Air Time: Cisco and Intel: Best Friends in the Enterprise: Page 2 of 2

Although all the radio chipmakers, including Intel, stepped up quickly and added CCX
capabilities to their client radios, they haven't done such a good job of keeping up
with Cisco's subsequent releases of CCX 2 and CCX 3. The end result is often a
mish-mash of client code, depending on the age of the notebook computer. As you
might guess, even though silicon vendors were fully willing to add new CCX
functionality to their latest designs, they weren't all that thrilled about upgrading
older clients, which made it difficult for Cisco to leverage its infrastructure. These
interoperability issues made it difficult to implement advanced wireless services.
They also led a fair number of enterprises to turn to third-party client supplicants
from vendors like Funk Software and Meetinghouse Communications, which provided
the vendors with a standardized client across multiple notebook generations.

Now, Cisco and Intel are coming to grips with some of these issues while also
advancing key strategic initiatives. In addition to the Digital Communities initiative,
their Business Class Wireless Suite joint announcement at this week's Intel
Developer Forum is designed to more tightly integrate Intel Centrino clients with
Cisco's Unified Wireless Architecture (which, by the way, doesn't look very unified
to this writer). I suspect much of this is driven by Cisco's desire to fix problems
with CCX. And as part of this effort to become wireless best friends, each company
pledged support for important technology initiatives being advanced by the other.
Intel announced that it will join Cisco's NAC (Network Admission Control) program
while Cisco will join Intel's AMT (Active Management Technology) program. These are
serious and significant alliances, but that didn't stop me from chuckling when I read
this sentence from Cisco's announcement:

"With Cisco NAC operating with Intel AMT, enterprises will be better able to defend
against security threats, helping to maintain user and business productivity and
reduce the cost of security attacks and improve system remediation."

Got that?