By integrating mobility services into the wired infrastructure, you can improve business processes and simplify the network, while lowering costs.

Mobility is more than just wireless technology; it is the capabilities that are enabled when a network can detect a user's presence and when people can access resources regardless of where they are. True mobility depends on full integration of wired and wireless networks.

Mobility services, including access to business applications, services, and tools from any location, at any time, have emerged as a new challenge for IT departments. At the same time, mobility services offer an opportunity to create sustainable competitive advantage.

• Flexible enough to support innovative business applications and network services
• Easier and more cost-effective to manage than separate networks

Bridging the Gap Between People and Resources

A mobile infrastructure that provides full value to a business extends beyond the back end to include network services, business applications, and business processes such as management and support, administration, and procurement.

Many businesses now have disparate networks composed of equipment from multiple vendors. By supporting different vendors for wireless and wired networks, you have to learn and manage multiple sets of features and services.

By unifying networks, you can extend access to many of the standard services on your wired network to employees’ mobile devices. The incremental value of this fluidity of information makes mobile applications and services a key way to respond to market demands and maintain high productivity.

Some of the mobile services that use the combined strength of wired and wireless networks include the following:

• Location services track the physical location of Wi-Fi devices, making possible applications such as real-time asset tracking, location-based security, and business policy enforcement.
• Voice over WLAN recognizes Wi-Fi handsets in the same way that it recognizes traditional desktop phones, expanding their reach. Besides guaranteeing call quality, it improves productivity by reducing voice-mail exchanges and making transparent the transitions between mobile and land-line calls.
• Guest networking lets you automatically offer customized network access to customers, vendors, partners, and others. Guest networking also decreases the cost of moves, adds, and changes.

More Benefits: Scalability, Security, Network Management

Companies with multiple wireless LANs (WLANs) are moving toward centralized, controller-based WLANs and away from separate networks based on different code, requiring separate management, and displaying different user interfaces. By integrating a controller-based WLAN with a wired network, you can achieve benefits in the following areas:

Scalability: Network integration helps ensure that the underlying data network can handle any additional traffic the WLAN might generate (such as from guests) and that network performance will be viewable across domains.

Security: A unified network allows IT to maintain unified network security policies and detect and respond to alerts more quickly. Each network can mitigate risks using network intelligence.

Network Management: A view across all domains of a unified network helps ensure optimal wireless coverage and capacity. Centralized network management also reduces training costs and allows flexibility in managing internetwork issues.

Reducing the Total Cost of Ownership

One way to measure the return on this investment is to look at total cost of ownership (TCO). Unified networks offer lower TCO by eliminating the need to maintain two systems separately and extending the same capabilities across both systems.

You can divide TCO analysis into capital expenditures and operational expenditures; and capital expenditure for technology is only typically 25% to 30% of the total lifetime cost. Integration saves capital costs (because of larger purchasing volume and implementation with existing network components), but saves even more in operational expenditures, through benefits such as the following:

• Better procurement management because of fewer suppliers
• Lower training costs for network use and business applications
• More efficient problem resolution due to elimination of multivendor conflicts
• Improved network management through a single centralized interface
• Lower labor support costs due to centralized network management
• Less network downtime, planned or unplanned
• Faster network adds, moves, and changes via centralized access point configurations