Remote connections to corporate networks over a VPN are a growing business requirement as teleworking takes hold. And while remote working one or two days a week over a broadband link from home is already the norm in many companies around the world, the untethered variety of connectivity is gaining pace, with road warriors seeking to reap the benefits of increasingly fast WiFi and improving cellular data rates.
Not surprisingly, the main players in this market have to date been network operators or aggregators like iPass Inc. In either case, said Andre Axford, CEO of London-based Cutting the Wires, their objective is to keep the customer on their network, or at least on the network of a partner with whom they are sharing the usage revenue, in countries where they have no network of their own.
The problem with all these services is that they tie the corporate customer in, he went on, so if they want to switch service provider for a particular bearer [i.e. cellular, WiFi, dial-up etc…], they can’t as they face the task of replacing all those software clients. The other alternative, he added, is to run multiple clients.
For example, a UK-based corporate might be running Vodafone clients for cellular access, BT ones for WiFi and iPass for dial, with three different bills, separate usage reporting for each and three separate skill sets to run them, plus a fourth set for the corporate VPN client, not to mention the support costs for all the different clients, he said.
Cutting the Wires was set up in 2003 by a group of former Vodafone employees, with the idea of creating a multi-bearer, carrier-neutral client to sell into enterprise. With Zafari Mobile, an enterprise deploys the clients on its laptops and a server in its network.
We customize the system to integrate a corporate customer’s existing security infrastructures such as VPN, access control, asset management and firewalls into the client, which means no separate security client to run, Axford said. It manages all bearers and devices, whether Centrino, cellular data card, LAN or dial port, which means that as mobile operators deploy HSDPA, there will be no need for new software; we can simply distribute new drivers.
The customer’s IT department can assign bearers to different providers, if the company takes WiFi from one and cellular from another, for instance. Importantly, it can also change them by sending out a settings update to the clients over the wire or the air.
You can also apply policy by group, department or individual, such that only execs can be allowed cellular access, or a WiFi connection can be forced whenever it is available, and so on, said Cutting the Wires’ CEO.
There are, of course, connection managers for cellular from other ISVs, with the main players being PCTel Inc, Sweden’s Alice Systems (now part of Norway’s Birdstep Technology ASA), Avanquest Software Inc (formerly BVRP) from France and Diginext BV from the Netherlands. However, all these companies develop technology exclusively for carriers, and as such their products only connect to their customers’ networks. On the WiFi side, most of the clients tend to be internal developments by the carriers themselves, who add wireless as an extension to their dial-up clients. No-one else is developing this kind of software for enterprise, claimed Axford.
Zafari Mobile is currently at version 2.0, which was announced at the beginning of March and introduced support for the EAP-SIM authentication and session key distribution mechanism, thanks to collaboration with Intel Corp to integrate support for its Mini PCI chipset, the 2915 a/b/g Sonoma. The next release, version 2.5, will be available in mid-April, said Axford, with its main enhancement being the inclusion of the Skype plug-in module, for which the company is currently finalizing Skype certification.
This is not to say that Cutting the Wires expects enterprise customers to embrace Skype as their VoIP infrastructure of choice, given the issues it faces with quality and bandwidth utilization.
We’ve really done it as a demo of the fact that we can integrate a VoIP client, Axford said. There’s no reason why we couldn’t integrate another one, such as the SIP-compliant Xten client that white labels for a lot of the VoIP services from carriers and ISPs in the States.
As for pricing, Cutting the Wires charges for its technology in various ways. Firstly, there is a per-seat (i.e. per-client) annual fee, which starts at around 25 pounds ($43) and decreases as volumes grow, which can also be an enterprise license for chunks of clients. Then there is a license for the Zafari server, which maxes at about 25,000 pounds ($43,000) for a fully-featured platform with all the components, such as auto-update, product key management for role-based access policies and MIS reporting.
Finally there is a one-off customization fee, which includes the integration work with the customer’s existing security infrastructure, but also branding, since the company usually overwrites the Zafari Mobile name with its customers’ own logos and brand names. This can cost anywhere from 20,000 pounds ($35,000) to, in our largest implementation to date, 500,000 pounds ($870,000), said Axford.
Of course, one might expect that the carriers would be less than happy with their corporate customers deploying Zafari Mobile, since it allows them to pick and mix, not to mention chop and change, their connectivity suppliers, even to the degree of having different suppliers for individual bearers.
Axford acknowledged that this is an issue, but Cutting the Wires relies on the clout of its corporate customers to impose their wishes on the service providers. We have one customer where they’re rolling out 90,000 of our clients for their employees to connect over the iPass network, he revealed.
