Interesting announcement from Trapeze Networks and a new company Divitas, the latter a company I hadn't heard of before. A quick scan of its website & a few articles like this one and it all starts to make an awful lot of sense.
Conceptually, it sounds like a similar product to Motorola's Wireless Service Manager and also fits with some of the activities that Nokia's enterprise division is working on with Cisco and Avaya IP-PBXs. Basically, there's a smart controller box in the enterprise network and a client on the handset. The carrier is more-or-less relegated to being a pipe (completely the right approach for large enterprises, in my view), with tight integration with the enterprise-grade WLAN network (something that is totally absent in UMA and most forms of carrier-based SIP mobility management).
The main problem that Divitas is going to have is ensuring testing and interoperability with the myriad software platforms that dual-mode devices will come in. Doing a Windows Mobile 5.0 port on a dedicated handset is fine - but they will also have to work with countless other WiFi-enabled devices that corporations & their suppliers prefer. In some cases, these will come in operator-specific versions that may even try & prevent this type of usage.
Divitas is also going to have work hard on its channel to market. In my view, this type of dual-mode solution will have to fit in with the enterprise telephony world, where the IP-PBX vendors and their resellers are the kingmakers & gatekeepers.
Dean Bubley's Disruptive Wireless: Thought-leading wireless industry analysis
Dean,
ReplyDeleteWill this bring about the enterprise 3G services that are needed if we are to see mobile grow?
Early work on the BT Bluephone project was slow because the hardware vendors did not wish to upset the network operators by installing the CTP profile in the Bluetooth stack. It is the same thing with WiFi, just today Orange were trying to get me to take an M600 rather than a P990 to test because it kept traffic on net.