Before the spinoff of its chip business, Motorola Inc. often came across as an octopus-a many-sided giant. With Freescale Semiconductor Inc. now a standalone company, the wireless vendor still weighs heavy in the industry.
This has been both boon and pain for the Schaumburg, Ill.-based vendor. Motorola has been lofted as a premier player in a variety of fields, including public-safety and handset design, and later regarded as an also-ran infrastructure supplier, fueling speculation that the company would have to sell some aspects of its business. Meanwhile, the company recently shook up its leadership structure as Christopher Galvin stepped down to make way for Sun Microsystems Inc. alumni Ed Zander.
Today, the company’s fingers are deep in many pies: pioneering protocols in the defense and government sectors, building wireless devices for cellular and other protocols, as well as exploring applications, infrastructure designs, radio push technology and the intricacy of software.
If yesterday these looked like competing parts of the business, the vendor plans to breathe a genius of seamless unity across all of its business segments. Or so says Padmasree Warrior, Motorola’s senior vice president and chief technology officer.
“Our vision is built around the notion of seamless mobility,” she exhales. “Seamless mobility is exciting. There will be an explosion in the future.”
Warrior speaks with gusto about what her company calls liquid media, which entails the capacity to move from cell to cell, from home to car to office without the hiccups of handoffs.
You can be watching a program on your television and transfer it to your wireless screen as you leave home and get into the car, explained Warrior. If you don’t want the visuals for fear of being distracted behind the wheel, you can transfer the audio to your stereo to simply listen while driving.
Warrior oversees Motorola Labs, the global software group and emerging early-stage business. In addition to serving as adviser to the chairman and to the board’s technology and design steering committee, Warrior presides over a global team of 4,600 technologists, examining technology programs and intellectual property, “guiding creative research from innovation through early-stage commercialization, and influencing standards and roadmaps,” according to the company.
A chemical engineering graduate from both the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, India, and Cornell University, Warrior has been with the company since 1984. She has served as corporate vice president and general manager of Motorola’s energy systems group, general manager of Thoughtbeam Inc.-a wholly owned subsidiary of the company-and corporate vice president and CTO for Motorola’s Semiconductor Products sector, which is now Freescale. She was appointed vice president in 1999 and elected a corporate officer in 2000.
She also served on the Texas Governor’s Council for Digital Economy.
In a world of heterogeneous networks, she sees her task as bringing the various technologies together for content. The end user, she believes, should be empowered to decide what content they want and how to get it without many obstacles. The wireless experience must be “device and context-sensitive.”
Software is important in this strategy, and Motorola has been looking at software more closely with the appointment of Zander as its new chief executive officer, as he comes from a software background. Warrior said Motorola’s software strategy focuses on Java and Linux frameworks, which will foster third-party applications. These will work in the context of its radio technologies including GSM, GPRS, EDGE, W-CDMA, CDMA technologies and wireless local area networks.
“Handoff from one network to another works through the gateways-at every home, automobile, enterprise and outside,” said Warrior. “We call that `out in the world.’ “
On the device front, she said the company is working on a handset that works inside a building with 802.11 technology embodying intelligent PBX functionality that hands off seamlessly to the cellular network. The company’s handset, the CN620, is Motorola’s first seamless mobility product, she said, adding, “You don’t have to push any button” for handoffs.
Alliances are essential to bring all the technologies and applications and content together into a seamless whole, she commented. As such, Motorola has signed a memorandum of understanding with Apple for its iTunes on the iPod to leverage Apple’s music expertise. Motorola also has entered an alliance with Microsoft Outlook to take advantage of Microsoft’s Windows CE capability.
Nextel Communications Inc. has been a major partner in the company’s iDEN technology. But a snag hangs in the horizon as the carrier contemplates migrating to next-generation networks. Motorola has upgraded iDEN to W-iDEN, but there is no indication that Nextel will adopt it. “Nextel is important to us,” she said.
Warrior said whatever the operator decides, Motorola will work with it. Nextel is taking a hard look at Flarion’s Flash-OFDM protocol, fueling rumors Motorola could lose perhaps its most important customer.
Concerning infrastructure, Warrior said the acquisition of Winphoria’s softswitch a few years ago effectively healed its Achilles’ heel of not having its own switch. Recently, Motorola has had some swagger in the infrastructure market, racking a few more contracts than it had previously. That put to bed a series of rumors about the division’s acquisition, especially by Nortel Networks Ltd. and Siemens AG.
She dismissed speculation that the company was on the cusp of major restructuring. Other major players like Nortel, Nokia and Siemens have reorganized their businesses to reflect what they see as a dynamic industry. Warrior said Motorola will not make any such dramatic moves, although it might tweak its business as circumstances require. The vendor recently announced plans to cut 1,000 jobs, or 1 percent of its workforce. The cuts primarily are associated with its semiconductor spinoff.
Motorola has streamlined its research and development activity, which was previously disconnected and not in sync with the strategic vision of the company, Warrior said. “We are asking questions on how to do better. What is the relevant problem that research can solve? What are the alternative ways of solving it? What is the business opportunity? How can we differentiate ourselves? Who are our competitors?” commented Warrior.
She said the company devoted $3.7 billion in 2003 for R&D, explaining further that the company just completed an exhaustive audit of all its R&D programs to rid the operations of redundancies, duplications and overlaps.
On public safety, she noted that real-time communication is the critical focus of Motorola’s vision. It has made forays with its APCO 25 and TETRA projects. She described the company’s strategy around what she called five Cs, referring to control, cost, capability, coverage for jurisdiction and capacity.
Voice has been the critical service, but data applications are the next line of focus for the company, she said.
