Red Bend develops software clients for mobile devices to enable FOTA updates from any mobile device management server that is compliant with the Open Mobile Alliance’s DM standard. Morten Grauballe, its executive VP of marketing, said the Red Bend technology does have a back-end component of its own, but it is a Software Management Module that integrates onto any OMA DM server.

These include platforms from vendors such as mFormation, InnoPath, Bitfone (now part of HP), Synchronica and the Danish vendor Mobilethink A/S. Of course, at least two of these players, InnoPath and Bitfone, have FOTA clients of their own and are thus competitors to Red Bend on that side of their business.

However, Red Bend’s decision around 18 months ago to exit the server side of the market gives it a position of neutrality vis-a-vis the back-end technology, while its roster of OEM customers like Nokia and Sony Ericsson should make it a desirable enough partner that even competing client vendors will want to work with its software on their OMA DM servers.

We hope that, in the long term, InnoPath will work with us, said Grauballe.

Aside from Nokia and Sony Ericsson, Red Bend’s other publicly announced OEM partners LG, Sharp and BenQ, though there is talk that Motorola may be edging closer after Bitfone, in which Motorola Ventures was an investor, was acquired in December by HP.

To further enhance its appeal, both to OMA DM server vendors and prospective OEM customers in the handset world, Red Bend has this week announced the next evolution of its FOTA technology, namely the vRapid Mobile client. This product, which was two years in development, looks at the firmware on a phone not as a monolithic block to be updated, but rather as a series of modules that can be addressed discretely.

This not only holds the potential for FOTA updates to become non-disruptive by not requiring a reboot as they do today. It also extends the ability to download new apps even to feature phones, which still make up the vast majority of the handsets in use around the world.

Grauballe acknowledged that its success in the feature phone space will depend on the handset manufacturers modularizing their proprietary OSes sufficiently for vRapid to work with them, adding that a lot of them are currently what you might call spaghetti code, with no APIs to write to, but many of the vendors were already on the modularization path even before vRapid’s emergence.

There is also a need for ISVs to port their apps to the different feature phone OSes in order for them to be downloadable, but there again, Grauballe said much of the work is already done. The mobile phone market is so big that a lot of ports have already happened, he began. A broad range of ISVs already have smart and feature phone versions of their apps.

We’re working with the handset guys [to popularize vRapid], said Grauballe. We’re also getting a lot of interest from enterprises, however, because there are still a lot of feature phones in use and this is an opportunity for them to customize those devices beyond the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) Java paradigm.

In other words, Red Bend believes vRapid Mobile could enable enterprises to add things like new browsers or push email clients to all their employees’ mobile phones, whether smart or feature, and potentially even do so without having to reboot the devices.

The first version of the product still requires the phone to be turned off and back on, but we’re working towards that not being necessary in the future, said Grauballe.