SoftBank Selects Red Bend Software for Over-the-Air Management of New Summer Lineup of Mobile Phones

WALTHAM, Mass.—July 7, 2010—Red Bend® Software, the market leader in Mobile Software Management (MSM), today announced that SoftBank has selected Red Bend to provide over-the-air software updating and device management for more than 50 percent of its summer lineup of mobile phones. With the inclusion of Red Bend’s vRapid Mobile® and vDirect Mobile™ software, Softbank can easily and reliably deliver new firmware updates over the air (FOTA) and provision new services to mobile consumers consistently across multiple platforms.

Red Bend’s mobile software management solution is available for SoftBank consumers in 10 summer models from leading manufacturers Sharp and NEC. The phones will provide many new and updated services and features, including a Twitter widget. The Red Bend-Enabled™ summer models are:

• Sharp – mirumo2 944SH, AQUOS SHOT 945SH, SOLAR HYBRID 842SH, THE PREMIUM6 WATERPROOF 841SH, 841SH s, 843SH,  945SH G Ver.GP30th, etc.
• NEC – 840N and 841N

These phones from SoftBank join a growing list of mobile devices featuring Red Bend’s software. In the first quarter of 2010, Red Bend’s software products were embedded in 70 million mobile phones, machine-to-machine (M2M) modules, mobile Internet devices (MID), USB modems and WiMAX chipsets, bringing the company’s total shipments to 750 million. Nearly one in four mobile handsets shipped in the quarter was Red Bend-Enabled—making it the company’s strongest quarter ever for deploying its mobile software management solutions.

Red Bend’s vRapid Mobile is the industry’s leading FOTA solution with 64 percent worldwide market share for FOTA-enabled handsets, according to independent research firm Ovum. It enables service providers and device manufacturers to update mobile phone software quickly and cost-effectively by:

• Identifying the essential changes from an existing version of firmware to a new, updated version.
• Reducing the new updated firmware to a compact package, up to 97 percent smaller than can be achieved through other techniques, to enable efficient over-the-air delivery.
• Installing the new firmware within the limited memory available on a wireless device.
• Enhancing the mobile user experience by seamlessly installing new updates and features in the background while the consumer continues using the phone.

Red Bend’s vDirect Mobile is the industry’s leading independent device management client. It is standards-based software that works with any Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) device management (DM) server. vDirect Mobile enables mobile operators and manufacturers to break the dependency of closed DM systems. Its modular architecture and cross-platform support improves time to market for mobile devices that must comply with operator requirements for OMA DM.

In addition, vDirect Mobile is a full-functioned device management client that delivers provisioning, configuration, device information retrieval and security to meet expanding requirements for mobile software management. It is proven across multiple platforms, operating systems and memory types on feature phones, smartphones, WiMAX devices and M2M modules.

About Red Bend Software
Red Bend Software (www.redbend.com), the leader in Mobile Software Management (MSM), provides software solutions for managing firmware, applications and devices over the air. The company’s award-winning products enable device manufacturers, mobile operators and software developers to increase revenues, reduce support costs and achieve faster time to market by remotely managing their software assets on mobile devices. Red Bend’s software has been deployed in 750 million mobile devices by eight of the top 10 handset manufacturers and leading mobile operators such as NTT DOCOMO and China Mobile, as well as dozens of other companies in the mobile, M2M and WiMAX markets. Unlike device management vendors with proprietary end-to-end systems and manufacturers’ internally developed solutions that are platform specific, Red Bend is the only company offering independent client software that is interoperable with any standards-based server and that works with any platform on any type of mobile device. Founded in 1999, Red Bend is a privately held, venture capital-financed company with offices in China, Israel, Japan, Korea, the U.K. and the U.S.