Welcome to this week's topic - Mobility and Wireless! Allow us to
introduce ourselves, I am Dave and joining us will be Omer, Danny and Tom.
Omer and Danny work in Israel while Tom and I work in Northern
California. This means that there is never a time when all of us are in
the office at the same time so we must rely on technology for us to
collaborate.
All of us work in the Intel IT department; Omer and Danny
are the leads in the engineering team responsible for deploying wireless
technologies inside of Intel. Tom is the lead in the engineering team
supporting the client software for wireless, and I represent the Mobility
and Wireless technology development group within Intel IT.
In order to keep this blog manageable, we will be using the term Mobility
interchangeably with Mobility and Wireless.
What does Mobility mean to Intel as a large enterprise consumer? Mobility
is more than a 'nice to have' at Intel. It has allowed us to use the
word 'work' as a verb, not a noun - Work is now something we do, not
somewhere we go.
Are we walking the walk? - Almost every Intel location has WLAN
installed! Also, three quarters of Intel's employees are using Centrino
notebooks instead of fixed desktop computers. And we have a campus
where not only do we have WLAN installed, but we are changing the usage
model by making wireless the primary network access method and using the
wired connection as a backup method. - More on that in a subsequent post.
Wireless is more than just WLAN, it encompasses all wireless technologies
that are globally available - Wi-Fi, WiMAX and a variety of cellular
technologies.
In order to mobilize Intel though, we have had to overcome a few
challenges; one of them was the security around wireless. Another -
usability - this includes the capabilities of the application software.
Still another is the challenge of deploying a Wireless LAN to support a
large number of consumers (100s to 1,000s) on a site.
So what does my 'mobility kit' look like - A Centrino Mobile Technology
powered notebook and a 3G cell phone which receives my corporate email
securely. - As a matter of fact, I am working on this post while mobile.
Please keep in mind that we represent the IT department, not the product
group, so we can't give information on future capabilities. But we do
think we are in a more unique position then most IT depts. - Our users are the
people who actually developed the technology we support.
Two of us are located in on the West coast of the USA and two in Israel
and we will be responding to your questions and comments on a daily basis.
We are looking forward to your questions.
If for some reason you have no questions for us, we'd be interested in
your response to a couple of our own:
- Are you looking to move your internal employees to Wireless?
- Do you feel that Wireless security is robust enough to protect your
production information?
- What challenges do you face in implementing Mobility?
- What changes would you like to see in Mobility?