Good Move: By letting others use their tools, Wind is marketing to companies who use their own, in-house operating systems:
Wind River Systems, Inc., a leading provider of software and services
for smart devices in the Internet age, detailed its plans to provide and
support its extensive line of embedded development tools for all embedded
real-time operating systems (RTOSs). This initiative enables Wind River to
deliver end-to-end solutions suitable for the complete software development
lifecycle for real-time embedded applications.
Through the acquisitions of Integrated Systems, Inc. (ISI) and its
subsidiaries Diab-SDS and TakeFive Software, as well as Embedded Support
Tools (EST) Corp., Wind River has added several prominent development tool
technologies to its product offering. These popular tools are already used
outside of the Wind River RTOS customer base. Through this initiative, Wind
River will continue to service these customers and expand to new customers
who are using a non-Wind River RTOS, including developers using in-house
proprietary (IHP) operating systems.
"Developers often select code management tools and other key
development tools such as hardware emulators, software debuggers and
compilers prior to choosing a platform operating system," said John
Fogelin, vice-president of Wind River's Platforms business unit. "Wind
River has amassed an unparalleled wealth of technology in these areas and
is now in a unique position to support customers with these tools prior to
and independent of their RTOS selection. Furthermore, our integrated
development environments (IDEs) will incorporate key features from these
acquired technologies to provide complete, end-to-end solutions for Wind
River RTOS customers."
"This decision helps affirm that Wind River has evolved to be much more
than just an RTOS company," said Tom St. Dennis, president and chief
executive officer of Wind River. "We've come to understand that our
customers mandate best-of-breed tools solutions, notwithstanding whether
they are using a Wind River RTOS in their application. Our ability to meet
this need broadens our available market to encompass users of Wind River's
market-leading RTOSs, other commercial RTOSs, and the single largest
population of embedded developers: engineers using IHP operating systems."
According to a September 2000 survey of the embedded systems market
conducted by Electronic Engineering Times(1), 58 percent of engineers
polled were using IHP operating systems in their embedded designs.
Thirty-six percent were using Wind River RTOSs and no other commercial RTOS
vendor received more than 6 percent for current RTOS usage.
The Tornado(R) Tools and pRISM+(R) IDEs will continue to serve as Wind
River's tool suites for developing applications on the VxWorks(R)
(including VxWorks Advanced Edition (AE)) and pSOSystem(R) RTOSs,
respectively (see related release, Wind River Introduces Next-Generation
pSOSystem/pRISM+, July 17, 2000).
About Wind River Development Tools
Embedded development tools provide an engineering desktop environment
for the development of software for embedded, or hidden, computers that
constitute 90 percent of all microprocessors sold today. Wind River's
development tools service 'code-centric' developers who focus on managing,
analyzing and often reusing large amounts of legacy code, as well as
'processor-centric' developers who need tools that expedite board support
package (BSP) development, RTOS integration and hardware / software
integration. These tools support virtually all popular embedded
microprocessor architectures and are integrated with many third party
RTOSs. Additional RTOS support including support for kernels developed
in-house, can also be added through published application program
interfaces (APIs). Wind River tool chains include visionICE II /
visionPROBE II emulators, reference design single board computers, software
debuggers (SingleStep(TM), visionCLICK, visionXD), visionWARE firmware
development kit, SNIFF+(TM) source code analysis environment, and Diab/RTA
compiler and run-time analysis tools. |
