Smoothing the path for mobile Linux

When in past years Symbian Ltd. nervously eyed the nascent promise of mobile Linux, Symbian evangelists noted sharply that the rival, open-source platform would require considerable sweat equity or costly out-sourcing to ready it for market.
That claim turned out to be true to an extent, to the benefit of software integrators such as Wind River, recently named as the official systems integrator for the LiMo Foundation, the mobile Linux camp with the most handsets on the market to date. (That means delivering the common infrastructure, tools, testing and integration services for the LiMo platform.)
Wind River is also involved closely with the “second wave” of Android devices launched by members of the Open Handset Alliance, and backed by Google Inc.
(And, yes, Symbian has since been fully absorbed by patron Nokia Corp., which now is offering it as an open-source, license-free platform to all takers this year. The platform plot thickens.)
In general, the ascendance of software over hardware as the focus of innovation will translate to software taking a larger chunk of a handset’s bill of materials, according to Wind River and two analysts.
“The software portion [of the BoM] is definitely going upward,” said analyst Tina Teng at iSuppli Corp. “I wouldn’t be surprised if, for a smartphone, the software portion of the BoM reached the range of 25%.”
“A software integrator is important, especially for an open OS that only provides the OS and middleware,” Teng said. “When a manufacturer doesn’t have the capability to do software or user-interface development, an integrator can bridge the application layer and the OS layer.”
Sweat it out, if you have the expertise in-house, or pay to play.
Analyst Carl Howe at Yankee Group cautioned that defining “software” in a handset may be an elastic category, which can skew estimates of software’s portion of the BoM. But in general Howe agreed that, even with “license-free” open software such as mobile Linux, software costs will rise due to the costs of integration and intellectual property review.
Thus third parties such as Wind River, Monte Vista, Purple Labs, even Broadcom Corp. are finding a need for their integration and “indemnification” services, Howe said. (“Indemnification” means a third party has reviewed a Linux stack, for example, to ensure that it doesn’t contain another party’s intellectual property that could fuel IP litigation.)
Bullish on Linux
That’s also Wind River’s view of the mobile world, a relatively small but growing piece of its work in software integration for vertical industries such as aerospace, defense and automotive.
“We’re a bit like the hidden force behind these Linux-related handset launches,” said Jason Whitmire, general manager for mobility at Wind River. “We see hardware decreasing and software increasing as proportions of the bill of materials. Software is probably 30% of the cost now and will be 40% within 12 months.” (Analysts Howe and Teng believe that figure is high.) “That’s how fast things are changing. The open source story is compelling – lowering costs, access to a greater pool of developers, allowing operators greater customization – but at the end of the day, it’s more complex, because you have to do a lot yourself or you have to outsource.”
“There are lots of bits and pieces that have to work together,” Whitmire added. “If you’re an operator, you want partners who know what they’re doing. So we’re working with operators on their version of the Android stack and supporting them in their franchise activities, because they’ll be licensing that stack – or their layer of the stack – back to OEMs.”
Wind River bolstered its expertise in this area with last August’s purchase of Mizi Research Inc., a Korea-based software integrator that had worked on Linux-based smartphones for Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., according to Whitmire. Wind River expects to see four smartphone launches this year that rely on its invisible handiwork, including one already announced from Kyocera Wireless Corp.
With its work for LiMo and OHA members, plus integration work for Intel Corp. for its “Moorestown” chipset designed for mobile Internet devices, Wind River believes it has placed a solid bet on a growing segment of the mobile industry.
“Over the next five years, we believe that those three Linux stacks are going to capture the majority of volumes in Linux-based, mobile phone deployments,” Whitmire said.
This trend will benefit as major OEMs phase out their legacy, proprietary platform software, which dominated the feature phone space, Whitmire added.
Shooting back
Whitmire took an opportunity to return Symbian’s fire.
“Symbian, I would argue, has reached the end of its life-cycle,” Whitmire said. “But it has reached a level of integration and maturity that you can still ship on it, which is good. The last quarter before Nokia took control of Symbian, however, they reported a precipitous decline in volumes. We think that’s continuing as these Linux-based designs kick in. There is no manufacturer or operator on the planet I know of with plans to design Symbian into their next-generation architecture. It’s either LiMo or Android.”
“Some of Symbian’s arguments have been right,” Whitmire acknowledged. “There is fragmentation within Linux and those early pioneers in Linux, like Motorola, suffered the most, because they literally built their Linux stacks internally, at a cost of half-a-billion to a billion dollars. And of course they have not amortized that over other parts of the industry. That’s a lesson learned and, why, today, operators are either choosing camps between Android and LiMo or doing both to ensure a proper pool of phones. We call that ‘collaborative amortization.'”
Risks
The challenge in the bigger game of open-source platforms vs. proprietary offerings from the likes of Apple Inc., Research In Motion Ltd. and Palm Inc., is that the proprietary platform shops can attract the application developers who understandably seek write-once-run-anywhere platforms.
“Going forward, Linux and open Symbian (still) run the risk of market fragmentation into a million different pieces,” Howe said.
As for Wind River’s involvement, Howe is respectful of the company’s prowess.
“They’re a very credible player in that software integration game,” Howe said. “Shoe-horning good things into small packages is their core competency.”