No Jitter is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Mobility Line-up at Enterprise Connect 2014

For those of us who started with planning meetings for Enterprise Connect 2014 back in August, it's hard to believe it's now just one week away. Once again we've put together a great set of sessions for the Mobility Track and augmented those with a couple from other tracks we'll gladly take credit for. What's even better is that we've lined up some great panelists who will be sharing their views and insights in what undoubtedly will be fun-packed sessions.

The mobile track kicks off Monday morning with my Deep Dive Session, Coming To Grips With BYOD. This is the session where we try to bring everyone up to speed on what's going on with regard to technology, applications, trends, policies and security issues in wireless. I'll be drawing on the InformationWeek surveys on the State of UC and The State of Mobile Security, and talking about the best practices for mobile management and mobile security for BYOD (and non-BYOD) initiatives. Essentially, we'll be touching on all of the topics under discussion throughout the conference.

Monday also brings our Mobility Summit, where the topic for this year will be, Enterprise Mobility: Can We Get it Right, Finally? We'll have representatives from AT&T, Verizon and Sprint as well as Samsung, BlackBerry, Microsoft, and AirWatch talking about everything from managing BYOD environments to mobile UC and the Internet of Things, or what we in the mobile space call machine-to-machine communications.

While it's not "technically" on the Mobility Track, Sheila McGee Smith will be hosting a panel she started last Enterprise Connect entitled Improving the Mobile Customer Experience on Tuesday morning at 8:00 AM, dealing with some of the developments we've seen in the contact center space to better support mobile users. Sheila will be joined by speakers from Cisco, Unify, and West IP Communications

In the afternoon we have a session on Taking Wi-Fi to the Next Level: 802.11ac. If you've missed it, 802.11ac is the next generation Wi-Fi radio link that promises to boost over-the-air data rates to around 7 Gbps. The standard enhances some of the technologies introduced in 802.11n like more efficient signal encoding, MIMO and wider bandwidth channels, but it also introduces some new tricks like Multi-User MIMO.

The upgrade to 802.11ac will require new access points, but an increase of that magnitude in the over-the-air transmission rate may demand an upgrade to the wired infrastructure that connects to those access points as well. Also, since 802.11ac only operates in the 5-GHz band, a re-survey of the facility might be in the cards. We'll have speakers from Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco, and HP providing their insights and recommendations about how to manage this inevitable transition.

Later on Tuesday afternoon, Marty Parker and I will discuss the idea of the extent to which enterprise users could live entirely on the mobile network, i.e. dumping their traditional PBX phone and number in favor of using cellular or other forms of wireless communications, in our session titled Evaluating the "All-Mobile" Option. We've pressed Eric Krapf into service to moderate. We might be a little ahead of the curve on this, but with an increasingly mobile workforce that is relying primarily on their mobile devices, maybe it's time that we started giving this idea some serious consideration. We'll be talking about what you gain, what you lose, who are the prime targets for this, and how we might tie those users into the wired systems.

Also on Tuesday we have another of these "not on our track but we'll promote it anyway" sessions,Deploying Video on Mobile: Some Do's and Don'ts. Hosted by Andrew Davis of Wainhouse Research, this session will feature speakers from Applied Global Technologies, Howard & Associates, and Deloitte. I haven't asked Andrew what he plans to cover, but I'll be there to hear it.

Finally Tuesday's mobility program wraps up with a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session on Bring Your Own Device initiatives. BoF sessions are open conversations on a topic of general interest where we share ideas, options, and experiences. Some BoF sessions ban vendors from participating, but I actively encourage them to come and participate. The only rule is they have to identify themselves as vendors when they speak. I know most of the vendors in the mobile space already, so don't try to slip one by me!

Wednesday has only one session dealing with mobility, Which Way With Enterprise Mobile Devices, a program we've been running for several years. The panel will feature representatives from AirWatch, BlackBerry, Samsung, Microsoft, and mobile conferencing company Biba. Here we talk about what's going on in the various mobile ecosystems; the impact of tablets on other computing platforms; smart peripherals; and whatever topics the audience wants to put on the table.

Finally at 8:00 AM on Thursday we'll do our last mobility session, titled Assessing the Legal Issues Around BYOD. This session will be moderated by telecom attorney and frequent NoJitter contributor Martha Buyer, and we'll be joined by Jim Brashear, VP and General Counsel for email security provider Zix Corporation, who also serves as Programs Co-Chair on the Information Technology, Privacy and Electronic Commerce Committee for the Association of Corporate Counsel--yes, he's a real expert on this. We'll explore a number of the legal issues that revolve around BYOD, and Jim will provide the legal status while I talk about some of the practical steps we take in a mobility policy to address them. Jim and I have done a similar program in webinar format, but we felt this would be very relevant topic for the Enterprise Connect audience.

So that's it. I'm delighted that Sheila McGee-Smith is pitching in on the mobility topic again and I'm glad that Andrew Davis is picking up on the video-on-mobile front. Most of all my thanks go out to all of our panelists who will be sharing their ideas and insights in what promises to be one of the biggest and best mobility tracks we've run thus far. I hope to see many of you there, and don't be afraid to speak up and challenge us, that's what makes for a great conference.

Follow Michael Finneran on Twitter and Google+!
@dBrnWireless
Michael Finneran on Google+