Can you comment on the possibility that WIND's TMS is a discontinuous innovation that will reshape the networking industry?
from Wind's quarterly earnings release last august:
corporate-ir.net
Tornado for Managed Switches (TMS), version 1, was shipped to 14 customers in June. Cerent Corporation has already begun shipping a beta version of its Cerent 454 evolutionary optical transport platform during the quarter. This application demonstrates TMS's immediate viability in the market, and applicability for innovative service provider networking equipment as well as traditional enterprise networking gear.
In addition, Allayer Technologies, Ardent Technologies, Broadcom Corporation, MMC Networks, and PMC-Sierra have all licensed Tornado for Managed Switches. Wind River is partnering with these companies, as well as others, to provide OEMs with integrated hardware/software switching platforms for building data networking equipment. For example, Wind River will be providing TMS with Broadcom's recently announced BCM 5600 StrataSwitch platform in order to offer OEMs a complete solution for wirespeed QOS-enabled layer 3 switching.
I personally don't view TMS as a discontinuous innovation as much as Wind moving up the food chain, and using their dominance in one area (VxWorks) to move into a higher margin area (TMS). Their ownership of the base level technology, VxWorks, gives them an inherent advantage in the middleware that sits on top of it, TMS. I see it as very similar to what MSFT did with DOS/Windows/Office. Because most of the communications players are already heavy users of VxWorks, they are an easy sell for a complete solution. The benefit for Wind is that TMS has per copy revenues that are "an order of magnitude" (from a recent conference call) higher than for VxWorks.
Wind has stated that they will be coming out with more of these "complete solutions" in the near future. I think the Audesi acquisition is about developing a complete solution for internet appliances.
I would also like to see them come out with a complete solution for 3G wireless phones. Since they are already pervasive in the base station end of the business, they should have some built in advantages. If they do, my guess is that they would have the most success in Japan. |
