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The most widely deployed mobile virtualization solution
Data Sheets
New Platform Adoption
The mobile killer app – applications!
Until fairly recently, mobile phones were just that – phones: voice-centric devices, silicon attached to a radio set. Today, mobile handsets are applications platforms, with application software driving purchase choice and sustaining operator average revenue per user (ARPUs) through accompanying network data usage.
As never before, applications and application availability can make or break a mobile product. As new mobile application platforms emerge (e.g., Android), mobile OEMs must deliver new products featuring those platforms and mobile network operators (MNOs) must certify, deploy, and support them.
Rapidly adopting a new application platform presents numerous and sizable challenges:
- Expertise: Mobile OEMs and MNOs need to re-train, re-constitute, and re-tool their hardware and software teams for the new platform
- Hardware: Legacy handset designs must be adopted to the platform or new hardware designed to support it; legacy software must be ported to new systems and CPUs
- Integration: Platform-native and legacy software components must integrate cleanly with baseband stacks and multimedia
- Differentiation: Device OEMs and MNOs need to map existing branding and value-added capabilities onto devices and services based on the new applications platform
Topping these challenges are perpetual time-to-market pressures in a rapidly evolving marketplace.
Fast track migration
With the OKL4 Microvisor and mobile virtualization, device OEMs and MNOs can preserve legacy investments already in place and migrate to new application environments with minimal migration cost. Key is the ability to run legacy baseband executives, and even application OSes, together with user applications and other accompanying code, in one or more dedicated virtual machines. Instead of investing valuable time and resources in porting those legacy assets to the new platform, device OEMs, MNOs, and developers can concentrate on innovation with the new platform and new applications, running in their own virtual machine.
Mobile virtualization brings more than a one-time advantage – once a design is virtualized, subsequent migration to a new hardware (e.g., from single to dual-core) and to as-yet unreleased new applications platforms, is greatly simplified. By abstracting both the underlying hardware and system software dependencies, OKL4 mobile virtualization results in lower development cost, shorter time-to-market, reduced BOM cost, and a mobile product that is easier to upgrade and maintain over time and across generations of devices.
