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SCOMO Goes Beyond FOTA and Focuses on Managing Individual Software Components

By Elad Ganot
Director of Standards and Alliances
Red Bend Software

Last month I enthusiastically purchased an advanced home entertainment system. I paid a lot of money to enjoy its high sound and picture quality, which were enabled by the cutting-edge technology that’s available in today’s market. It took me about seven years to upgrade my system even though I am a gadget fan and have a technical background. My new system is composed of an HDTV, an advanced receiver (which includes an image enhancer), a media streamer and a DVD player. You might wonder why isn’t Blu-ray part of my system—especially if I want to enjoy high definition movies. The DVD won’t help me so much as it cannot store the capacity required for HD quality. Well, as you may know, there is still doubt on whether Blu-ray will indeed become the next mainstream format for movies, so I’ve decided to wait and see. I can always upgrade separately my existing DVD to a Blu-ray (or whatever other format wins the market). Upgrading my DVD will not force me to upgrade the whole system because it is a stand-alone part with well-defined interfaces to the rest of the system. This makes it a “component.” When the time comes, I will receive an email telling me about this cool new device and for the right price I would click the “buy it now” button, and a delivery package will be on its way to my home.

Going from the hardware world to the software world, things look even cooler. Here not only do components are upgradable, but also they even do so almost instantly and quite frequently. I change software components on my computer at least 100 times a year (not just once every few years). I install software, update existing software and uninstall software that I don’t use. Sometimes I just disable software for a while and re-enable it later. Yeah, I like tweaking the software on my computer, and recently I started playing with my mobile phone in the same way. My mobile phone has so many software components available for it that I even abandoned my stand-alone PDA, which had served me loyally for several years.

Most users are not even aware of the fact that their mobile phone could actually be used as a personal computing platform. They probably know they can customize it in terms of a fashionable look (with wallpapers, sounds and colorful covers), but will they know how to discover a useful software component? Then be able to download it? Install it? Disable it if needed and re-enable it? Remove it?

It was back in 2005 when the mobile industry saw an opportunity to improve the user experience with regard to software management and offered a service of managing the “life cycle” of software components on remote devices. To be able to realize this concept, you have to achieve a mass market, and the industry must agree on some common methods of communication—to allow for every device on every network to connect to the service, regardless of the manufacturer of the equipment (be it a managed client device or a managed server). The good news is that we NOW have a consensus with the Candidate Release of SCOMO 1.0 that was ratified by the OMA on Nov. 17.

Now let us componentize the last sentence in a reversed order:

Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) is the open organization that develops service enablers for the benefit of the mobile (and recently fixed-line) industry. If you are using Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), then you are already using an enabler developed by the OMA.
Software Component Management Object version 1.0 (SCOMO 1.0) is the name of the service enabler that allows a service provider to remotely manage software components on connected devices.
Candidate Release is a major milestone in the development of OMA enablers. It denotes that the enabler is ready for implementation and is about to go through a phase of interoperability testing. If a concrete interoperability issue is identified during the testing phase, then a standard solution can be found and incorporated into the official specifications. Once no more issues are found and interoperability testing is sufficiently successful, the enabler is promoted to Approved status.

But a Candidate state also means a lot from a business perspective. Interoperability testing period typically happens in parallel to commercial deployments of the enabler. This means that Candidate Release of an enabler is a signal for businesses to start implementing commercial deployments, since the enabler is stable.

In mid-2006, the OMA published the Candidate Release of Firmware Update Management Object (FUMO), which allowed mobile operators to offer a service of updating the firmware of a connected device over the air, without bothering the consumer to physically bring the device to a store. This enabler—which was later Approved in early 2007—has revolutionized the way firmware is managed and had significant results in productivity of consumers as well as mobile operators and handheld manufacturers. It saved costs and, at times, was a means for rolling out new service features and services. To date, hundreds of millions of devices worldwide have been using FOTA, and it serves as evidence for the success of the FUMO enabler.

Much of the lesson and design details of SCOMO are based on FUMO, but with a major difference in mind. This time it’s all about software components over the air (SCOTA) rather than a single monolithic firmware image being managed. It is a more complicated task to manage separate components than it is to manage a single firmware, which is why FUMO is not appropriate for performing SCOTA. But SCOMO is still based on design principles learned from the successful FUMO standard. In that sense, SCOMO can be considered as an evolution of FUMO. But make no mistakes, these two are complementary to each other and they will live side-by-side. They are tools designed for similar but still different purposes. Coming back to my neat home entertainment system analogy: I would use FUMO to update the whole system in one piece, but I would use SCOMO to update just my DVD component (hopefully sooner than later).

For more information about SCOMO, please read the following:

"SCOMO: Enabling the Remote Lifecycle Management of Software Components" at http://www.redbend.com/resources/scomo.asp and
Wireless Week’s “Inventory Changes Everything” at http://www.redbend.com/news/view_article.asp?ID=605&TypeID=2.

Labels: design, device management, DM, firmware, FOTA, mobile, mobile software management, Red Bend, standards

posted by Red Bend @ Tuesday, December 2, 2008 - 11:23 AM

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