The Indian Connection Behind Linux Mobile

Posted by: Steve Hamm on April 10

In the tech industry these days, when you lift a rock you often find a bunch of Indian programmers hard at work under it. So it goes with the LiMo Foundation, which is building a stack of open-source middleware and an application programming interface to run mobile phones. Azingo, a four-year-old mobile software company with headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., is on the board of LiMo and is performing a lot of the development and test work for the consortium. (LiMo has 30 members, including the likes of Motorola, Samsung, LG, and NTT DoCoMo) That work is being done by some of the 300-plus Azingo programmers in Pune and Hyderabad.

But this is no all-volunteer army. Azingo’s main business is taking the open-source software stack and the API and turning it into a commercially-hardened and supported software product, which it’s selling to handset makers and mobile operators. Azingo got a $30 million cash infusion from private equity firm Garnett & Helfrich last year and is in the midst of raising another major round of financing to pay for its business ramp-up. The company demonstrated its software running on a handheld a few weeks ago, and CEO Mahesh Veerina expects to have two major-player phones running the package in the market early next year. “We see it as Red Hat for the mobile industry,” says G&H partner Terry Garnett.

The main threat to Azingo, and LiMo, is Google…

Google, of course, is pushing Android, its software package that runs on top of Linux for mobile phones, and its Open Handset Alliance. Wrap it all together and it's basically LiMo--only controlled by Google. Most of the mobile service operators and major handset makers who are members of LiMo have also pledged allegiance to Android and the Open Handset Alliance. Azingo's Veerina insists that he doesn't see Google as a major threat, though. "Ours is a more operator-sympathetic platform," he says. "Operators will launch Android phones, but, privately, they're threatened by Google. They don't want somebody else controlling the API and controlling how applications get on the phones."

A wild card is Nokia, with a 40% share of the handset market, which has not joined either alliance.

The other handset makers and the mobile operators are threatened on all sides. Nokia, Microsoft, and Google all seem to have designs on mobile hegemony of one kind or another. So the rest of the bunch may find strength in togetherness. If so, they'll depend on Azingo and its Indian programmers to do a lot of the heavy lifting.

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