Motorola Solutions and Oracle - the world moves on

LinkedIn recently informed me that one of my former Motorola colleagues has a new job. This person, who had a major role in Motorola's relationship with Oracle several years ago, jumped from the "solutions" side of Motorola to the "mobility" side of Motorola in 2009 - at about the same time that Motorola was selling my division. It appears that this person hung around Motorola Mobility for a while, but recently moved away from the batwings altogether.

Before I myself left Motorola, I had responsibilities on the marketing end for managing the relationship between the biometrics division and Oracle. During this time, I was quoted in a 2006 interview by Mark Brunelli about Oracle Database 10g.

"Counting all of our [biometric] product lines, we have over 300 installations and we're in nearly 40 countries," Bredehoft said. "We have everything from small local systems like in Bullhead City, Arizona, all the way to large national systems."...

"One of the challenges we had with the previous generation was that every agency had a different way that they wanted to do their data. It wasn't driven by standards," Bredehoft said. "With Oracle, we were able to take whatever XML came into the workstation, store it into the database and come up with different database schemas for every customer."

True technical experts were probably groaning by this point, but that interview served as a mere prelude to this 2009 video:



OK, so maybe the lighting wasn't so good, but Motorola's biometric unit and Oracle derived mutual benefits from our marketing relationship - and, more importantly, our technical relationship (which was handled by someone else). And while Motorola engaged in a number of cooperative efforts with Oracle, biometrics was a significant one.

Until Motorola sold its biometrics business unit (and I switched jobs). And Motorola itself split into two. (As I subsequently noted, Google got the "mobility" part.)

Upon reading the news about my former co-worker, I was curious about the relationship between Motorola Solutions (I came from the "solutions" part of the company) and Oracle today. There is still an ongoing relationship, but the product focus has naturally changed.

Motorola and Oracle have an ongoing relationship committed to bringing customers integrated mobility solutions. Enterprise-class companies use Oracle databases, middleware, and applications to run their businesses....

The Motorola-Oracle alliance focuses on the retail, healthcare, and travel and transportation vertical markets and cross-industry solutions for warehouse management.

So why the new focus? Because of a business unit that Motorola acquired - and kept: the old Symbol organization.

Motorola has engaged in several projects with Oracle in recent years. In particular, our MC50 enterprise digital assistant (EDA) and MC9000 industrial mobile computer have been extensively tested to ensure smooth running of the Oracle E-Business Suite applications.

Technology - and time - marches on.

Postscript - since I mentioned Google's takeover of Motorola Mobility, I began asking myself the question "Where in the world is Sanjay Jha?" It turns out that he was being considered for the Intel CEO job.

Tech news site CNET reported last month that Intel had settled on three finalists: Chief operating officer Brian Krzanich, chief product officer Dadi Perlmutter, and one candidate from outside the company --Sanjay Jha, former CEO of Motorola Mobility.

"I personally expect them to go internal," said JoAnne Feeney, who follows Intel for Longbow Research. "The Intel culture is so strong and there's so much knowledge inside the company that it's probably more productive to go inside."

A decision is expected soon - maybe.