I spent last week in London, having been invited by Motorola Solutions to attend their European wireless team’s inaugural analyst day. It was an ideal time to be there: the weather was perfect, retailers were more than happy to share their personal accounts of the impact the summer games had on their businesses (a topic for an entire article unto itself), and the Paralympic Games were in full swing.

But what impressed me most was the content Motorola’s team presented.

We spend a lot of time talking about the importance of being customer-centric: whatever you’re selling, if you take the time to understand your customer, understand how your products fit into whatever problem it is they’re trying to solve, and always place them in the center of every strategic decision you make, it’s very difficult to go wrong.

Quite simply, Motorola’s EMEA ENC (Enterprise Networks & Communication) teams “gets ” it. As many readers may know, the company effectively split into two different entities in 2011, and while Motorola Mobility was bought by Google (and has been struggling), Motorola Solutions (formerly known as Motorola Inc.) is focusing both on enterprise and government customers with core markets in public safety government agencies and commercial enterprises. Their ENC business in EMEA is headed up by David Gozalo (MSSI VP, EMEA ENC Solutions). Gozalo’s presentation displayed a profound understanding of his customer – wherever they may be in EMEA – and how his products could address their unique geographic and specific geo-economic challenges.

For example, Motorola has recently begun offering managed mobility infrastructure services for retailers. “Within a $5 million managed service deal, only $1.5 million of that will be hardware costs, ” said Gozalo, with the remainder going to establishing and maintaining the system. “We’ve been offering managed services for years across Europe as it pertains to tetra networks, (governmental emergency services) so we have the experience – why not make use of this in a retail offering? ” What makes this even more interesting is that Motorola, which typically is bought on a CapEx model, is making these solutions available to retailers on an OpEx basis. This becomes highly attractive to retailers in such economically struggling countries as Italy, Greece and Spain.

This wasn’t the only example of the company’s understanding of the need to customize for the varying markets in EMEA. Anthony Fulgoni (ENC Distribution Manager) shared current status and vision for the regions of Western Europe, Eastern Europe (with a growth focus on Turkey and Russia), MENA (Middle East and Northern Africa), and ISSA (Israel and South Africa). Within each, it has focused on establishing radio, mobile, and wireless network solutions specific to the enterprise via various levels of certification, but also honed in on various tiers of retailers. What struck me here carried over from Gozalo’s presentation: the technologist has made significant investment (more than $10 million) in adopting a new “sales way: ” in his own words, “Anyone interacting with any customer is trained in this one, unified way now. ” The program has successfully enabled better account – and partner account – management by employing one common language and approach across all client and partner practices across all of EMEA. It is just another example of how a vendor that has always been known as a hardware supplier is morphing into a solutions vendor – all while keeping an eye on customer-centricity.

Of course, the EMEA team understands that the impending wave of BYOD in the retail industry places it in a very important moment right now, and it plans to not let that opportunity slip, which brings us to the product demonstration of the company’s newest store-based WLAN solutions. I’ll never be the tech-junkie my partner Brian Kilcourse is (he refers to himself as RSR’s resident propeller-head), but when I saw what the vendor’s new NX 6500 Integrated Services Platform could do in a store, even I gave it an audible “wow. ” One box, taking up 1/5 of the space that previous store communications and networking equipment would have, using FAR less energy in the process, can interact with all of the store-provided or BYOD devices a modern day store could ever dream up. Once communicating with the vendor’s newest line of access points and sensors, it can also enable consumer locationing and behavioral Wi-Fi analytics within the store, as well as customer proximity awareness outside the store. And of course, it also has the power to handle all digital signage, mobile commerce, and IP phones within.

Finally, in our most recent mobility benchmark report, retailers shared little consensus as to where these exciting new mobile devices would take them – or more to the point, where the mobile-empowered consumer’s love of these devices would force them to be. However, one point on which they were firmly united was the following: any mobile solution worth adopting in retail better be deployable across any platform; 23% of all retailers said that their budgeted solutions were “write once/deploy across many mobile platform developments. ” Even more importantly, that percentage was largely driven by the best performing retailers: 73% of Retail Winners placed high value on new solutions’ ability to be written once/deployed across multiple platforms. Again, Motorola’s EMEA ENC team, while clearly interested in aiding the hardware division’s sales, completely understands this trend, calling all of their solutions “rho mobile, ” or platform-agnostic.

All in all, very cool stuff, and I’m really glad I went.