NetMotion Wireless releases Mobility 10 software

ANAHEIM, Calif. — NetMotion Wireless last week announced Mobility 10, a major release of its VPN solution — formerly known as Mobility XE — that includes new features designed to give enterprise IT teams greater flexibility and control of broadband use via a wider variety of devices.

“As you know, Mobility XE has been the mobile VPN — it’s been our main product for a long, long time,” said Mark Pendolino, director of marketing communications for NetMotion Wireless. “We’re taking a slight turn. With the features that we have with Locality and integrating them together in a NetMotion suite, it definitely gives us a broader market base to go after.

“We’re now setting the stake in the ground as an enterprise-mobility-management [EMM] software. We see Mobility a little less as a VPN — it still has that strong VPN capability — and we’re seeing it more of a centralized control for mobile deployment. There’s a lot you can do with the tool — a lot more than just creating persistence or creating a VPN tunnel.”

Mobility 10 includes three key new features, one of which is support for more operating-system platforms, according to Pendolino.

“We can now support Android, support iOS and be able to use those features in the tool — application persistence, roaming, acceleration, etc. — and apply that to a broader range of mobile devices,” he said. “What’s cool about the tool is that you can actually go in now and even set specific policies — you can single out platforms or you can single out specific users — that allows much more customization.”

Another feature is what NetMotion Wireless officials call “deep enterprise integration” that is designed to provide greater insight and visibility throughout the enterprise, so network-management personnel can determine the best way to use resources, Pendolino said.

“We created what we’re calling role-based access, which essentially is the ability to create different groups and give them levels of access that can vary, depending on what their business needs are,” Pendolino said.

“So, if you have a business group that just wants to see reports, then you can lock it down to let them run and generate reports. Or, if you have an IT team that needs reports and also to see what policies are in place — but not change them — there’s a variety of ways to set those access levels. I think that helps, for a larger organization.”

In addition, Mobility 10 can help enterprises comply with a variety of regulatory mandates—for example, HIPAA, CJIS and PCI — by providing evidence when data-access policy changes were made, Pendolino said.

“Anytime now that a group or an assigned user makes a change within the tool, it tracks it,” he said. “What that does is it allows enterprises that have certain regulatory requirements and need to show that compliance, they can do that with these tracking mechanisms.”