NetMotion Wireless, an infrastructure provider for remote access to mission-critical enterprise applications, on Monday launched Version 6.5 of its mobile VPN solution.

As the enterprise reluctantly gets dragged into deploying mission-critical applications, the need for better performance, ease-of-use and policy management for mobile devices is increasing, according to industry analysts.

To that end NetMotion unveiled Version 6.5 of Mobility XE with a UDP (User Datagram Protocol)-based VPN capability.

UDP will give users a higher level of performance, said Rob Enderle, principal at the Enderle Analyst Group.

"If speed was an absolute requirement you would select UDP," Enderle said, noting that while UDP is less reliable than TCP, packets that don"t show up with UDP are re-sent.

The major change in Version 6.5 is the ability to administer policy over the VPN.

According to Enderle, VPNs are security nightmares that provide tunnels into otherwise secure networks.

"It"s like building a castle with three sets of walls and then you build a tunnel underneath the walls," Enderle said.

The management overlay to a VPN will allow administrators to write policy centrally and deploy it. For example, a policy might say that users cannot access corporate applications if the access points are not owned and managed by the enterprise, said John Knopf, senior product manager at NetMotion.

The latest version can also identify what needs to be tunneled through a VPN and what does not.

For example, carriers provide connection software that communicates with the wireless data over the stack, Knopf said. While a typical VPN would tunnel that communication, Version 6.5 understands that tunneling in this case is not necessary.

NetMotion Wireless Mobility XE is available now. Pricing starts at US$15,000 for 100 devices or $105,000 for 1,000 mobile devices.