Mobilelite Deploys Wireless PDA Network

By
iApplianceWeb
(12/13/01, 10:13:47 AM EDT)

Interactive Intelligence released its first wireless application gateway product, called Mobilite. Mobilite 1.0 is designed to help enterprises more quickly and easily develop, deploy, and maintain business applications for personal digital assistants with wireless connectivity, including RIM Blackberry devices, devices such as Compaq's iPAQ that run the Pocket PC operating system, and devices running the Palm OS.

"As opposed to WAP-based applications, Mobilite supports complex business applications," Dr. Donald E. Brown, president and chief executive officer for Interactive Intelligence, said. "WAP is great for simple consumer applications, like stock quote lookups, but is notoriously slow with limited functionality. Mobilite takes a much different approach by providing client-side software for each supported device, along with a powerful application server, a combination that allows organizations to build desktop applications that run well even over low-bandwidth wireless networks."

In addition to client-side software, Mobilite includes the following server-side components:

• A form designer that allows developers to visually lay out device-independent user interfaces.
  
• A graphical application designer that makes it easy to build the application logic flow by dragging and dropping pre-built components into a work space and linking them together.
  
• A Windows 2000-based application server that includes interfaces to a wide variety of databases, e-mail systems, LDAP directories, mainframes, SOAP-based Web services, and telecommunications systems, including PBXs and IP-PBXs.

Because wireless network deployments are more delicate than wired, Interactive Intelligence designed Mobilite with the following features:

• Mobilite transparently supports a variety of networks, including 802.11, GPRS, Cingular Mobitex, CDPD, and Palm.net.
  
• Mobilite applications include end-to-end encryption for maximum security. Users are authenticated against an LDAP directory, and application access can be tightly controlled.
  
• A single Mobilite server can handle thousands of concurrent connections.
  
• As opposed to slower, browser-based wireless applications, Mobilite uses a proprietary compression scheme and intelligent caching to allow applications to be responsive even over low bandwidth connections.
  
• End users running different devices over different types of networks can all run the same application at the same time. Organizations are not forced to standardize on a single type of PDA or wireless network.
  
• Mobilite applications can be updated at any time. Wireless devices automatically execute the latest version, so IT managers don't have to worry about software distribution.

Mobilite is targeted at enterprises with as few as 50 wireless users up to Fortune 500 companies with thousands of mobile employees. Wireless carriers and other service providers can also use Mobilite to build custom wireless business services deployed on service provider networks.

Link:
Interactive Intelligence