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A desk jockey is a thing of the past. Most information workers spend a good portion of their day outside of the office walls. And when in the office, they spend only a few hours a day at their desks. Smartphones, tablets, laptops and other mobile devices have unleashed people from their cubes and allowed them to work at their convenience.
Sales of smartphones and tablets continue to surge.
Gartner estimates that 473 million smartphones were sold in 2011, with sales rising 58% from 2010. The bring-your-own-device (BYOD) movement has positively ignited, as people want to use their personal smartphones and tablets for work. Aberdeen Group found that 72 percent of organizations were permitting the use of personally-owned mobile devices for business.
The shift to mobility is generational too: Millennials, now entering the workforce en masse, grew up on technology.
Whether corporate- or personally-owned, the widespread use of smartphones, tablets and laptops is driving the demand for a better user experience for wireless LANs (WLANs). As many organizations have painfully discovered, consumer-grade wireless access points (APs) simply don’t hold up under the intensive demands of today’s mobile workers. Workers are forced to deal with unreliable Wi-Fi — dead spots in coverage, interruptions to calls and herky-jerky video. And IT is saddled with systems that are costly to operate and cumbersome to manage.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. ShoreTel is working with industry leaders, including Ruckus Wireless and Bradford Networks, to help organizations meet the challenge of delivering high-performance, enterprise grade WLAN service and support the demand to use mobile devices for business, regardless of whether they are company-owned or BYOD.
Mobile UC over Wi-Fi
ShoreTel and Ruckus Wireless have partnered to deliver reliable unified communications solutions for organizations that need full phone and multimedia capability for both company-owned and BYOD mobile devices. Ruckus ZoneFlex is an adaptive Smart WLAN system that offers businesses both power and simplicity when it comes to Wi-Fi.
ShoreTel is integrating Ruckus ZoneFlex APs and ZoneDirector WLAN controllers as core components of ShoreTel Mobility, and the result is a smarter Wi-Fi and UC platform. This joint solution enables organizations to provide their workers with mobile UC over Wi-Fi with a solution that leads in quality and a low total cost of ownership. Organizations can deliver dial-tone anywhere users work and across a broad range of mobile devices. That results in greater efficiency and workplace collaboration.
The solution from ShoreTel and Ruckus is designed to deliver consistent WLAN performance, so workers can enjoy enterprise-quality voice, jitter-free video and high-speed data. Businesses from the smallest to the largest gain enterprise-class quality without enterprise-level complexity and cost.
BYOD with Confidence
BYOD, while in hot demand from workers, is a major pain point for IT, as using unmanaged mobile devices to access corporate applications and data introduces security risks.
ShoreTel is working with Bradford Networks to help alleviate that pain. Bradford Networks Network Sentry can be used to effectively manage security policies and prevent unauthorized network access for a broad variety of equipment and devices, including company-owned and employee-liable mobile devices. Organizations can use Network Sentry to create limited access zones for BYOD, giving employees the freedom to use their favorite mobile devices, including Apple iPhone and iPads, while mitigating the security risks.
With ShoreTel Mobility, workers have the flexibility to work however, whenever and from wherever they need to be.
Check out the video to learn how ShoreTel Mobility can stop the BYOD chaos.
