The telcos, including some big national carriers, have announced their backing of Mozilla’s Firefox OS, a smartphone platform that’s supposed to bring down the price of smartphones. That’s obviously what’s behind the deal in the first place; telcos have become weary of subsidizing handsets to promote coolness. They’ve encouraged Microsoft and now it appears that they’re hedging their bets even there. Even if the new phone OS isn’t a big hit, it could have a big impact.
Firefox OS is based more on HTML5, with applications taking the form of web pages and scripts. There’s an older-version open-source Android kernel at the bottom and a shim layer that exposes phone features through APIs so that they can be addressed by HTML5. Thus, they can access the APIs representing both external (web/cloud) and internal (Firefox OS) features.
It seems to me that the value of this model would be limited if we assumed that the phones had to do exactly the same work to produce a given experience, and an alternative app model would rely more on cloud execution of features to unload the device and lower the cost. If that’s the case then there may be a double reason for operators to like the approach. If operators hosting mobile features in the cloud could integrate these with basic handsets (what I’ve called “brightphones” as opposed to truly “smartphones”) they could have a model that re-introduces them to the mobile revenue stream.
The Firefox OS model might also represent another take on the thin client, what Google Chrome OS goes after. While Mozilla is saying the goal is the phone and tablet space they admit that even a desktop is possible, and that might mean that the OS could take a fork into the business space, offering a richer and standards-based virtual desktop. The big question will be performance; scripting languages running inside a browser aren’t likely to be as fast as traditional app languages. Work here would narrow the gap, though.
Another interesting development is the Dell buy of Quest Software. Quest is a database and IT infrastructure player, a company that would give Dell a firmer foot in the data center when competing against players like HP and Oracle who have both software and servers. The important thing here, I think, is that Dell is demonstrating that you can’t be a pure server player and sustain profit margins and strategic influence. That’s also true in network equipment, as my recent surveys are showing. Vendors who have a greater IT component to their product lines, or more software focus, have uniformly scored higher. Engaged in the cloud in a credible way? Good for your margins. Enterprises who are embarking on IT missions of their own want the missions supported by their vendors, not a vendor who simply pushes devices at them for self-assembly. Obviously a full spectrum product line helps out, and Dell wants to make the move.
Quest isn’t a known cloud play, though, and I don’t think that infrastructure management is going to drive enough buyers to Dell’s doorstep. They need to reposition this asset as part of their cloud story. That will almost certainly mean positioning infrastructure management as cloud management, something that I always wondered why Quest itself didn’t take on. There’s an enormous opportunity in the area of “cloudifying” applications, after all. We’ll likely see some steps taken quickly because Dell won’t want to waste the limelight the deal will bring them.