Firefox May Change the Mobile Market!

It is the time for converged systems, which are opening up an altogether new dimension of IT. With converged systems, you get three different systems comprising the compute part, and the storage and the networking parts, to work together.

TCL Communication’s smartphone brand, Alcatel One Touch, launched the Alcatel One Touch Fire smartphone ‘globally’ last year. Fire was the first ever phone to run the Firefox OS, an open source operating system created by Mozilla. According to many, this OS is in some ways on par with Android, if not better. Sadly, Fire has failed to see the light of day in India, because our smartphone market has embraced Android on such a large scale that other OSs find it hard to make an impact. In a candid chat, Piyush A Garg, project manager, APAC BU India, spoke to Saurabh Singh from Open Source For You about how the Firefox OS could be the next big thing and why Alcatel One Touch has not yet given up on it.

It was not very long ago (July 25, 2011, to be precise) that Andreas Gal, director of research at Mozilla Corporation, announced the ‘Boot to Gecko’ project (B2G) to build a complete, standalone operating system for the open Web, which could provide a community-based alternative to commercially developed operating systems such as Apple’s iOS and Microsoft’s Windows Phone. Besides, the Linux-based operating system for smartphones and tablets (among others) also aimed to give Google’s Android, , Jo Jolla’s a s Sa Sailfish s OS as we well as ot other e community-based open source ource systems such as Ubuntu Touch, a run for or their money (pun intended!). Although, h, on paper, the project boasts of tremendous potential, it has as failed to garner the kind of f response its developers had ad initially hoped for. The relatively few devices in a market that is flooded with h the much-loved Android OS could be one possible reason. Companies like ZTE, Telefónica and GeeksPhone have taken the he onus of launching Firefox x OSbased devices; however, giants in the field have shied away ay from adopting it, until now.

Hong Kong’s Alcatel el One Touch is one of the few w companies that has bet on Firefox efox by launching the Alcatel One Touch Fire smartphone globally, last year. The Firefox OS 1.0-based Fire was primarily intended for emerging markets with the aim of ridding the world of feature phones. Sadly, the Indian market was left out when the first Firefox OS-based smartphone was tested—could Android dominance be the reason? “Alcatel Fire (Alcatel 4012) was launched globally last year. We tried everything, but there’s such a big hoo-ha about Android. Last year, it was a big thing. First, you have to create some space for the OS itself, and then create a buzz,” revealed Piyush A Garg, project manager, APAC BU India.

According to Garg, there’s still a basic lack of awareness regarding the Firefox OS in India. “Techies might be aware of what the Firefox OS is but the average end user may not. And ultimately, it is the end user who has to purchase the phone. We have ave to co communicate u cate t the e a advantages of Mozilla Firefox to the end user, create awa awareness and only then launch a

product based on it it,” he said.

Alcatel’ Alcatel’s plans for Firefox-based

smart smartphones

So the bottom line is, India will not see th the Alcatel One Touch Fire any tim time soon; or maybe not see it at all all. “Sadly, yes. Fire is not coming to India at all. It’s not going to co come to India because Fire was an 8.89 cm (3.5 inch) product. Ins Instead, we might be coming up with an 8.89-10.16 cm (3.5-4 inch) produ product. Initially, we were considering a 12. 12.7-13.97 cm (5-5.5 inch) device. Howev However, we are looking to come up with wit a low-end phone and such a device cannot come in the 12.7 cm (5 inch) seg segment. So, once the product is launched with an 8.89—10.16 cm (3.5-4 inch) screen with the Firefox OS, we may launch a whole series of Firefox OS-based devices,” said Garg.

The Firefox OS ecosystem needs a push in India

With that said, it has taken a fairly long time for the company to realise that the Firefox OS could be a deal-breaker in an extensive market such as India. “Firefox OS may change the mobile game. However, it still needs to grow in India. Considering the fact

that Android has such a huge base in India, we are waiting for the right time to launch the Firefox-based smartphones here,” he said. But is the Firefox OS really a ‘deal-breaker’ for customers? “The Firefox OS can be at par with Android. The major advantages of Mozilla Firefox are primarily the memory factor and the space that it takes—the entire OS as well as the applications. It’s not basically an API kind of OS; it’s an installation directly coming from HTML. That’s a major advantage. Also, apps for the OS are built using HTML5, which means that, in theory, they run on the Web and on your phone or tablet. What made Android jump from Jelly Bean to KitKat (which requires low memory) is the fact that the end user is looking at a low memory OS. Mozilla Firefox is also easy to use. I won’t say ‘better’ or ‘any less’, but at par with Android,” said Garg, evidently confident of the platform.

To take things forward, vis-à-vis the platform, Alcatel One Touch is also planning to come up with an exclusive App Store, with its own set of apps. “We have already planned our ‘play store’, and tied up with a number of developers to build our own apps. I cannot comment on the timeline of the app store but it’s in the pipeline. We currently have as many as five R&D centres in China. We are not yet in India, although we are looking to engage developers here as well. We’re already in the discussion phase on that front,” said Garg. So, what’s the company’s strategy to engage developers in particular? “We invite developers to come up and give in their ideas. Then either we accept them, which means we buy the idea, or we work out some kind of association with which developers get revenue out of the collaboration. In China, more than 100,000 developers are engaged in building apps for Alcatel. India is on our to-do list for building a community of app dvelopers. It’s currently at an ‘amateur stage’; however, we expect things to happen eventually,” he said. Although there’s no definite time period for the launch of Alcatel’s One Touch Firefox OS-based smartphone in India (Garg is confident it will be here by the end of 2014, followed by a whole series, depending upon how it’s received), one thing that is certain is that the device will be very affordable. Cutting costs while developing such low-end devices is certainly a challenge for companies, since customers do tend to choose ‘value for money’ when making their purchases. “We are not allowed to do any ‘trimming’ with respect to the hardware quality—since we are FCC-compliant, we cannot compromise on that,” said Garg. So what do companies like Alcatel One Touch actually do to cut manufacturing costs? “We look at larger quantities that we can sell at a low cost, using competitive chipsets that are offered at a low price. On the hardware side, we may not give lamination in a low-cost phone, or we may not offer Corning glass or an IPS, and instead give a TFT, for instance,” Garg added.

HP’s latest mantra is the ‘new style of IT’. Conventional servers and data storage systems do not work for the company and its style of IT any longer. This is about the evolution of converged systems that have taken over the traditional forms of IT. The company is taking its mantra forward in every possible way.

HP has recently launched the HP Apollo family of high-performance computing (HPC) systems. The company claims that HP Apollo is capable of delivering up to four times the performance of standard rack servers while using less space and energy. The new offerings reset data centre expectations by combining a modular design with improvised power distribution and cooling techniques. Apart from this, the company claims that HP Apollo has a higher density at a lower total cost of ownership. The air-cooled HP Apollo 6000 System maximises performance efficiency and makes HPC capabilities accessible to a wide range of enterprise customers. It is a supercomputer that combines high levels of processing power with a water-cooling design for ultra-low energy usage.

These servers add to the fast pace of changes going on in the IT space today. Vikram K from HP shares his deep insight into how IT is changing. Read on...

Q Since you have just launched your latest servers here, what is your take on the Indian server market? From a server standpoint, we are very excited, because virtually every month and a half, we’ve been offering a new enhancement or releasing a new product, which is different from the previous one. So the question is - how are these different? Well, we have basically gone back and looked at things through the eyes of the customer to understand what they expect from IT. They want to get away from conventional IT and move to an improvised level of IT. So we see three broad areas: admin controlled IT; user controlled IT, which is more like the cloud and is workload specific; and then there is application-specific ‘compute and serve’ IT. These are the three distinct combinations. Within these three areas, we have had product launches, one after the other. The first one, of course, is an area where we dominate. So, we decided to extend the lead and that is how the innovations continue to happen.

Q What do you mean by ‘new style of IT’? It is the time for converged systems, which are opening up an altogether new dimension of IT. With converged systems, you get three different systems comprising the compute part, and the storage and the networking parts, to work together. A variety of IT heads are opting for this primarily because they want to either centralise IT, consolidate or improve the overall efficiency and performance. When they do that, they need to have better converged systems management. So we have combined our view of converged systems and made them workload specific. These days we have workload specific systems. For example, with something like a column- oriented database like Vertica, we have a converged system for virtualisation. Some time back, servers were a sprawl, but these days, virtual machines are a big sprawl.

Q Converged systems have been around for about 18 months now. Can you throw some light on customers’ experiences with these systems? Yes, converged systems have been around for a while now and we have incrementally improved on their management. What we have today as a CSM for virtualisation or CSM for Hanna, wasn’t there a year back. The journey has been good and plenty of enterprises have expressed interest in such evolved IT. With respect to the adoption rate, the IT/ITES segment has been the first large adopter of converged systems, primarily because it has a huge issue about just doing the systems integration of ‘X’ computers that compute ‘Y’ storage while somebody else takes care of the networks . Now, it is the time for systems that come integrated with all three elements, and the best part is that it is very workload specific.

We see a lot of converged systems being adopted in the area of manufacturing also. People who had deployed SAP earlier have some issues. One of them is that it is multi-tier, i.e., it has multiple application servers and multiple instances in the database. So when they want to run analytics, it gets extremely slow because a lot of tools are used to extract information. We came up with a solution, which customers across the manufacturing and IT/ITES segments are now discovering. That is why we see a very good adoption of converged systems across segments.

Q We hear a lot about software defined data centres (SDCs). Many players like VMware are investing a lot in this domain. How do you think SDCs are evolving in India? The software-defined data centre really does have the potential to transform the entire IT paradigm and the infrastructure and application landscape. We have recently launched new products and services in the networking, high-performance computing, storage and converged infrastructure areas. They will allow enterprises to build software-defined data centres and hybrid cloud infrastructures. Big data, mobility, security and cloud computing are forcing organisations to rethink their approach to technology, causing them to invest heavily in IT infrastructure. So, when we are talking about software defined data centres, we are talking about a scenario in which it can be a heterogeneous

setup of hypervisors, infrastructure, et al, which will help you migrate from one to another, seamlessly. Q So, software defined data centres could replace traditional data centres in the future? Therefore, can we consider them a part of new-age IT? Well, I don’t believe that is so. We have been living with old TP for about 30-35 years. As the cloud, big data and mobility pick up even more, and are used in the context of analytics, you will still have two contexts residing together, which is old TP and old AP. Then you would have more converged systems and will talk about converged system management. That is exactly our version of how we want to define software defined data centres.

Q We talk a lot about integrated and converged systems. It sounds like a great idea as it would involve all the solutions coming in from one vendor. But does that not lead to some kind of vendor lock-in? No it doesn’t, primarily because these are workload specific. So, one would not implement a converged system just for the sake of it. As I mentioned, it has to be workload specific. So, if you want to virtualise, then you would do one type of converged system or integrated system. If you want to do Hanna, that is an entirely different converged system. What helps the customers is that it breaks down the cycle of project deployment and hence, frees up a lot of resources that would otherwise be consumed for mere active deployment or transitioning from one context to another. QSo,

are SMBs ready to jump onto the integrated systems’ bandwagon? Yes, there are quite a few SMBs in India that are very positive about integrated systems. Customers, irrespective of the segment that they belong to, look at it from the angle of how the business functions, and what kind of specificity they want to get to. I wouldn’t be particularly concerned about the segment, but I would look at it from the context of what workload specificity a customer wants. QWhat

are the issues that you have seen IT heads face while adopting converged IT systems? Fortunately, we have not heard of many challenges that the IT heads have faced while adopting converged IT solutions. In fact, it has eased things for them, primarily because they have been told in advance about what they are getting into. They are no more dealing with three separate items. They are getting into one whole thing, which is getting deployed and what they used to take months to achieve, is done in two or three days. This is because we run the app maps prior to the actual sale and tell them what exactly will reach them, how it will run and what kind of performance it will deliver. The major challenges are related to the fact that they are on the verge of a transition ( from the business perspective), and they see any transition as being slightly risky. Hence, they thoroughly check on the ROI and are generally very cautious.