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Wind River Aims For Post-PC Embedded Apps
(08/20/99, 2:34 p.m. ET)
By Alexander Wolfe, EE Times
In a bid to position itself as the technology enabler for the burgeoning world of post-PC embedded applications, Wind River Systems has set out to reshape the company.
Wind River also hinted this week at having significant offerings to debut at next month's Embedded Systems Conference. The goal is to grow Wind River from a business of approximately $150 million to $1 billion in revenue in four to five years.
Embedded networking capabilities will play a big role in that jump. For example, at the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) in San Jose, Calif., the company plans to unveil "different connectivity models" for hooking embedded appliances and systems onto the Web, a source said. The approach will diverge, the source hint, from today's dominant "Weblet," or Java-based browser models that are being aimed at embedded appliances by such companies as Espial Group, in Ottawa, and Sun (which acquired that technology last October from Beduin Communications) and which has also developed the Java-based Jini distributed-computing technology.
"Connectivity is a key piece of what we're doing," said the source. "You'll see something in that area." Wind River officials declined to comment on specifics of the technology.
Tornado Watch
On the business side, to meet its ambitious goal Wind River will press ahead with its well-known core products -- the VxWorks real-time operating system (RTOS) and its Tornado and Tornado 2 integrated development environments -- and leverage post-PC embedded technologies in new areas.
However, the most significant step in Wind River's move to reposition itself for post-PC embedded computing revolves around a companywide reorganization. "We see a world coming that's going to involve devices with [a] very different kind of computing than you have today," said Jerry Fiddler, chairman and CEO of Wind River.
"What we've done is to break up into multiple business units in order to attack a range of different things," said Fiddler.
Analyst Darcy Fewkes, research director of Aberdeen Group, is sanguine about the move. "Embedded-systems vendors have tried to be everything to everyone for too long," she said. "These groups overlap a little, but they still signify the ability of a company like Wind River to focus on specific areas rather than taking a horizontal approach."
Fiddler said Wind River's core engineering unit "is tasked with building what we call the 'Universal Socket.' This means building the platform; building something that can vector a bunch of software onto any microprocessor in any socket anywhere.
"We can already do that," Fiddler said. "But that platform comprises a lot of different pieces: an OS, networking protocols, graphics and Java." Moving forward, Wind River intends to be more of a "one-stop shopping" model, adding technologies to the mix of what can plug into the "Universal Socket." Consulting will also be added to the mix.
To achieve its ends, Wind River is creating several new business units. The company's mainstream software products will henceforth flow out of the newly named Core Technologies group, which will be led by vice president of platform engineering John Fogelin.
In addition, two new business units are being established. Wind River Networks, led by vice president and general manager David Fraser, will take responsibility for Tornado for Managed Switches (TMS), the company's software solution for building Layer 2 and 3 router-like products. It will also handle the more than 50 networking protocols offered for embedded devices. "We're basically offering a complete router [software] package on a CD," said Fraser. "This is typical of the sort of solution product Wind River is now going to be putting together."
The second unit, Wind River Services, will act as a consulting organization to outside OEMs and customers. "Their job is to go and get you over a hump," said Fiddler. Mindful of companies like Cadence Design System, which grew their consulting operations too quickly, Fiddler plans to ramp up more moderately.
"We have people who can do very high-level stuff. When the code actually gets slung, it might be by a Wind River engineering or by the customer." The services unit will be headed by vice president and general manager Kamran Sokhanvari.
Beyond the changes, Wind River's Fogelin said the technology Wind River and other RTOS vendors are aiming at the post-PC world is a different kind of animal than desktop software. This is particularly apparent when it comes to operating systems.
"If you want [guaranteed response], you have to have a microkernel," said Fogelin, who wrote the original microkernel that's the underpinning of VxWorks.
Latency -- the time it takes to respond to an interrupt -- is also an issue, he added. Latency tends to become more of a problem as embedded applications take on TCP/IP and other protocol stacks, so that's something developers must be aware of, he said.
Reliability, which Fogelin believes is abetted by modular software, is another fertile area to plow.
"We intend to continue to pursue intellectual property in the areas of reliability, enriching our graphics portfolio and extending the reach of our foundation -- as many sockets as I can possibly find," he said.
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