Cisco unveiled a network appliance Wednesday that is intended to reshape enterprise wireless LANs by collecting device data and making it available for use by higher level applications.

The Mobility Services Engine (MSE) runs software programs that collect, store and manage data from wireless clients and Cisco access points and controllers. The MSE can use this data itself for jobs like rogue radio detection, and share it with higher-end Cisco security, access control and network management applications. MSE also can share data with third-party mobility applications, such as wireless asset tracking, cellular-to-Wi-Fi voice roaming, and RFID data management.

The appliance is part of Cisco's larger plan to create a unified software layer that spans different physical networks and the mobile clients that use them. Mobile devices such as laptops, RFID tags, dual-mode smartphones, embedded devices and sensors could be using any combination of access networks -- including wired Ethernet, Wi-Fi, passive RFID, cellular, WiMAX, Ultra Wideband, and wireless sensor networks such as Zigbee. The MSE is the start of collecting and coordinating data about all these clients, in large numbers, across these different types of networks, and feeding it via a XML/SOAP-based API to other applications.

"What it shows is that Cisco is finally realizing, although they don't overtly state this, that networking is no longer [about] LAN, WAN and PAN [personal area network]," says Ken Dulaney, a vice president with research firm Gartner. "Networking is converged among wired, wireless, personal, business. The next step to watch is how they deal with security, which is still fragmented. Will they have a more unified vision for security on top of [this vision] of the converged network?"

Today, applications from WLAN vendors typically run on their controllers. (Compare enterprise WLAN products.) Third-party applications, such as asset tracking via Wi-Fi tags, run on separate computers and have to collect data from separate wireless sensor networks or by directly contacting individual controllers or access points. MSE offloads the application processing from controllers to a dedicated device, creating what Cisco executives call a "services plane." It's a smart move, according to some analysts.

"Its significance is that it's a product that is really separating the network and services layers, and it's open," says Ellen Daley, a vice president at Forrester Research. "This means [software] developers, and groups within Cisco, can leverage or use network resources more easily."

Enterprises, for example, could leverage the data for unified communications -- a grab bag of technologies that vendors are trying to stitch together into a single communications interface for users' e-mail, voice, instant messaging and the like.

"This won't do much for those outside Cisco environments," says Gartner's Dulaney. "But for Cisco clients, it will provide an element of control for security, context [information, such as location], and roaming, which are foundation technologies for next-generation unified communications. That's an important battleground for Cisco against Microsoft with Office Communication Server."

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