The Packet Scoop

The annual Apple Developer’s Conference is coming in two weeks to San Francisco’s Moscone Center, just two blocks from our office. Obliviously, being technology geeks, we typically slip out of the office for a day as we spend time at the conference (that’s the beauty of being a technology company in San Francisco – many of the big conferences are here – next up, Linux World!) Although most business environments do not include Apple equipment, it’s tough to debate that many of Apple’s designs, ideas, and innovations ultimately end up in some form in our IT environments.

Case in point: mobile computing. As you probably know Apple CEO Steve Jobs is expected to kick off the conference with the new new iPhone. The design and intuitiveness of the iPhone is relatively unmatched in the industry. But what does that have to do with network management? alot.

First, getting an alert that a router is down to your mobile email is one thing, but being able to fix the problem is a requirement. In order to fix the problem, you need a web interface of some type. But here’s the rub. As a vendor we need to support multiple mobile operating systems and their array of mobile browser versions, instead of just the general PC browser. That means writing code to support blackberry, Windows, Palm etc. What a disaster.

Apple has made the mobile web interface so easy (they default to Safari obviously) and Internet surfing so simple. The zoom in and zoom out features and simple touch scroll are examples. Because of this approach, as a vendor, we only need to build to the general browser, as opposed to the mobile version of IE etc for every operating system. You see, Apple is making life easier for us too.

Apple is making our job easier. And our goal is to make your network management less complicated. Hopefully, we’re getting there.

Steve