A recent report from ABI Research highlights the rise of mobile Linux, estimating that 23 percent of the world’s smartphones will have a Linux operating system by 2013. It appears that much of that growth will come at the expense of Nokia’s Symbian, and that LiMo and Android will be the main beneficiaries. What the report doesn’t note is that last year ABI predicted that 31 percent of smartphones will have Linux by 2012.

Either there’s something to explain the change in numbers, or we should perhaps take our analyst reports with a grain of salt. However, Linux is undoubtedly moving fast: 15 handsets were launched earlier this year with LiMo, and after several demos and prototypes, anticipation for the Android is running high. But the jury is still out on which framework will win out with carriers and application developers.

LiMo has the backing of NEC, Motorola and Samsung as well as SK Telecom and Verizon. Android, through the Open Handset Alliance, has T-Mobile, NTT DoCoMo, China Telecom, Telefonica, Google and several others. The stated goal behind both efforts is to eliminate some of the costs associated with developing mobile applications for multiple operating systems by using open source. It’s a laudable goal, but the fight between the two for market share demonstrates how hard it will be to lower costs, as developers will still have to build for multiple platforms.

photo courtesy of the LiMo Foundation and NTT DoCoMo

Motorola Ventures today put an undisclosed amount of money into Sunnyvale, Calif.-based startup VirtualLogix, which aims to do for communications equipment and mobile devices what VMware has done for the server. I’m pretty leery of companies throwing around the v-word, but with its take on virtualization, VirtualLogix is actually creating value.

For proof, check out the plans for a sub-$100 multimedia 3G phone developed by Purple Labs using NXP chips running VirtualLogix’s software. The software allows a processor to run a rich operating system on the same chip that controls the baseband access. (In a typical smartphone — depending on the applications and radios needed — this takes two or more chips.) The end result is a high-end feature on a low-end phone using fewer chips. That’s excellent for device makers, but VirtualLogix counts among its investors TI and Intel, two companies that want to sell more chips.

VirtualLogix CEO Peter Richards explained this contrast away by saying the chip vendors just want to make customers happier. But while that may be true, what’s really behind the chip firms’ interest is VirtualLogix’s ability to take software written for single-core chips and run it on multicore chips by virtualizing the multicore hardware. Multicore chips aren’t in phones right now, but given how much we want our handheld devices to do, they will be.

The other beneficiary of virtualizing a communications device is the gear market, where VirtualLogix customers such as Alcatel-Lucent are using the software to combine multiple products, like call routing servers, call management servers, etc., into one box rather than four or five. Virtualization as offered by VMware and Xen is creating a lot of savings by allowing companies to reduce the number of servers they use in data centers, so it stands to reason that it can do the same in the telecommunications world.

When Freescale Semiconductor named Richard Beyer as CEO on Wednesday, many of my friends at the company felt the faint stirrings of hope. Freescale, which was spun off from Motorola in December 2004, is a kind of wallflower in the chip world.

It has some good products, but it also has some real problems that need solving before it can live up to the expectations set by its $17.6 billion buyout in September 2006. The buyout left Freescale saddled with $9.5 billion in debt. That’s a lot for a company that reported sales of $5.72 billion last year, down from $6.36 billion in 2006.

Freescale has three big problems. The first is that about a quarter of its sales come from its former parent, which is having a tough time all its own. The second is that it’s in so many markets — some of which are growing — while Freescale is standing still. The third and final problem lies in the fact that former CEO Michel Mayer was not the kind of leader needed to take a newly independent company down its own road.

Beyer may solve the third problem if he can step into his job in mid-March, listen to managers and figure out a strategy (likely involving a push to analog) that gets Freescale growing in step (or even ahead of) the markets it dominates.

To his credit, Beyer is walking into the job willing to listen. “It’s too early for me to presuppose that certain areas are the areas that we should focus on more,” he told me. As the CEO of Intersil, Beyer presided over several acquisitions and created a laser focus on analog chips. That strategy isn’t likely to work at Freescale, he said, which is too big in too many markets to pare down to just one.

As for the first problem, Freescale is trying to reduce the influence of Motorola on its earnings, but as Beyer points out, diversifying your customer base while continuing to satisfy your largest customers is a hard line to walk. “Motorola is very important to Freescale. We were its in-house semiconductor division and its objective was to serve the needs of Motorola, and serve the needs of others,” Beyer said. “What it doesn’t want to do is abandon its largest customer in favor of all other customers.”

Broad growth at the company, which reorganized its three market-defined product divisions into four product-focused ones at the end of 2007, may come if it can push deeper into the automotive segment, where it has a leadership position, and if it can take advantage of the transition to 4G cellular networks. There’s also the analog and sensor market, which Beyer knows from his days at Intersil.

Beyer managed to turn Intersil into a small but fast-growing analog company during his five years there. When asked what he thought Freescale’s growth opportunities were, he declined to get specific, but said, “I have some thoughts on areas where there are interesting opportunities by virtue of what I’ve been working on for the last couple of years.”

When pressed on analog and sensors, he said they were “certainly exciting.” Let’s hope Beyer can translate his excitement into growth.

Motorola said today it’s exploring strategic options that include selling its handset business. The news comes on the heels of the company announcing a terrible fourth quarter, thanks to continued weakness in the handset business.

Any buyer should look carefully at Motorola’s handset business. By putting it up for sale, Motorola is admitting that the handset division is operationally weak, and to some extent, beyond redemption.

The overreliance on RAZR, and later its inability to get out of the rut of producing phones that never became “hits,” proves that the bureaucratic poundage was weighing the company down. Even if it was operationally sound, the company would need some vision to get back on track and fight it out with the likes of Nokia, Samsung, LG and newcomers likes Apple.

It is a hard fall for a once-proud company, which along with Nokia and Ericsson made up the triumvirate that controlled the wireless business with an iron fist. In order to understand how badly Motorola has stumbled, compare its daily sales of roughly 454,000 with Nokia’s daily sales of 1.3 million.

Recently, companies like Alcatel and Siemens have sold off their handset businesses to Asian handset makers. Those deals didn’t work out too well for the buyers, though. Buyers beware.

Motorola Chief Technology Officer Padmasree Warrior traded Chicago for the San Francisco Bay Area. She has joined Cisco Systems (CSCO) as chief technology officer, San Jose based company announced today. She didn’t waste much time and has started blogging on her new Cisco blog.

Okay it is full of PR sanitized corporate speak, but having read her writings in the past I think this should be a good one to watch. I think the world of her abilities and Cisco picked up a great executive to add to their team. This move also explains why Motorola took down her blog. I am going to chat with her later today and update the post.

“For next few weeks I want to listen to what everyone at Cisco has to tell me and learn,” said Padmasree Warrior, just an hour after it was announced that she was joining Cisco Systems as the Chief Technology Officer. I got a chance to speak with her as she rushed between meetings. She declined to comment on the specifics of her switch from Motorola to Cisco.

“I have admired Cisco because of their technology leadership and their business model innovations and innovations from a larger perspective,” she said. In her mind Cisco’s apporach to global opportunities along with macro-shifts in the over communications and computing industries make her job most exciting.

Though she spent recent years at a mobile-focussed company, Warrior said that her 23-years-in-technology have given her the grounding she needs to adjust to an all-IP future. “For the longest time, communication technologies have been vertical,” she said. Video meant cable, voice meant telephone, and data translated into Ethernet. “It is all horizontal - now network is the platform,” she said.

I asked her if we are in a brave new world of COMMputing, where the lines of computing and communications have blurred to such a degree that you can’t tell the difference. Google and Amazon Web Services are perfectly good examples of this commputing movement.  She agreed and promised to share more of her thoughts at a later stage - after she has settled down in the Bay Area and spent time in Cisco trenches.

Originally posted at 1.41 pm