bob hunsberger

Q & A

CEO OF NETMOTION WIRELESS

Bob Hunsberger, a 20-year veteran of the wireless industry who has served as an executive with Nortel Networks, Siemens, Broadcom and other companies, earlier this year became CEO of NetMotion Wireless, a Seattle company that provides easy set-up and management of a wide variety of WAN and LAN mobile connectivity for enterprise verticals, such as health care. Hunsberger recently spoke with Wireless Review News Editor Dan O'Shea about his long career and Net-Motion's future.

On his latest career move: I've been with NetMotion since the end of January. I had been CEO at a company called Widcomm that was working with Bluetooth technology. That company had some problems, but we were able to turn it around, and we eventually sold it to Broadcom. I stayed at Broadcom for about five or six months to make sure everything went OK. What excites me about my role at NetMotion is taking the wireless enterprise to the next level. NetMotion literally has tens of thousands of individual users in public safety and in health care and other verticals. Wi-Fi is still a big success in the enterprise, but the nature of the wireless enterprise is changing.

On mobile carriers moving to 3G: We're starting to see these better-performing air interfaces from the carriers. They have really made the move to invest in DSL-like speeds and in plans to go above that. Enterprise users want to operate more and more of their applications on a wireless basis, and this helps. They also want to take advantage of the capabilities of both WANs and LANs. They are going to want to roam between the two.

On NetMotion's product map: A lot of people think of what we do as providing mobile VPN capabilities, allowing enterprise users to pursue mobile computing on the corporate network and allow any enterprise application to work on any type of mobile network. In some sense, we are going to expand on our mobile VPN functionality as users want to roam with those applications boundaries. There will be increasing need to make our interfaces as efficient as they can be.