The great thing about mobile computing is that it significantly boosts mobility. The bad thing about mobility is that it will drive you mad trying to support it.

The thing that drives enterprise customers crazy about mobility is the general lack of standards. The end result is a dizzying array of proprietary services and products that all require special attention and unique application development environments if you want to develop a custom application.

Cisco is trying to step into the middle of the mobile morass with a new set of offerings, albeit proprietary, that starts to provide a layer of middleware sanity over all the various mobile devices and services.

Known as Collaboration in Motion, the core of the latest Cisco initiative involves extensions to Cisco existing Compatible Extensions (CCX) program that adds the ability to do remote diagnostics of mobile devices, enhance security, track locations and support voice applications on mobile devices. As part of this effort, Cisco is also upgrading its support for running WebEx online collaboration software on smart phones, including the Apple iPhone.

In terms of hardware, Cisco next month also plans to make available a new 5500 series wireless controller that comes with simpler version of Cisco management software for controllers. The new 5500 series can manage up to 250 access points and thousands of client devices. Finally, Cisco is rolling out a 3310 Mobility Service Engine that is designed to make it easier for smaller organizations to develop intelligent mobile networks.

Perhaps most importantly, Cisco plans to make the information its engines and controllers gather available to developers via an open API, which could go a long way towards making those applications more intelligent.

Clearly, mobile computing is going to be one of the cornerstones of just about everything relevant that happens in future of enterprise computing. Obviously, it would be nice to have a set of robust industry standards in place to do much of what Cisco is delivering around this Collaboration in Motion effort. But in the absence of those standards, most enterprise organizations can't wait for various standards committees to catch up with their already pressing requirements.

Hopefully, the prospect of Cisco extending its networking dominance out across various wireless networks will spur the industry to move faster on creating much-needed standards for mobile computing that are sorely missing today.