Motorola’s Greg Brown was channeling Winston Churchill last week when he announced his company’s plans to take on the BlackBerry market with wireless devices for all manner of enterprise jobs.
“We will address the needs of mobile workers in the office, out in the field, in the factory, at retail, and across the supply chain,” said Brown, president of Motorola’s network and enterprise business. Hey! What about “on the landing grounds”?
Big talk was the order of the day nonetheless, as Brown tried to explain what Motorola hopes to do after it digests its $3.9 billion acquisition of Symbol Technologies.
Symbol’s stock in trade is handheld computers and bar code scanners used to capture data in warehouses and factories. If you have signed for a UPS package recently, the chances are you did so on a Symbol device. Motorola’s specialty, on the other hand, is WANs.
The plan is to join the two and push more wireless data devices into all corners of the enterprise by cutting across devices, infrastructure, applications and services, Brown said.
“Symbol’s strength in capturing, moving and managing data inside the building directly complements . . . Motorola’s network capabilities outside of the building,” Brown said.
Motorola already is envisioning the types of products and services it will be able to offer. For example, Symbol is a leading vendor in RFID, the short-range wireless technology that companies are just beginning to use to track products and assets. Motorola would like to expand RFID’s reach by combining it with cellular, Wi-Fi and WiMAX technologies to help enterprises track products throughout their life cycles, spanning private networks inside offices and public networks outside, said Ed Zander, Motorola’s chairman and chief executive.
Symbol is developing wireless devices catering to various industries, such as healthcare, transportation and retail. “I looked at all the devices and imagined the Wi-Fi and WiMAX play,” Zander said.
Motorola also sees opportunities in Symbol’s enterprise wireless LAN business. Symbol has deployed 45,000 such networks that eventually will need to be upgraded to higher speeds. There also are still lots of enterprises that have yet to install their first wireless networks, Zander added.
