Wavelink Press Releases

3M Selects Wavelink for Mobile Device Management

Company manages devices from multiple vendors and reduces weeklong process to 30 minutes

MIDVALE, UTAH — Aug. 13, 2009 — As a Fortune 500 company with worldwide sales of $25.3 billion and more than 79,000 employees, 3M has the monstrous tasks of managing its infrastructure for all its employees. In order to manage the ruggedized mobile devices in approximately 30 plants nationwide, 3M has selected Avalanche Mobility Center™ (MC) from industry-leader Wavelink® (www.wavelink.com).

3M has completed its deployment of the Wavelink software and uses the solution to manage its ruggedized devices that vary from a half dozen devices up to 80 devices per plant. In order to maintain a high level of security on the devices, the company uses Avalanche MC to regularly change the encryption keys, along with updating the firmware, pushing out configuration updates and changing the SSID on each device.

“As 3M compared Avalanche MC to other solutions, we found it to be the most comprehensive solution that could also manage devices from multiple vendors,” said Dean Svela, who manages 3M’s mobile infrastructure. “We were using a lot of old Intermec devices along with a number of devices from LXE. We are now starting to introduce some Motorola devices to our network, and Wavelink lets me manage all of them centrally from a single console.”

Immediately after deployment, 3M saw a huge time savings in updating its devices using Avalanche MC. “Being able to remotely and centrally manage the devices made a huge difference,” said Svela. “Now we don’t need to have our IT people at each location manually find each of the devices to update them. Previously, if one person had to go find all 30 devices to update the encryption key, it would take him all week. Now with Avalanche we can get it all down in about 30 minutes.”

Prior to using Wavelink Avalanche, each mobile device was manually configured in different locations by different people. Over a period of time, there were almost as many different configurations as there were devices. Wavelink Avalanche has made it much easier for 3M to standardize the configuration on each of its devices. The scan-to-configure feature allows administrators to create a profile as a barcode that is then simply scanned by the device that needs to be configured.

The central management console gives 3M greater visibility into the mobile devices on the network. Each plant or location can be pulled up so the administrator can see exactly how many devices and what type of devices are being used along with the status of the updates or configuration enabling them to easily see where potential problems may exist.

“The biggest advantage for us is the time and money we save,” adds Svela. “When we are able to remotely update firmware and radio drivers, push out new configurations and easily update the WEP encryption keys, we are able to drastically reduce the strain on the IT staff at each site so they are able to focus on other projects.”

For more information about Wavelink Avalanche MC, please visit http://www.wavelink.com/products/avmc.aspx.

About Wavelink
Founded in 1992, Wavelink Corporation is the leading provider of multi-vendor mobile application development and mobile device and infrastructure management software. Wavelink’s technology solves the unique challenges involved in deploying, managing and controlling auto-ID data collection (AIDC) systems and RFID, and facilitates peak performance from frontline staff. Wavelink’s emulation product family is the industry standard in providing host connectivity solutions. More than 10,000 companies in the retail, manufacturing, government and logistics industries rely on Wavelink to accelerate application delivery, reduce device management and support costs, and tighten network security. For more information, please visit www.wavelink.com or call 888-697-9283 from the USA and Canada or +800-9283-5465 outside the USA and Canada.

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Wavelink is a registered trademark and Avalanche Mobility Center is a trademark of Wavelink Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Media Contacts:
Rod Anderson
SNG PR for Wavelink
801-208-1100
rod.anderson@sng.com
www.sng.com