What I Hope I Don’t Hear at Mobility Field Day 4

With another Mobility Field Day 4 coming up soon, I can’t help but ponder what this year’s briefings will bring. (If you’re not familiar with Mobility Field Day or the Field Day franchise, have a look here.) As I bang this blog out, the agenda features:

• Aruba
• Cisco
• Fortinet
• Metageek
• Mist
• …and a secret company you’ll all find out about during the event

This list may or may not grow a little, we never know right up until the last minute. As is, it’s a nice mix of old-guard industry leaders, up-and-comers, crowd favorites, and tool-makers. The event is gonna sizzle as each vendor attempts to show their newest offerings and best face, and I’m both proud and priveleged to be in attendance.

That being said- As a loooong-time Wireless Doer and frequent delegate for Field Day events, I’d like to share some of what I sincerely hope I DO NOT see and hear at this awesome event. This is a voice from the trenches speaking…

• AI and Machine Learning as THE THING. Given the line-up of pesenting vendors, I promise that you’ll get intoxicated if you take a drink everytime you hear “AI” or “machine learning” during MFD4. I’m all for letting the world know that these processes are at work under the hood- but companies also have a way of overselling buzzwords. Just because a vendor has incorporated artifical intelligence, machine learning, SDeverything, analytics, etc, it doesn’t mean the product won’t ultimately be problematic. There needs to be more to the presentation than “AND WE FREAKIN’ USE AI- NOW CUT US A P.O.!”
• Over-Licensed Proprietary Features Masked as Innovation. Vendors have the right to charge whatever they want, and some have certainly turned complex licensing paradigms into huge cash cows.

  Hear me now vendors: license away- but know that fair play counts. And some of you have lost your sense of fair play in favor of squeezing every rediculous cent out of long-time loyal customers with obscene, over-complicated license paradigms that are poorly disguised as “innovative”.  You can show us the most useful and revolutionary features in the world, but when even your own sales folk get tripped up in the complexity of licensing, the aftertaste is not worth using the feauture set.

• BMW Pricing for Ford Fiesta Feature Sets.  If it’s buggy, incomplete, “coming in Q1 next year”, bundled with a slew of other functions we really don’t want, or implemented with an out-of-touch developer’s view on wireless, it is not worth a premium. Back to the fair play thing- roadmap feautures are fine. But don’t charge me today for what I can’t use for 6-12 months. Or expect customers to be thrilled to pay for a laundry list of features they don’t need to create the illusion of some kind of wonderful deal is at hand. Be San Jose and let your merits carry you, and not Detroit- I’d rather have another vascetomy than visit a car dealership.
• A New House Made of Crap is Still a House Made of Crap. There are product sets on the market that are long in the tooth and perpetually problematic and buggy. The delegates in the rooms at MFD4 will be all too familiar with hidden TCO that comes with lack of QA and rushed-out-the-door code and hardware. I sincerely hope that we don’t hear about “new” anything being added to product sets that need to be sunsetted for everyone’s benefit. In this spirit I would also like to hear honest explanations about how whatever new stuff is coming is developed with higher QA standards than in the past applied. It’s fun seeing RF test facilities and such, but the radios usually aren’t the issue- it’s substandard code that runs the radios. It’s hard to get excited about new features added to old problems.
• Dahboard Fever. Marketing departments love to wow us: “each of your network users will have 87 IoT devices on them by next year- YoUR NETWORK IS NOT READY”. Besides baseless huge numbers and predictions of overwhelm, another trick is the accross-the-board generalizations that we all have deep, deep problems that only one more dashboard can solve. So what if you have more dashboards now than you can monitor- this next one is THE fix, and will scrape all of the dumb off your ass to bring clarity at long last. Pffft.

You’ll notice that my little list here really doesn’t just apply to Mobility Field Day. To me, it’s just common sense narrative that applies to vendor relationships day in and day out. But I also know that too often product managers and C-levels have a distorted view of how wonderful their stuff is, and hopefully Field Day gets us a little closer to honest, direct dialogue with those vendor bigs who may only get filtered feedback.

There is a lot to get excited about right now out there in WLAN Industryland… 802.11ax, WPA3, 5Gish stuff, new operating systems, fresh analysis resources, and a slew of technologies all ready to propel our networks and the industry forward. But it has to be based in reality, attainable, affordable, and implemented with STABILITY for end users in mind.

See you at Field Day.

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Note: on Twitter, follow @TechFieldDay and #MFD4 for this event, August 14-16

Figuring Out What Bothers Me About Wi-Fi and “Analytics”

I’ve been to the well, my friends. And I have drank the water. 

I was most fortunate in being a participant in the by-invitation Mobility Field Day 3 event, this past week. Few events get you this close to so many primary WLAN industry companies and their technical big-guns, on such an intimate level and on their own turf. For months leading up to MFD3, something  has been bothering me about the discreet topic of “analytics” as collectively presented by the industry- but I haven’t been able to nail down my unease until this past week.

And with the help of an email I received on the trip back east after Mobility Field Day was over.

Email Subject Line: fixing the wifi sucks problem

That was the subject in the email, sent by an employee of one of the companies that presented on their analytics solution at MFD3 (Nyansa, Cisco, Aruba Networks, Fortinet, and Mist Systems all presented on their own analytics platforms). The sender of this email knew enough about me to do a little ego stroking, but not enough to know that only a matter of hours earlier I was interacting with his company’s top folks, or that I’ve already had an extensive eval with the product he’s pitching at my own site. No matter… a polite “no thanks” and I was on my way. But his email did ring a bell in my brain, and for that I owe this person a thank you.

The subject line in that email set several dominoes of realization falling for me. For example-  at least some in the WLAN industry are working hard to plant seeds in our minds that “your WLAN sucks. You NEED us.” Once that hook is set, their work in pushing the fruits of their labor gets easier. The problem is, all of our networks don’t suck. Why? These are just some of the reasons:

• Many of our wireless networks are well-designed by trained professionals
• Those trained professionals often have a lot of experience, and wide-ranging portfolios of successful examples of their work
• Many of our WLAN environments are well-instrumented with vendor-provided NMS systems, monitoring systems like Solar Winds and AKIPS, and log everything under the sun to syslog power-houses like Splunk
• We often have strong operational policies that help keep wireless operations humming right
• We use a wealth of metrics to monitor client satisfaction (and dis-satisfaction)

To put it another way: we’re not all just bumbling along like chuckleheads waiting for some Analytics Wizard in a Can to come along and scrape the dumbness off of our asses.

In all fairness, that’s not a global message that ALL vendors are conveying.  But it does make you do a double-take when you consider that a whole bunch of data science has gone into popping up a window that identifies a client that likely needs a driver update, when those of us who have been around awhile know how to identify a client that needs a driver update by alternate means.  Sure, “analytics” does a lot more, but it all comes as a trade-off (I’ll get into that in a minute) and can still leave you short on your biggest issues.

Like in my world, where the SINGLE BIGGEST problem since 2006, hands-down and frequently catastrophic, has been the buggy nature of my WLAN vendor’s code. Yet this vendor’s new analytics do nothing to identify when one of it’s own bugs has come to call. That intelligence would be a lot more useful than some of the other stuff “analytics” wants to show.

Trade-Offs Aplenty

I’m probably too deep into this article to say “I’m really not trying to be negative…” but I’ll hazard that offering anyways. Sitting in the conference rooms of Silicon Valley and hearing from many of the industry’s finest Analytics product’s management teams is impressive and its obvious that each believes passionately in their solutions. I’m not panning concepts like AI, machine learning, data mining, etc as being un-useful as I’d be an idiot to do so. But there is a lot of nuance to the whole paradigm to consider:

• Money spent on analytics solutions is money diverted from elsewhere in the budget
• Another information-rich dashboard to pour through takes time away from other taskings
• Much of the information presented won’t be actionable, and you likely could have found it in tools you already have (depending on what tools you have)
• Unlike RADIUS/NAC, DHCP/DNS, and other critical services, you don’t NEED Analytics. If you are so bad off that you do, you may want to audit who is doing your network and how

Despite being a bit on the pissy side here, I actually believe that any of the Analytics systems I saw this week could bring value to environments where they are used, in an “accessory” role.  My main concerns:

• Price and recurrent revenue models for something that is essentially an accessory
• How well these platforms scale in large, complicated environments
• False alarms, excessive notifications for non-actionable events and factors
• Being marketed at helpdesk environments where Tier 1 support staff have zero clue how to digest the alerts and everything becomes yet another frivolous trouble ticket
•  That a vendor may re-tool their overall WLAN product line and architecture so that Analytics is no longer an accessory but a mandatory part of operations- at a fat price
• Dollars spent on big analytics solutions might be better allocated to network design skills,  beefy syslog environments, or to writing RFPs to replace your current WLAN pain points once and for all
• If 3rd party analytics have a place in an industry where each WLAN vendor is developing their own

If all of that could be reconciled to my liking, much of my skepticism would boil off. I will say after this last week at MFD3, both Aruba and Fortinet did a good job of conveying that analytics plays a support role, and that it’s not the spotlight technology in a network environment.

Have a look for yourself at Arista,  Aruba, Cisco, Fortinet, Mist and Nyansa telling their analytics stories, linked to from the MFD3 website.

Thanks for reading.