Enterprise Mobility Defined

Transcript

Introduction

PETER SHAPLEN: Welcome to this podcast series, an ongoing conversation about trends, technology, and business for Cisco I'm Peter Shaplen. And Brett Galloway, who's the senior vice president for the wireless and security technology group at Cisco, is charged with pursuing the aggressive growth of wireless, LAN and broadband. To enable mobility and it is mobility that has my interest today. Nice to see you.

Interview

BRETT GALLOWAY: Nice to see you Peter.

PETER SHAPLEN: Define mobility for the Enterprise for us.

BRETT GALLOWAY: It's about people trying to get work done. You know, Cisco's vision is to change the way we work, live, play, and learn. What are the challenges an IT organization faces in this evolving world toward mobility? You know they, one challenge they certainly face is an explosion in the number of devices that people are dealing with. You know, in, the world circa five years ago, for the most part we used PCs and laptops. Um, those, you know, fairly common architecture. There were few variations. What have we seen happen since then? An explosion of devices and not just devices but applications that are coming from the consumer world back into the enterprise so you have IT organizations that are facing these demands for devices and applications. And facing, the innovation cycle that's driving these devices and applications. And they face business leaders demanding these solutions. But they also have to do that in a way that's safe and secure and available. We're focusing on the role of the network to enable mobility. And it's the pervasiveness, or even the immersiveness of that network that actually fundamentally enables mobility and this is Cisco's contribution to be sure, in the realm of mobility is the degree to which we enable the creation of those networks. Our vision is the human network. Right? A network that allows people to work wherever they want to work. But even more than that is the technology platform that allows a lot of other people to innovate, creating visions that none of us in Cisco have even imagined.

PETER SHAPLEN: What have been the, chief issues regarding a security which obviously has been a major component of the Mobility launch?

BRETT GALLOWAY: You know, as an IT organization, I have a little bit different challenge. I mean, I certainly want my users to be happy, but I also have to make sure that that still happens in a compliant way. When we talk about collaboration, we talk about openness. We talk about innovation. We talk about creating new things. Creating new business, creating new opportunities. That's one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is security. And openness, innovation change, are all things that, you know, represent, potential real threats, you know, no one remembers how exciting it was when the network goes down. No one remembers, the value of openness when a security threat, you know, makes the front page of the paper. And so IT is really caught in this tension between enabling collaboration, enabling mobility, and, keeping the Enterprise safe. What we're focused on doing through Motion is to bring together all of these various network technologies. To allow people to continue to collaborate effectively in a way that is still managed for me, uh, from a security perspective. And the Enterprise interest in that is to make sure that, that, that they can get people to work at home High-speed broadband, hugely important. Hugely enabling. Um, VPN access. You know, secure, compliant, controlled access to the Enterprise network. And yet at the same time, creates an open platform for people to be able to innovate. What we're focused on is creating a set of mobility solutions, um, with ever-richer properties, with ever richer scope and scale. That allow people to get more work done. in more places and more times.

PETER SHAPLEN: You're really
redefining the word mobility.

BRETT GALLOWAY: Certainly we're, focusing on the role of the network to enable mobility.

PETER SHAPLEN: We've often heard a lot about the concept of presence. But is this one more step toward that ultimate aspect of presence and being mobile enough and connected?

BRETT GALLOWAY: Absolutely. What's exciting about the Motion launch is not only now do we have the ability for the network to know where you are, we now have architecture that allows the network to tell applications where you are.
And this is a connection between presence, the experienced application, and the network services that enable it. You know, so we, we now have through the mobility service engine, an architecture that allows third party applications to query the network. Who you are, where you are. And do that in a secure way. That allows you to build not only presence applications, but an array of applications. We're focused on four things in mobility services engine. Number one is continuing our jour-, journey of unifying disparate networks. So we've been bringing together WiFi and Ethernet networks with our unified wireless network. With mobility service engine, we're continuing that journey of integrating other wireless technologies such as WiMax, RFIB, et cetera. Two is creating a platform for collaboration. Um, you know, the, the network is valuable in as much, not as it exists as a network, but in as much as it connects people to people. People to things. And things to things We're focused on helping our customers deal with this wave of client devices coming in their environments. Um, and not just devices but applications that really come out of the consumer space. And which represent an enormous innovation wave, but which represent, for our enterprise customers, and enterprise IT in particular, a challenge. And the fourth thing we're focused on is, is really a platform for, for partnering. You know, how do we not only have a great networking products, but how do we allow third party applications to interface those products effectively?

PETER SHAPLEN: Looking ahead, what will this enable your customers to do that they can't do today? Is it just about productivity and efficiency, and effectiveness? What is it really going to mean?

BRETT GALLOWAY: What we see with mobility ultimately is really turning the world of work inside out. today, you know, I get up every day I get dressed, I get in the car, I drive to work. What we're ultimately doing is we're changing work from some place you go to some thing you do. Um, and if you look at the next stage cohort entering the work force, this is absolutely what they expect. And, you know, that happens because we have a rich set of communications solutions available. That happens because networks available pervasively, or even immersively in the case of wireless. That happens because, you know, we've enabled our IT organizations to drive innovation in this very open world in a way that still lets them remain safe, secure, and available. This requires us to work with solutions across enterprises, consumer technologies, as well as service provider technologies. And one of the things that exciting about being at Cisco is only Cisco's position delivers solutions across all of those domains, in vision of this sort of world of sort of turning, turning the n-, the, sort of the experience the network inside out. It's quite transformative. And it's not just transformative for us in the developed world, it's transformative in the emerging world as well. You know, we are with our WiMax technologies, you know, able to deliver networks where networks haven't been before. And, you know, in transforming commerce, transforming politics, transforming even society in ways that, you know, pervasive communications can truly change the way we work, live, play, and learn.

PETER SHAPLEN: And I can figure out why they would want it. But somebody has to defend it to the CEO to say we want to buy it. We want to use it. We want to implement it. We want to engage our employees with it. and they're gonna be asked, well yeah, that's fine. But How is it worth it?

BRETT GALLOWAY: It's a great question, and you can look at that at multiple levels. You know, a lot of what we're focused on with the motion launch, it's very practically aligning with vertical solutions. But if I zoom up from the level of specific vertical solutions what's horizontally interesting here are, the set of solutions around collaboration. Leveraging innovation. Um, and security, you know that I think are broadly appealing. There are gonna be few CIO's who will fail to recognize the evolution here from closed networks to an open world. ,removing or making richer the set of, um, portals and doorways and, and connection points for the enterprise and the rest of the world. Whether it's business to business. Business to consumer or even consumer to consumer with employees. And, it is up to Cisco to make sure that we create a clear and compelling architecture that allow our customers to evolve in line with this world. This builds on the installed base of wired and wireless networking products that, that our customers have already deployed. So, you know, we're not asking people to change out their networks. We're, what we're doing is we're adding new network component, um, that, that adds this, this services layer. That adds this orchestration capability. That adds this, um, sort of platform component in terms of application delivery. What opens up that innovation is the network. And not just the network in abstract sense, but a n-, a network that's, that's pervasively available at low cost with great computing devices. That allows them to add their little bit to the solution and create a great experience. What is incumbent upon us is to make sure that we have created a rich enough set of partnerships, um, in terms of applications, to make these solutions useable and deployable out of the box.

So a big part of our, um, activity around the motion launch has been lining up those application partners. So we bring to our customers is not just a, an architecture in the abstract, but specific solutions that they could buy and deploy.

PETER SHAPLEN: From your engineering perspective, paint for me the workplace that mobility will create for us in the very short-term future.

BRETT GALLOWAY: Well I think ultimately what we're creating is not a work place, but a workspace. Um, and it's a workspace not in a physical sense, but in a virtual sense. You look to the various investments we made, both in a, in network infrastructure, as well as, acquisitions such as WebEx. And this is ultimately about creating, um, spaces that are in line with our vision of mobility, , what is interesting about those workspaces are that they create, you know, great ways to collaborate. Um, they create great ways to collaborate in a time-shifted sense. So I can have, intermittent dialogues. they create great ways to collaborate real time. With not just audio services, but even video services. Um, you know, and so all these, these technologies, transform the way we work in ways that I think we haven't truly understood yet. You know, to be able to deploy these technologies is hugely exciting and relevant to me personally.

PETER SHAPLEN: Brett Galloway, thank you.

BRETT GALLOWAY: Thank you.

PETER SHAPLEN: Brett Galloway is the senior vice president for the wireless and security technology group at Cisco. And thank you for listening. An archive of this and other podcasts, both audio and video, can be found online at newsroom dot Cisco dot com. I'm Peter Shaplen for Cisco.

Evan Schuman: Excellent. That sounds like it could be a very, very nourishing breakfast, getting a lot more information beyond just the biscuits. I wanted to thank you very much, Dave, for spending your time with us today.

Dave Brown: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Evan Schuman: For the Cisco Podcast Series, this is Evan Schuman. For more podcasts on technology and other global news information, please go to newsroom.cisco.com. That's newsroom.cisco.com.