The feds’ shift to Android could give it a big business boost, too

It was the kind of late-afternoon announcement most people missed and probably would have passed on anyhow: Defense contractor General Dynamics bought Open Kernel Labs, a small mobile virtualization vendor known best (if at all) for its collaboration with Citrix Systems on Project Nirvana, which let cellphones run two operating systems separately via virtualization. Consumers saw this technology at work in the Motorola Atrix 4G and its Lapdock.

But it’s a big deal at several levels, one that could lead to an Android-dominated federal government and even reverse iOS’s dominance in business.

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Here’s why:

1. The federal government — not just the military and espionage wings — is serious about adopting modern mobile technology and shifting more government employees to work-at-home (telework) scenarios involving use of personal equipment. It’s the consumerization of government.
2. A large segment of the private sector — including aerospace, financial services, utilities, and health care — are bound up in or bound by severe data management and separation requirements. That’s created a clash with today’s Internet-connected, work-anywhere, information-flow-based world.
3. The larger IT community is beginning to realize that managing devices alone rather than the information flowing among them is at best a Band-Aid and at worst a fool’s errand. Plenty of information-separation technologies are available, but they’re a patchwork of partial, nascent solutions. A strict, virtually separated approach might better address the information-flow concerns.

Open Kernel Labs is at the center of these trends, and it now has a large powerhouse company behind it, thanks to General Dynamics, whcih has lots of government contracts around information security, radio networks (it’s building the national LTE network for police and other emergency responders), and transportation systems. In return, OK Labs brings partnerships with HTC and Samsung that should open real doors in both government and business.

In progress: The feds’ mobile reinvention Government agencies have been laggards when it comes to mobile deployments. But that may soon change.

Recently, the White House issued pro-BYOD guidelines for federal agencies and directed agencies to make their websites mobile-friendly. Test deployments of iPhones and iPads have been going on for months at many agencies. The iPad is used in Afghanistan battlefields to analyze drone surveillance data and images. What’s been missing is Android, whose smartphones outsell iPhones overall but trail far behind in business adoption due to inferior management and security capabilities.

Android may have an advantage in government, especially — ironically — in the more security-conscious agencies. That’s because Apple has shown no signs of wanting to create special versions for high-security environments, and off-the-shelf mobile management technologies such as those from Good Technology and MobileIron can add only so much to the iOS base. Contractors like Computer Sciences Corp., which provisions the battlefield iPads, has the luxury of knowing the devices are used only on military communication networks and under strict usage rules — these are not BYOD iPads.

Beyond that, the military is on its own, as the previous provider of smartphones — Research in Motion — fades away, with usage of its BlackBerry continuing to plummet. Besides, RIM’s new BlackBerry 10 devices and their new management platform may not support the same high-end capabilities as the current BlackBerry and BES platform do.

That leaves Android, which as an open source operating system, can be customized to meet government needs — and the government is doing just that. Previously, the U.S. Army announced plans to create a hardened Android smartphone for military use. If combined with OK Labs’ virtualization technology, soldiers could carry one smartphone with two virtual halves: a personal half and the Army’s custom military half that keeps government data secure, personal information separate, and even phone numbers and location information separate — using a device that works very much like the civilian devices all their friends have. Soldiers, after all, are typically in their 20s, so social networking likely counts among their major pastimes.

GD, by using OK Labs’ technology, could offer this same approach to other agencies via special commercial Android smartphones from Samsung and HTC — even BYOD models that employees would be allowed to bring in themselves. That’s a major change from the usual government pattern of designing custom equipment that costs tens or even hundreds of times more than their commercial off-the-shelf equivalents.

It’s not all a stretch to see the Android platform, for both smartphones and tablets, becoming the preferred and sometimes standard mobile platform across the government, with iOS allowed only in lower-risk roles — the reverse of the current Android and iOS roles in business.

Government technology today, business technology tomorrow What makes this possible is the fact that OK Labs has been working with HTC and Samsung to bring this dual-VM technology into Android smartphones for any business, not just the military or federal government. In fact, we should see real products on the market in early 2013, if not sooner. The HTC deal has been known for a while, but the Samsung partnership is a new revelation. It’s a big one, given that Samsung is the leading Android vendor and second only to Apple as a mobile economic powerhouse.

With GD’s ownership, Samsung and HTC can be more confident that there’s a big-enough market for such devices in government, giving them the incentive to proceed with actual products, not just demonstration models. This is a well-known pattern for such pervasive technologies as the Internet, email, and virtualization.

The expected federal demand should make it easier for Samsung and HTC to offer similar products to businesses, especially those with higher levels of security requirements. They too could gain tight control over the business VM on such Android smartphones while letting users do whatever they want on the separate personal VM — satisfying both management and employees in one device.

GD is sure hoping so: It needs to grow outside the defense business, now that the $4 trillion Iraq and Afghanistan wars are winding down and the federal coffers have been emptied. It sees OK Labs’ dual-VM technology as a great way to grow both its federal business and its corporate business through the red-hot mobile focus. Both OK Labs CEO Steve Subar (who, along with the rest of the OK Labs staff, remains with GD) and James Norton, GD’s vice president of business development in the C4 unit that OK Labs is now part of, confirmed that goal. As Subar put it, the sales pitch is simple: “If it’s good enough for [Defense Secretary Leon] Panetta to use, it’s good enough for your company.”

Yes, there are many ways the government or GD could screw this up. Apple could also decide a high-security iPhone and iPad suddenly make business sense — which might help Washington policy makers feel more comfortable as Apple is a domestic company, unlike Samsung and HTC. But the feds also don’t like single-sourced products, which gives the Android ecosystem an advantage. Besides, the feds trust companies like GD to keep their subcontractors and partners in line.

If the OK Labs promise is realized, in a few years we could seen an Android-heavy government, as well as perhaps an Android-heavy enterprise.

This article, “The feds’ shift to Android could give it a big business boost, too,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.