This week, I had the opportunity to get away from the Texas heat and travel to the West Coast to attend sales training for Xirrus, a new product for the team at Westron. Based in Southern California, Xirrus is the leader in high-performance wireless networks. The company is going to market with a very unique approach to solve high-density and performance issues for customers who depend on wireless to grow their business and support their clients and employees.
The idea of depending on wireless is a fairly new concept for most. While Wi-Fi has been around for some time, it is quite often considered a “nice to have” technology. Typically, you might find corporate wireless access limitedly deployed in conference rooms and guest areas. Or, it might be positioned throughout an organization to provide access for someone who needs to connect a laptop wherever they may be in the building. Is this need changing? It didn’t take long during the course of my trip to confirm that demand for mobility solutions is certainly skyrocketing. I also lived through the problem that this demand is causing.
On my departing flight from Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, I noticed that Google and Virgin America had partnered up to provide access to their new Chromebook. This is a Wi-Fi-enabled netbook running Google’s Chrome OS, and Virgin also offers Wi-Fi access on the plane for some flights. Having this technology available for business and casual travellers is amazing, and you can surf the net at 35,000 feet! It does point to the fact that the demand is there for connectivity almost everywhere.
While the Chromebooks were nice, almost everyone I came in contact with on the flight already had their own iPad, iPhone, Android or laptop. Most had more than one of these devices (including me).
My random sampling is backed up by the sales numbers and activation rates of the Apple devices and other smartphone and tablet manufactures. As of June 2011, it was reported that Apple had sold over 25 million iPads. This is for a product that was just introduced a little over a year ago. Google announced earlier this month that there are over 550,000 Android activations every day!
It is the applications that drive these sales, as well as the need for constant connectivity. Hosted e-mail services, cloud-based business applications, and social networking connectivity (to name a few) are allowing companies to be more available and productive, no matter where they are. To compound the problem, the next generation of workers will scarcely know what to do with an Ethernet cable. My own kids have well over 10 wireless devices connected at my house (iPhones, gaming consoles, school laptops, etc.). I suspect this group of future employees and employers will take the demand for mobility and connectivity to different level.
This is where the problem lies. As these business-critical apps and mobile Wi-Fi devices begin working their way into the corporate network, the wireless infrastructure will start to fail. In many markets, like education, it is already happening. In many K-12 school systems, educational programs that bring in a laptop or tablet for every student have created the need for a mobility solution to support new demand. In the past, having “four bars” on your Wi-Fi was a good indicator of a successful wireless experience. But when a large group of people congregate and collaborate with these mobile devices, most wireless deployments aren’t designed to deliver the performance users require when an area gets dense with connections. This problem gets even worse when encryption is implemented, which corporate customers would always do.
Case in point is my hotel experience with Wi-Fi while on my trip. When I checked in at about 4 p.m., I immediately connected my laptop wirelessly to the “free” hotel network to check e-mail. There were no problems initially, but as the hotel filled up that evening, the service became gradually unusable. I could no longer browse the Internet, and I when I tried to print to the network printer in the business center over the Wi-Fi network, it failed even though I always had four bars on my signal meter. I realize that many hotels are infamous for poor Wi-Fi services, but the issues that they face are the same ones that other businesses will face as hoards of Wi-Fi enabled devices show up and NEED to connect in the building. And it will become nearly impossible to accurately determine where a wireless user will be, since they can connect anywhere.
There is a lot that goes into solving this problem from a product stand point. A product’s ability to handle high-density user groups will become a key factor in deciding what to deploy because the user landscape is changing so rapidly. It would have been hard to imagine a couple of years ago that the tablet would become so prevalent in the business world. In fact, two of Westron’s unified communications partners (ShoreTel’s IP Telephony and LifeSize’s High Definition Video Conferencing solutions) have recently brought to market apps for iPads, iPhones and other devices to deliver core voice and video services directly to those endpoints – wherever they are.
I’m excited to have a partner like Xirrus, who will equip Westron to solve these issues for our customers, providing them a robust wireless infrastructure as they migrate towards a changing world where wireless connectivity and performance is truly depended on to compete and grow their business.
