Vertically-focused communications applications aren't exactly new, nor are communications integrated into existing business apps. As Melanie blogged about here, CEBP adoption isn't turning out to be as straightforward as many people hoped, but as her blog also demonstrates, the apps are there and are compelling in and of themselves.
What's kind of different is when a company associated more with network infrastructure gets into the application game. I had a chance to talk with Devin Akin, who's chief WiFi Architect at Aerohive Networks, which pioneered "smart" network access points (APs)--a WiFi architecture that seeks to move deployments off the controller-centric architecture that dominated over the last few years, and which itself displaced "fat" APs that afforded little centralized control.
The AP architecture debate is a whole other issue, separate from the topic of my conversation with Devin, who described the first application that Aerohive has written to run on its systems. It's called TeacherView, and its first application is, as the name suggests, in the K-12 education vertical.
TeacherView presents teachers in a computer lab setting with a management console that displays which laptops are connected to the WiFi network, the strength of the connection, and what website or other network resource (e.g., email server) the laptop is accessing.
The application also lets teachers cut off the wireless connection to any or all laptops, a feature that Devin said the teacher may want to use if he or she needs to leave the room briefly or otherwise becomes unavailable to supervise the class temporarily, and wants to make sure the students don't use the computers inappropriately in his or her absence. The teacher can also push web pages out to the laptops from the console.
Here's a graphic depiction of how the application works.
TeacherView demonstrates that application integration will happen on different levels--at the lower network levels as well as on the application layer. The teacher-student relationship could be echoed in a call center, with supervisors exercising more granular control or pushing resources to agents (not that Aerohive is talking about doing that at this stage).
