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Backoffice & OSS
Alcatel-Lucent Unveils Endpoint Manager Technology For Enterprises
Evros Product Will Corral The Employee Laptop
by Jim Barthold
Alcatel-Lucent Ventures (ALV) has developed a product, Evros, that helps enterprises better control the growing number of employee laptops and, at the same time, offers a way for carriers to sell more 3G services.
Invented by Bell Labs, and introduced by ALV, the vendor’s initiative to identify and commercialize innovative technologies, Evros is a secure, always-on computing system that resides on a 3G PCMCIA data card inserted into laptops. The technology was introduced at the Demo 07 conference in Palm Springs, Calif. and should be generally available by the end of this year.
“We leverage the 3G network to create a device that’s always on and always available for IT to manage the laptops,” said Dor Skuler, general manager of Evros Project at ALV.
The device works even if the laptops are turned off or if the card is disconnected, he said, calling it a “new type of PCMCIA card” because it has its own battery, processor, operating system and software.
Perhaps the biggest benefit for an IT department is the ability to either find or disable a lost laptop via a GPS system. It also allows IT to upload new software and perform other tasks off-hours so “there’s no reason for me to waste valuable working time and get annoyed while I’m waiting for patches to be uploaded and applied during my working hours,” he said.
For the user, Evros automatically creates a VPN tunnel “so every time you go online it’s through VPN; it’s tunneled to the enterprise,” he said. “We give IT more tools that they need but we also try to make the user experience easier and simpler.”
The card, which is currently being incubated in ALV, can be marketed through Alcatel-Lucent, spun out as a separate company or licensed to a third party. It’s currently in trials with several organizations, including the Visiting Nurses Association of Northern New Jersey.
“We are targeting compliance-driven or regulated industries such as finance and healthcare services (that are) regulated by law that the data has to be secure,” Skuler said.
Enterprises, he said, want the technology but carriers can benefit from it.
“This is the first solution that carriers can now go to enterprises … and say ‘This solution requires 3G to work; it only works if you partner with a carrier.’ As opposed to 3G being an alternative way to go online, it becomes a way to solve a real security problem for highly regulated industries,” Skuler said.
It also offers the opportunity for third parties to develop and upsell “a lot of other applications that an always-on platform that has independent access and storage … can bring value to the user’s life,” he concluded.
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