Hi All

I am pleased to announce the Agito for iPhone solution is in the Apple AppStore.  You can use the following URL to jump directly to it

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/roamanywhere-dialer/id370295498?mt=8

As well, here is a quick run through of the Agito for iPhone client:

Thanks,

Pej

Twitter is alive with talks of AT&T and how they are restructuring their cellular data plans. The new tiers are priced lower than what is offered today (200MB cap starting at $15/mo and 2GB cap starting at $25/mo, with a tethering plan TBA). There are changes to how overages will be handled, eliminating overage charges and instead tacking on an overflow plan (i.e. going over 2GB automatically adds a 1GB overflow for an additional $10).

The underlying message is clear. No more unlimited data plans. It is no secret that cellular voice is becoming a commodity and cell data usage is increasing at a record pace (some reported a 1400% increase in 3G due to the iPhone alone). Operators are looking to cash in on the shift from feature phones to smartphones (even my mom is ready for the iPhone, which is amazing to me), and this requires metered data usage.

I get it. You get it. We both know that while we probably use less than 2GB/mo today, that won’t last long, especially with video and more data hungry apps on the way. That $25/mo plan will be a distant memory.

You can keep these costs in check with WiFi. WiFi and WLANs are and will continue to be a major means to offload from the operator network. Even AT&T extols the virtues of WiFi in their press release:

“Wi-Fi will generally provide consistently fast speeds and does not count against a customer’s monthly data plan usage total.”

Smartphone users use their devices in-building about 66% of the time.  Take this as the opportunity to make your WiFi networks ready for the smartphone onslaught. Ensure they can support VoWLAN, and make it easier for smartphones to securely connect to the network (e.g. it is time to dispel with One Time Passwords and VPN over WLAN as the primary mode of security).

Smartphones today, be it Android, iPhone, or BlackBerry, support WiFi, WPA2-Enterprise, WPA2-Personal, and WMM QoS, so they can connect to almost any network securely and ensure both voice and data apps perform well.

Leading WLAN vendors have published design guides for dense WiFi deployment, and a few are linked here:

Cisco Design Guide

Aruba Design Guide

Meru Design Guide

Of course, I am compelled to plug Agito. Agito’s RoamAnywhere solution automatically and seamlessly moves VoIP and UC data (i.e. presence and IM) between WiFi, cellular, and 3G for all major smartphones. More information on our website.

Always interested in your thoughts and comments,

Pej

AT&T Press Release: READ

The results are in for the 2009 Mobile Star Awards, the 8^th annual awards program put on by MobileVillage where the industry votes for the top mobile products, success stories and visionaries of the year.  The industry has spoken, and Agito Networks was voted as the best in each of these areas, earning the Mobile Star Awards’ top honors – the Superstar ranking in each category entered.

In the Enterprise Software Awards Category, industry voters named Agito’s RoamAnywhere Mobility Router as the #1 Unified Communications / Fixed Mobile Convergence product, over a field of competing products that included RIM’s Voice Mobility Suite and Motorola’s TEAM VoWLAN solution.  The industry recognizes RoamAnywhere’s unique ability to mobilize enterprise voice and UC applications to increase mobile worker productivity while reducing costs by extending UC, PBX and deskphone features to mobile phones and providing industry-leading handover between WiFi and cellular networks.  RoamAnywhere uniquely offers high availability, redundancy, security, enterprise scalability, and the industry’s broadest IP-PBX and mobile handset support, including support for the Research In Motion (RIM®) BlackBerry® smartphone.

In the Success Story Awards Category, industry voters recognized Agito’s customer Hertford Regional College (HRC) as the top Wireless Network success story, over numerous other wireless network end user organizations nominated.  HRC, the largest further education college in Hertfordshire, deployed Agito’s FMC solution to improve voice connectivity and productivity in its mobile environment of 900 staff and more than 12,000 full- and part-time students, while reducing costs.  With facility building materials that do not allow cellular coverage indoors and a campus-wide Cisco WLAN and IP-PBX already in place, HRC turned to Agito Networks for high-quality voice communications, leveraging their WLAN.

Finally, in the Visionary Awards Category, Agito Networks’ Co-Founder and CTO Timothy Olson was voted by the industry as the top visionary for Wireless Network Solutions.  Mr. Olson was recognized for creating Agito’s RoamAnywhere Mobility Router – the industry’s first and only location-aware solution that intelligently routes users to the best wireless network available based on a combination of policy and users’ current location.  Instead of following the FMC market with carrier offerings that remain slow to emerge, Mr. Olson created a solution directly for the enterprise.  When confronted with limitations in available smartphones, Olson and his team developed new techniques and solutions for delivering enterprise-grade VoIP on these phones when it was considered not possible.

Agito is flattered and humbled by the recognition of the industry and our customers. 

Dan

Last week I had the pleasure of working with the Samsung enterprise team at the CTIA Wireless & IT event in San Diego, CA.

I (and many of the press & analysts I met with) were very impressed with Samsung’s current strong focus on the enterprise and working with the leading eFMC and Mobile UC  solution provider, Agito Networks, to enable the Samsung dual-mode Windows Mobile devices for enterprise mobility applications.

We were demoing (see below) the Agito RoamAnywhere solution which extends the enterprise extension from the PBX onto the Samsung dual-mode smartphones as well as extending location-aware presence with integration into Microsoft OCS 2007. These capabilities are extended both across the cellular and WiFi networks enabling customers to reduce mobile expenses while extending wireless coverage and improving productivity.

In addition to the strong interest in seeing the joint solution from Samsung and Agito, there was much interest from users in the Omnia II which is an upcoming Windows Mobile 6.5 device and the Samsung Moment that runs Android, both of which are sporting beautiful AMOLED displays.  The general conclusion from discussions with many folks is that while Android is very promising and great to see more devices being released from leading smartphone manufacturers such as Samsung, the platform still has some ground to cover before it is enterprise-ready.

– christian

Read the Agito/Samsung Joint Press Release

I read an interesting article from Michael Morisy at SearchUnifiedCommunications.com which describes the Google Voice application for BlackBerry that was released this week.  Google Voice provides single number reach for personal use to ring your mobile and home phones, as Agito RoamAnywhere does for enterprise use. Where Agito differs is that we have focused on the enterprise requirements and thus provide integration wiith the enterprise PBX and UC infrastructure along with enabling VoWLAN and seamless sub-100ms WiFi to/from Cellular handover.

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One of the observations that Michael made and we also see is that Google Voice doesn’t support Voice over WiFi that Agito does support.  One of the interesting benefits of Agito for Google Voice is that if a customer has deployed Agito RoamAnywhere then when  calls are made through Google Voice on the BlackBerry is that we are able to co-exist and automatically route those calls as VoIP over the enterprise WiFi thus eliminating the need for use of cellular minutes when in a WiFi area. огромные сиськи в мире

Check out the brief demo video below that shows an example of me placing a call with the Google Voice Application and it being automatically routed with VoIP over WLAN.

Learn more about Agito for BlackBerry and how it can help your enterprise (and enable VoWLAN for your Google Voice).

Request a Demo

Cheers,

Christian

Update Mar 3 – According to Phonescoop, this trial is now nationwide!

I am pleased and a bit surprised to see T-Mobile USA offer $49.99 flat rate calling to “loyal” customers (customers in good standing and with acounts active for >22 months). This is just a pilot and based on this blog post, it looks to be limited to the SF Bay Area.

This is a big step for a US mobile operator.  To my knowledge, voice ARPU for US mobile operators averaged around $40-50 dollars per month.  The existing flat rate plans (at $99) come at a significant premium over normal rate plans for the **average** user (100+%).  With this new pricing model T-Mobile makes the step to flat rate usage at ~25% increase, a far more palatable step up in pricing.

It will be interesting to see how AT&T, Verizon, and in particular Sprint will respond.  Is this the end of tiered rate plans?  If this plays out, the impact to enterprises will be significant – more mobile usage, but more importantly, more mobile users.  Enterprises can easily justify rolling out mobile devices to a greater user base at neutral to lower overall cost.

I will keep my eyes on this one – I am keen to see if this pilot rolls out nationwide.

Pej

Read the post on Cellphone Signal

Philippe Winthrop at Strategy Analytics poses an interesting question:

“So what about WiFi companies such as Aruba Networks, Bluesocket, Cisco, Extricom, HP ProCurve, and Meru?

They all talk about enterprise mobility, but are they REALLY in the enterprise mobility space?”

I agree in spirit with Philippe – that enterprise mobility is the intersection of lots of “things” – devices, applications, **AND** infrastructure (cellular, WiFi, 3G/4G). So in my opinion, WiFi infrastructure is part of enterprise mobility – but they are not an island unto themselves.

Cisco, Aruba, and Meru – to name just a few – do great things to make applications that ride on the infrastructure work well, especially around voice, such as QoS and Call Admission Control, things that make devices work better such as WMM-PowerSave (aka 802.11e U-APSD) for greatly enhanced battery life, and make the WiFi bits easier to manage (Cisco AutoRF, Aruba ARM, and Meru Air Traffic Control).

But to Philippe’s point, it is the sum of the whole that addresses the business need.

Pej

Read Philippe’s post here.

We had the opportunity to join Cisco, Nokia and Bryant University on Cisco’s Mobility TV to talk about how we are working together with one of our eFMC ecosystem partner to deliver a joint solution.  While it was exciting to be able to talk about our industry-leading product in a forum such as this, what was the most interesting to me was hearing how one of our users, Bryant University, has benefited from the Agito product and improved the end-user experience of Voice over WLAN.

The Mobility TV webcast, “Optimize Your Mobile User Voice Experience Across Multiple Networks”, and presentation slides are now available for archived viewing at the following location.  I recommend you take the time to view it and hear about our joint solution with Cisco and Nokia along with some reflections from Bryant University.

View the webcast now:   http://www.cisco.com/go/mobilitytv

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Christian

Read the Agito press release about Cisco collaboration.

Read the Cisco press release about Motion.
Request the eFMC whitepaper.
Request a demo.

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

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
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