Increasing customer loyalty through

proactive software updates and

management

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Who am I?
 I work for Red Bend the leader in OTA software
management
 Red Bend is known for it‟s innovative, algorithmic
approaches to difficult problems
 Software updateability has many non-trivial
problems
 Efficient, fault-tolerant, in-place updating
 Dependency discovery / resolution
 System partitioning / decomposition
 We try to solve these problems for device
manufacturers, network operators and chipset
vendors

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Why manage and what to manage?
 It‟s all about the user experience
 Delivering a more robust user experience
 Bringing new functionality to users and enabling small moments
of delight
 Software assets are more than apps
 Must consider the whole stack, kernel(s), middleware, runtimes,
1st party apps…
 Peer reviewed OSS code is good… Applications & UI
 Breaking the baseline 1.0 Upgraded
Browser
 Differing release cadences
Services/Middleware
New Media
Codec

System 1.0
(OS,DRIVERS, COMMS)
System
EMBEDDED Bug fix
Why OTA?

 UX is much better
 Potential for analytics
 …but software obeys Parkinson‟s Law*

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_Law
So what do we need to consider?
 Solutions that enhance the updating UX
 Minimize delivery times
 Minimize update times (ideally to perceived zero)
 Resolving asset dependencies prior to delivery (don‟t let
customers down with unresolved dependencies)
 Unified update UX, across all asset types (including 3rd party?)
 Baseline releasing / testing in reliable systems
 Flexible bearer support (OTA is not just about UMTS networks)
 Reach to all software assets everywhere (not just
„applications‟)
 CORE, ROFS, RW FS…
Considerations for platform
developers
 Bandwidth, like water is abundant but finite
 Remember Parkinson‟s Law (at least as applied to executable
code)
 Provide frameworks / enablers that allow the whole value
chain to participate - “Avoid the PC update experience”
 Consider updateability and it‟s impact on testing / validation /
security
 Breaking the baseline. What needs to happen to isolate tested
components from each other?
 Minimize perceived user time taken to perform updates
(discovery, delivery and installation)
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