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Gaining Control Over Mobility

When Michael Finneran and I moderated the VoiceCon session on UC and Mobility last week, the heart of the discussion, to my mind, was an exchange on the need for IT to exert control over mobility, and the various obstacles and opportunities for making that happen.From the discussion, it emerged that there are several technical issues at stake:

* "Twinning," or the ability for an IP-PBX to ring a mobile phone either concurrently or serially with the user's PBX extension.

* End device control

* End device management

The twinning issue has come up because a lot of PBX platform vendors are touting this feature's ability to bring the mobile user's public personna, in the form of his or her contact number, under the control of the enterprise. By twinning the mobile and desktop phones, you can compel the end user to give out his or her corporate phone number as their contact, and callers will reach the mobile device as prescribed by the rules that the user configures into the system. The idea is that when that user leaves the company, his or her customers/contacts don't necessarily retain the independent means of contacting your ex-employee, as is the case now, when most employees simply give out their cell phone numbers.

Along these lines, Brandon Weilbacher of Aastra (which now includes mobility player Ericsson's enterprise division)noted that his company offers a single-user license which, as the name suggests, allows the user to register multiple end devices under a single license.

The challenge with twinning, as Don Hausman of Motorola noted, is that every PBX vendor implements the basic control functionality differently. That means Motorola and the other mobility vendors have to write separate interfaces to each manufacturer's PBX. Don suggested that platform vendors should consider creating a standard for twinning to make a multi-vendor twinning implementation easier.

But of course there isn't just a multiplicity of core call control platforms within the enteprise; there are also invariably multiple end user devices. And you can expect this to continue. Luc Roy of Siemens said, "We've seen FMC [fixed-mobile convergence] implementations fail because there was only one client offered."

But customers want a standardized management approach for this leg of the connection as well, so that they're not dealing with a multiplicity of management systems for Blackberries, Nokias, Motorolas, iPhones, etc., and the panel was a lot less sure about how this would come together. Both Aaraon Williams of Nokia and Eric Ritter of RIM mentioned work going on in the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), but seemed far from certain about this capability today.

Regardless of the interoperability level, centralized management of mobile devices is obviously a must for enterprise IT organizations. What Don Hausman described as "Tight IT controls for the level of security on the handheld" would include such features as password aging, control over what applications get loaded on a device and the ability to prevent use of the device for gaming.

Eric Ritter noted that RIM can set some 400 IT policies via its management system, and included in the management needs: over-the-air upgrades; automatic backup; and operating system upgrades. And here's where dual-mode capabilities are important (apart from the much-touted VoWiFi-to-save-airtime): Being able to deliver these bulk data upgrades over the WLAN is crucial "so I don't get some massive data charge," Ritter noted.

You can watch the video of the entire VoiceCon UC Mobility session below; the part of the discussion I'm writing about in this post comes in at about the 36:30 point in the video: