New platform delivers secure firmware delivery for Android fleets, helping OEMs and enterprises meet tightening security patch mandates without adding costly infrastructure.

SEATTLE: Esper, the device management infrastructure for enterprise and purpose-built deployments, today announces Esper Airwave, a fully managed, cloud-based over-the-air (OTA) update platform, designed to secure Android edge device fleets at enterprise scale. Airwave enables today’s original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to deliver secure firmware updates faster, at scale, with no build-time integration requirements or custom update infrastructure. Available today in product preview, select OEMs are invited to request early access, with full access released later this year.

"Device lifecycle and security support has become one of the most pressing operational challenges for enterprises running mission-critical edge deployments at scale," says Yadhu Gopalan, co-founder and CEO of Esper. "The hard truth is most OEMs in the dedicated device space either have no OTA solution at all or what they have isn't built for enterprise demands. That gap has real consequences. Airwave closes it."

OEMs are leaning on Android as the foundation for purpose-built hardware that serves today’s most demanding operational environments: from restaurants and retail to logistics and healthcare. But for device makers without reliable OTA infrastructure, delivering secure updates at scale requires significant resources, including dedicated engineering teams, global content delivery networks (CDN), cryptographic signing and validation systems, and automatic rollback mechanisms. For many OEMs, the costs and expertise required are too high. The result: manufacturers delay updates, defer to ODM-managed rollout schedules, or perform manual USB updates.

Esper Airwave fills that gap by enabling OEMs to deploy updates in hours without changing existing build processes. Built on the same infrastructure as Esper Foundation, Esper’s custom Android operating system designed just for dedicated devices, Airwave is built on the same OTA subsystem powering Esper Foundation's firmware delivery across tens-of-thousands of devices in production - and works with any AOSP build, regardless of MDM.

Key Airwave Features include:

• Signed validation and encrypted delivery ensure every update is secure end-to-end
• Staged rollouts with automatic rollback deploy firmware in phases, and halt automatically if failure rates exceed defined thresholds, so a bad build never becomes a fleet-wide event
• Full OS and delta build support lets OEMs ship complete releases or lightweight patches, cutting download size and install time
• Per-device OTA observability provides real-time visibility into download, installation, and boot status across every device - including which devices failed and why

Airwave comes as pressure on device manufacturers to actively support hardware with timely security patches accelerates across nearly every industry. This has been reinforced by recently updated compliance standards, including last year’s updates to the PCI DSS 4.0.1, which require patches to be installed within one month, and soon-to-be-mandated HIPAA security requirements, which will require providers to decommission unsupported devices and apply security patches within a 30-day window. For industries affected by tighter standards, devices without OTA capabilities almost guarantee non-compliance for the enterprises today’s OEMs serve.

About Esper

Esper is the device management infrastructure platform for enterprises whose fleet complexity has outgrown the team running it. Where general-purpose MDMs treat devices as endpoints, Esper treats them as infrastructure - giving engineering leaders the foundation of automation, reliability, and intelligence cloud-native software has had for two decades, applied to the physical world. The platform combines Esper MDM for declarative configuration, zero-touch Seamless Provisioning, OS-layer control via Esper Foundation, and Airwave OTA for firmware - across Android, Windows, iOS, and Linux.

Fonte: Business Wire