What You Missed at the 2014 Motorola Solutions Partner Conference

Thousands of Motorola Solutions partners packed into the Aria’s convention center in Las Vegas, last week, for three days of education, business strategy meetings and new technology evaluation. The event kicked off with a brutally honest assessment of the company’s challenges over the past year, but Motorola executives hammered home that 2014 is going to be about partner enablement and support.

"You must be able to speak the language of the industry that you are serving; to be that market specialist,” Motorola Solutions CEO Greg Brown told the audience of 3,000 partners. "As we change the focus of our resources…we will be sitting at the table with you as trust advisors.”

Motorola also made it clear that the company will continue to invest heavily in new and future-forward solutions in the coming years, including wearables and tools to better harness business intelligence and analytics.

"We have to think about moving from voice and data to collective intelligence,” CTO Paul Steinberg said. "We are reinventing the way teams communicate thanks to converged devices and analytics. Motorola is advancing that intelligent edge with network analytics to bring that data together through a framework that can be harvested as meaningful experiences for our customers.

Steinberg described four mega-shifts that Motorola is seeing in the IT channel:

The future will be all about the networks.
Human augmentation and automation will continue to expand
Technology will move from contextual computing to predictive computing
"The world around us will become a platform"
Beyond these lofty predictions, Motorola’s partner conference also focused on strategies and trends that are affecting solution providers today. Here are four that hit home:

Focus on Partners – The reverberating refrain through the event was that Motorola Solutions does not sell through it’s partners; it sells with its partners, in an effort to create a true partnership. Motorola is investing heavily in its PartnerEmpower channel program, which has been augmented so that partners can increase their ranking based on metrics that aren't just tied to volume of sales, but also training certifications, end-user satisfaction and marketing programs.

Betting on Android – Microsoft’s lack of information regarding a new mobile platform, coupled with the looming end-of-life of Windows CE, has significantly boosted interest by Motorola partners in Google’s Android platform. Top tier Motorola solution providers and software developers are being given early access to Android products and SDKs so they can begin developing for the platform well before they come to market. The company stated that it will be expanding its Android portfolio from four to seven new products in the coming year.

Omnichannel Radios – Motorola is pushing it’s innovative new MOTOTRBO Anywhere platform, which allows Motorola MOTOTRBO radio users to seamlessly communicate between their radios and mobile phones using a company’s IP network and a mobile app. Now warehouse executives don’t have to carry around a radio to communicate with the floor or shipping area. They can simply use the app on their phone to access most of the features available to MOTOTRBO radio users and talk seamlessly with colleagues on radios. The technology was hyped big time by Motorola resellers who plan on using the technology as an upsell or value-add for new and existing clients.

Manufacturing Renaissance – Many companies are just now moving to networked solutions, because they are losing millennial employees that expect wireless pan solutions. Retail and the push for omnichannel sales solutions are driving innovation in manufacturing, and manufacturers are being forced to move into a more flexible business model to be able to move products through the supply chain faster. Finally, as manufacturers rebuild capacity in the U.S. (particularly in Detroit), they only need half the jobs that they use to have, due to the increased use of automation. This allows organizations to invest in more technology with fewer and radically different jobs.