in another popular blog spot and the timing seemed appropriate. We are seeing a huge upswing in the need for organizations to track, monitor and manage personal and business-class devices. Unlike traditional AIDC devices, most business class devices are designed for Broadband first and Wi-Fi second, putting a lot more data on the cellular carrier networks.

I find it interesting that the article talks in terms of market saturation, but what I am also hearing here is the potential for network saturation. One of the things that Wavelink Engineering has spent significant time on is making sure that a multi-modal Mobile Device will choose the best medium for updates, and restricting large updates to only those connections that meet a configurable minimum adapter link speed.

The article also talks about the efficiency and cost-effective nature of text messaging. We thought about that too. We can reach out to a multi-modal device first using SMS messaging to ask it to perform an update without knowing whether Wi-Fi or Broadband is available. When the device receives the message requesting an update, it can automatically choose the best network to perform that update.

Anyway, I’m watching the growth of iPhone, Android and Blackberry closely, and I’ll be curious to see how it plays itself out in the AIDC market.

Industrial vs. Consumer Grade Access Points

Back in January, we had a brief discussion about ruggedized versus consumer grade Mobile Devices. Shortly after that, I was making customer calls with one of Wavelink’s Platinum Reseller Partners, and an IT manager at a large multi-national retailer told me he was considering purchasing Consumer Grade APs for several of his new store roll outs in the coming year. His motive was to save money by purchasing the lower cost access points and wanted to know if he could still manage the APs with Avalanche.

There is a fair amount of unbiased material available on the web that compares the various features and benefits of Industrial or Enterprise grade APs vs. Consumer grade APs, such as the Best Practices article from BizTech Magazine or this recent Wavelink Technology Tidbit. What I wanted to do here was share my answer to his question about AP management.

Wavelink Tech Tip: Localizing CESecure with a Universal yet Local Server Test.

We ran into an interesting challenge recently, trying to configure Wavelink Avalanche’s CESecure, for a large national retailer. Just to review, CESecure provides device side security to Mobile Devices by requiring user authentication to gain access to the Mobile Device, as well as providing the ability to lock a device that is lost or stolen, and even encrypting or deleting sensitive data after the device has been locked.

The retailer wanted the CESecure client to use a local “Server test” to determine whether or not to lock the device, but they didn’t want to have to maintain a different configuration for every one of their stores, which number in the hundreds. We came up with a pretty ingenious solution using a wildcard in the configuration of the server address and it turned out that this wildcard syntax was already supported in the product… click here to continue reading the entry.