Dear Bill S. and other WIND folks: I appreciate you wanting to defend WIND against any and all perceived threats to WIND from ISI, who have been long time rivals. But, the embedded market is not a zero sum game where there will be a winner take all. There are so many market segments with vastly different requirements that both WIND and ISI can each prosper. I do believe that WIND's growth is slowing but will continue to do well in a very robust embedded market. And, Ron Abelman's leadership at WIND has indeed been outstanding.
However, with ISI at the beginning of a new product cycle, a much lower valuation and a capable new CEO; I believe ISI's share price has a lot of upside from here. So far, ISI is up 4% for the year while WIND is down 30%. I do think the drop in WIND was an overreaction to analyst comments that growth was slowing for WIND but it does show the vulnerability a stock has with a high valuation. I prefer to avoid that kind of vulnerability.
As for JAVA, you took my comments a little out of context. If you had continued the quote, it read “JAVA, C++ compiler technology (DIAB).” I was not talking about embedded JAVA in general but referring to ISI's DIAB compiler technology. The DIAB compilers are very high performance compilers that are showing very good growth for ISI.
DIAB's Java compiler, FastJ, provides high performance native JAVA machine code running in a number of processors including MIPS, PowerPC and Coldfire. It does not need a JAVA Virtual Machine (VM) to run. I am not aware of another JAVA compiler specifically for embedded processors with the same capabilities. Quite a few WIND customers are using DIAB compilers with VxWorks running both JAVA and C++ application code.
WIND provides GNU (based on free public domain software) compilers essentially for free with VxWorks. They have been popular and have a large installed base, but they do not have the optimized performance that the DIAB compilers have. For many applications GNU will continue to be a good solution but I believe there is a growing trend towards high performance compilers with tools that can also optimize code such as from DIAB.
On embedded JAVA in general, ISI is supporting the Newmonics JAVA VM; a third-party SUN compatible version; and the new Hewlett Packard Java VM developed specifically for embedded applications. I did talk to the Newmonics folks last November at the Embedded Systems Conference and they said their pERC JAVA VM was indeed shipping. But, the HP version will have a lot of marketing muscle behind it.
I did see the announcements today that WIND will support PersonalJAVA for VxWorks and provide a new JAVA compiler. WIND's press release did point out that embedded JAVA has been slow to take off because conventional JAVA is large, slow and expensive compared to traditional embedded applications.
But, you may have noticed the new WIND compiler, TurboJ, is an “Ahead-of Time” compiler. It provides native machine code for the application but still must run with the SUN JAVA VM. In other words, the application code runs faster but the application still has the overhead of the JAVA VM, extra memory, and the cost of PersonalJava as well as VxWorks. The press release did not say what processors WIND is supporting with TurboJ but I suspect it is only for Intel and Sparc chips.
WIND and ISI are taking different approaches to the market. WIND does have the official SUN stamp of approval while ISI is targeting embedded designs that demand low cost and very small footprint applications. From what I can tell WIND has been targeting higher-end applications while ISI is targeting deeply embedded, high-volume applications which has been ISI's traditional space. Embedded JAVA is still very, very early in its development but each approach will have its place.
|
