“Can calls be made over WiFi with a dual-mode phone from 35,000 feet on a cross-country flight?”  This was a challenge one of my peers proposed recently so we decided to test it out on a recent flight between San Francisco and New York with the in-flight WiFi service as you can see in the video here.

It is quite amazing how far the technology has come to be able to enable high quality SSL-secured calls over in-flight WiFi service to place a call to a coworker.  Since use of the cellular radio for placing phone calls is currently banned by the FAA, before having access to the WiFi on a handset, there was no way to place a call without pulling out your laptop.  Now you have the ability to disable the cellular radio from your phone and leverage the WiFi connection for applications such as secure voice.

As for the future of in-flight calling, that is unclear with Bill H.R. 5788 currently being considered, which if passed would ban voice communications on any device in-flight.  We aren’t sure either if we want our neighbors on the plane chatting through a long flight.

What is clear though is that the technology is available today to make secure and simple VoIP communications over the WLAN even with today’s handsets and challenging WLAN environments.

To find out more about Agito’s Secure Remote Voice, visit www.agitonetworks.com/Mobility_Router_SRV.php for an overview and request a demo.

Pej

“Healthy alliances are crucial to making a leader’s vision become a reality.”
-Abraham Lincoln

What Lincoln said in the 1860’s still rings true today! Enterprise Fixed Mobile Convergence (eFMC) enables enterprises to be more agile and competitive by taking advantage of their existing PBX infrastructure and enterprise WiFi deployment to reduce cellular costs and make their mobile workers more accessible and responsible as well as provide them better in-building coverage. Key to making this a reality has been enterprise WLANs. WiFi provides a robust, battery efficient wireless infrastructure to support real time applications like voice and video, and has done so for many years. Agito has now announced technology partnerships with every leading enterprise WLAN vendor, underscoring our corporate strategy of collaborating and natively integrating in with our ecosystem of leading PBXs, Wireless LANs and Smartphones. We are proud to be the only eFMC company to have this distinction.

Yesterday Trapeze Networks announced joint interoperability with Agito Networks RoamAnywhere solution. This adds to our existing partnerships with leading WLAN vendors including Cisco, Aruba, Meru and Aerohive. Working closely with our wireless LAN ecosystem partners, Agito is able to deliver a robust, well-integrated Voice over WLAN solution to our customers. With our native integration into radio management from market leaders Cisco and Aruba, customers get peace of mind knowing that their wireless LAN is working in harmony with their mobility appliance. Agito’s RoamAnywhere Mobility Router is designed using RFC-based open standards to simplify 3rd party integration. Enterprises can rest assured that whatever infrastructure they choose to deploy, Agito will integrate natively to support their environment.

Sandeep

Read the Trapeze Release
Request a Demo
Read the Agito eFMC Whitepaper

You’ve seen this subject covered here before, so I won’t harp too hard on it. The industry is doing that for us. If you are an enterprise, the carriers continue to ignore you when it comes to your mobility needs and support for your mobile workers. And then again, maybe not.

I was asked to join a panel debate at Interop New York/Mobile Business Expo (MBX) this week that focused on highlighting the different methods of convergence, and the solutions that are best for which environments. Tech Target’s Shamus McGillicuddy did a nice preview of the session and what attendees could expect, including having an interview with Michael Finneran, the moderator.

What is interesting is that mobile operators are clearly NOT delivering the IMS-integrated solutions promised for so many years. I remember I was on an FMC panel at last year’s Interop NY/MBX event, which did have a carrier (Verizon) on the panel. It was clear soon into it that the poor guy did not belong, and he became an easy target. Even the audience got into the act, asking him about his company’s offering. His response? “I got nothing.” As Shamus highlights, the Interop gang could not even get a carrier representative to make an appearance on the panel. Silence speaks volumes.

But something more interesting is happening. Carriers are looking to eFMC companies – Agito in particular – to deliver these capabilities to enterprises. Our close partnerships with Cisco and Avaya have enterprises telling carriers to work with Agito, and they are! (More on that later).

At MBX this week, we demonstrated publicly for the first time the next release of the RoamAnywhere Mobility Router. Here’s a view into our booth from CRN magazine, which named the new RoamAnywhere one of the Hot On-the-Go Solutions from the conference.

Industry firsts delivered from this new solution include Secure Remote Voice for secure VoWLAN, Dual Persona for converged business and personal communications on one device, advances in Dynamic Least Cost Routing for additional cost savings, and the broadest PBX and Symbian/Windows Mobile handset support available.

Pej

Read Shamus McGillicuddy’s article
Learn more about Secure Remote Voice
Learn more about Dual Persona
Learn more about Agito’s handset support

Anthony Marano Company was an organization in search of a reliable mobile unified communications solution.  We hear a lot about mobility and convergence needs these days, but Anthony Marano Company didn’t just talk about the need – they went out and did something about it.  Their story is highlighted in a well-written case study that was featured in Tech Target’s SearchUnifiedCommunications site earlier this month.

After evaluating and installing a number of competing solutions, including their most recent UMA solution, Anthony Marano Company has settled on the RoamAnywhere Mobility Router from Agito Networks.  While they are not your typical enterprise, their needs are similar to yours and the many enterprises Agito is working with – high-quality voice communications, continuous coverage, and reliability.  What enterprise with a mobile population doesn’t have these requirements?

Located outside of Chicago, Anthony Marano Company is one of the nation’s leading fresh produce distributors.  Dealing with a perishable agricultural commodity, its mobile employees work in a real-time environment.  They move inside and outside the company’s 460,000 square foot facility and need continuous high-quality voice communications.  Up to 3,000 orders are placed and fulfilled daily, with 90 percent of them shipping same day.  Missed calls can result in potentially thousands of dollars lost, not to mention the loss of customers and reputation.

Since their facility is metal and concrete, and is impenetrable by cellular signal, you can see their challenge.  Well, I won’t spoil the storyline, you can read the case study for yourself.  The writer does a good job capturing the customer’s challenges and pointing out Agito’s differentiation and key benefits delivered – including continuous connectivity and seamless WiFi/cellular handover, high-quality voice communications, reliability in a high-availability architecture, call functions such as call forward, and all this delivered on one device for each mobile worker.

With all the talk about what to do around mobile UC – kudos to Anthony Marano Company for taking charge, and taking action.

Dan

Read the Tech Target article

In the last IEEE meeting I attended I had the good fortune to participate in the celebration of the completion of the work done by the IEEE 802.11k task group. As one of the original co-authors of the specification I had the privilege of attending a very nice celebration dinner. This was very satisfying for me as I attended nearly every IEEE meeting for more than 3 years with one of my key focus areas to complete the job in 802.11k. I am very proud of my contribution to this group and give much thanks to Richard Paine, our group chairman, who remained at the helm for duration of the task group.

For those of you not familiar with this group, we were tasked with standardizing many 802.11 radio measurements that were largely already available in most 802.11 client adapters and in 802.11 network infrastructure. In addition to defining these measurements, we also needed a standard way to exchange the measurement information between the client adapters and the network infrastructure.

The first question that might come to mind is why? The value of radio measurements is unanimously agreed upon in the wireless community. By measuring the RF environment good decisions can be made about both how to manage the wireless network as well as how the wireless network functions. Measurements allow us engineers to develop products that make good decisions about very important RF characteristics such as channels selection, power settings, data rate selection, network selection, etc. By exposing and controlling this information between the network and the client the 802.11 WLAN network simply works better.
(more…)

I was very honored, and a little surprised, to receive one of InfoWorld’s Top CTO Awards for 2008.

This is a very recognizable distinction for our young company, and we are the only company in our Unified Communications and enterprise mobility space, in fact in networking in general, represented. Other award winners are CTOs from companies you have also heard of, such as UPS, Lehman Brothers, Virgin America, the District of Columbia, Sun Microsystems, MasterCard, AFLAC, ETrade and Credit Suisse. I am proud to be honored in such good company, and in fact we have been speaking with some of these organizations about the Agito enterprise FMC solution.

While my name headlines our press release and I have my photo with a funny smile published on InfoWorld’s site, this award is truly a testament to the all-star team we Agito executives have assembled, and the world-class eFMC product we are delivering. The recognition really goes to these 40+ men and women, whose commitment, enthusiasm and long hours are leading to some exciting results for Agito.

Without them, there’s no way we have a chance to be the eFMC solution provider of choice selected as a premier integration partner of Cisco for its Mobility Services Engine. In case you missed it, Agito is providing the seamless handover and mobile UC capabilities for the Mobile Intelligent Roaming function of Cisco’s new product launched in late May. Overall, without our team, we wouldn’t be generating the industry excitement on the customer, channel, partnership or recruiting fronts.

So, while it’s my name that’s in the headlines of InfoWorld, it’s my hat that’s off to the terrific team we have at Agito building our company.

Tim

As mentioned in the video, links to the:

Agito eFMC Whitepaper
Cisco Motion Press Release
Agito/Cisco Partnership Press Releases
Agito Product Demo

Pej

There was an exciting announcement this week from Cisco and Agito Networks about how the two companies are partnering to provide an integrated enterprise fixed mobile convergence (eFMC) solution for Cisco customers. This effort validates what our Agito customers have already learned. That is, only Agito’s user location (click here to learn more about our location technology and architecture) and integration with the wireless networks – whether it is the home, public, or enterprise network – provides the best possible mobile voice user experience. This is why Agito is the only enterprise mobility company invited to integrate with Cisco at this stage. It also goes without saying that it is also great to see a leader such as Cisco recognizing the importance of enterprise mobility for customers to improve their business operations, a validation of the eFMC space.

But don’t just take our word for it. Industry reception of this integration has also been extremely positive. To see some of the best coverage we’ve seen, check out Agito’s coverage page which we’ll be updating with this launch coverage periodically this week. While Cisco has the brand recognition, the huge installed base, and a leading WLAN system, most editor and analysts understand Agito’s innovation, and contribution in this partnership. Agito’s integration into the MSE will provide:

• Intelligent, seamless roaming between Cisco’s WLAN in-building networks and cellular networks. It’s Agito’s handover capability from WiFi to cell, and cell to WiFi (not just Cisco WiFi, but home WiFi for example) that is being leveraged for this solution.
• Robust context awareness of networks outside of Cisco’s WLAN (cellular, home, etc.). Cisco provides intelligence within the network, and it’s Agito’s client on the mobile device that provides intelligence when mobile users are outside Cisco’s network.
• Mobile UC functionality extended to mobile users. The MSE connects to the Agito client on the mobile device, but it’s Agito’s RoamAnywhere Mobility Router that connects the device to the enterprise PBX and provides all the mobile UC functionality.
• Mobility policies capabilities – Agito’s location-based policies are leveraged, especially polices applied when outside the network, where Agito has the visibility.

For Agito, Cisco adds network intelligence, information from Cisco’s Unified Wireless Network, to Agito’s RoamAnywhere as an optional metric to help determine the time and place for wireless network handover. Agito’s RoamAnywhere already uses the industry’s most robust set of metrics to determine WiFi/cellular routing – including user location, call cost, battery life, call quality, network reliability, user load and signal strength.

As enterprise mobility becomes a business critical need for enterprises, Agito’s RoamAnywhere products make up the only enterprise-ready mobility architecture with high-availability; a scalable, non-blocking architecture; and LDAP/ActiveDirectory (click here for more details) integration for ease of deployment that enterprises require. Agito brings a solution for enterprise mobility, and mobile UC to Cisco customers.

Christian

Read the Agito Press Release
Read the Cisco Press Release
See the News

I don’t usually write about vendor products, but with a slew a new phones either here today or in the near future, I can’t resist!

I am a huge Nokia fan (my daily phone is an Agito-enabled Nokia e61i - love it!), and so I am excited to see the official product shots of the the new e66 (replaces the e65) and the e71 (replaces the e61i). Very thin, US 3G, and of course, voice-grade WiFi!

Click the image for a link to a review

I was traveling in Europe a few weeks back and lost my phone. It wasn’t just any phone, it was my Agito powered Nokia e61i. I love that phone. I have mobile email, Qik, Google Maps 2.0, and of course the Agito client running on it. I was really sad to lose that phone, and not just because of the cost, or (significant) inconvenience, but for the fact that I felt irresponsible.

The worst part of the whole debacle was that I didn’t have any device management running on my device. So whomever found my phone would be getting my emails, Facebook updates, etc. I rallied, and used my laptop to VPN back to Agito and change all my passwords, and disabled my Agito client so calls could not be make on the phone. While I was slightly relieved, I was still concerned about the data saved on the phone. Who would look at it? What would they do with the data?

I swore at myself the remainder of the trip, because I should know better. As an executive for a enterprise mobility company, I know the statistics around disclosure of lost devices. I made a promise to myself that when I get stateside, device management would be a priority for us.

I am back and just read an article in Informationweek by our friend Richard Martin. In his article titled “Trouble Ahead: Most Companies Don’t Have A Mobile Device Management Plan” (catchy, if not dead on), he cited a few companies that have made the same mistake I have. That stats are chilling:

Not only have most organizations in InformationWeek’s recent survey of 307 business technology managers not adopted mobile device management strategies, most of them–52%–don’t even have plans to buy or implement tools that would help them corral proliferating wireless devices.

Take my advice, get in front of mobile device management sooner rather than later.

Pej

Read Richard’s article