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Red Bend Blog

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Software on the Edge: MSM Reaches New Frontiers

By Yoram Salinger
CEO
Red Bend Software

Having experienced the benefits of MSM for mobile phones, operators are beginning to require software management for all edge devices in the network. Mobile broadband PC cards are some the latest devices to benefit from FOTA and OMA-DM capability. With MSM, operators can provision settings over-the-air, reduce customer support costs and keep consumers satisfied with their mobile services—whether they are talking on their mobile phones or video conferencing from their PCs.

The fact that operators are extending MSM to mobile PC cards shows the increasing importance that operators are placing on having full management control over their networks. Red Bend is in a unique position to give operators a consistent level of control in a world of heterogeneous terminals. We are the only company totally focused on remotely managing software inside mobile devices. Our experience working with 15 manufacturers across a dozen different mobile platforms (both open and proprietary) enables Red Bend to intimately appreciate the complexities of mobile software architectures.

We recently celebrated shipping our market-leading vCurrent® Mobile solution in 200 million mobile phones worldwide. Soon, mobile broadband PC cards will come to market that are Red Bend-enabled. And after that, well… stay tuned. As operators and manufacturers become more advanced in their use of MSM, Red Bend will continue to innovate and deliver new solutions that enable our customers to derive even greater value from software on the edge.

Labels: FOTA, mobile software management, OMA-DM

posted by Red Bend @ Monday, November 26, 2007 - 5:32 PM 0 Comments

Best Practices in Creating Firmware for Over-the-Air Update Deployment

By Ilana Bogomolny
Senior Product Manager
Red Bend Software

In the mobile phone market, increasing numbers of devices now support FOTA—Firmware Over-the-Air (FOTA) updating. FOTA is the most cost-effective way to maintain the device firmware and to provide new features remotely. It is already common practice for operators in Japan and the US, and is gaining momentum with OEMs and operators in Europe.

However, even with wide support for FOTA capability across feature phones and smartphones, the actual deployment of firmware updates varies by operator, OEM and even by region. Updating mobile firmware over-the-air is new territory and a subtle paradigm shift for device software developers and integrators. Raising the level of awareness about best practices in creating and deploying new firmware versions using FOTA can significantly accelerate market adoption as well as improve the consumer experience and level of trust in this new technology.

To optimize the FOTA user experience, the updates need to be as small as possible, and the update process should be as fast as possible. From the device manufacturer perspective, updates should be easy to create and test.

For the past five years, Red Bend Software has been providing its market-leading vCurrent® Mobile FOTA solution to the industry’s top device manufacturers on more than 100 device models, implementing a wide variety of device architectures, chipset platforms and operating systems. Red Bend's Field Application Engineers have accumulated a wealth of hands-on experience in supporting our customers through successful integration, adoption and deployment of FOTA.

At Red Bend, we have learned that although using vCurrent Mobile for FOTA updating does not require any changes to the manufacturer’s tool-chain, the awareness of the factors affecting firmware updates can have a significant effect on update size and speed and ultimately the consumer's experience.

So what are these factors?

FOTA updates are created by calculating the difference between old and new firmware versions. This means that OEM software developers and integrators should not consider each software release only as a standalone project, but should also be aware of the amount and nature of the changes introduced since previous versions. As many teams contribute components to a software release, it is often difficult for the configuration manager to figure out who is contributing most changes – Red Bend provides a set of tools which allows the configuration manager to understand who is contributing what kind of changes.

The updating experience for the consumer should be as easy and brief as possible. To this end, creating and sending a single file that updates the firmware version is always preferable to sending a series of updates incrementing one version at a time. In addition to improving the user's experience, single-step, single-session updates provide less opportunity for the phone users to cancel the download process, and thus will increase the rate of successfully completed update sessions.

Other factors that affect FOTA are the optimization of the FOTA Update Agent during the integration onto the device, and the optimal usage of update generation tools when FOTA updates are created and deployed.

In addition, standard engineering practices for software updating involving data formats and API compatibility should be observed.

In order to help industry-wide FOTA adoption, we at Red Bend are here to assist our customers in making their FOTA updates smaller and faster, ensuring FOTA-friendliness of each new firmware version, and tracking the type and quantity of changes between firmware versions.

For more information, please contact your Red Bend account team or email us at inquiry@redbend.com.

Labels: firmware, FOTA, mobile software management

posted by Red Bend @ - 4:55 PM 0 Comments