I'm new to Wind, in at 40 for 500shrs. I was looking for a software company within wireless community. Was feeling real good until the last two days. Also ran across this article. Any comment. They raise concerns about fragmentation.
Real-Time OS Falls As Wind River Consolidates
Mar 03, 2000 (Tech Web - CMP via COMTEX) -- Five months after embedded software
powerhouse Wind River Systems announced it is merging with Integrated Systems,
the other shoe dropped -- squarely on ISI's operating system.
Executives from the two companies gathered in Chicago at the spring Embedded
Systems Conference this week to detail how the merged companies would operate,
and what everybody had long suspected -- that ISI's pSOS real-time operating
system would fall by the wayside -- became policy.
"At the end of the day, you've got to have one platform, otherwise you're not
running the company properly," said Wind River chairman Jerry Fiddler.
While the high-profile operating system will be phased out in coming years, Wind
River, Alameda, Calif., is keeping ISI's Prism development environment and
rolling its Dr. Design design services operation into one of five newly formed
business units.
At a news conference and in an interview afterward, Fiddler sketched out a newly
joined operation with a mission to develop and help build the next-generation
Internet infrastructure and devices -- everything from switches using the
Tornado integrated development environment to emerging picture screens that dial
up a server and display rotating digital images. Fiddler saw $1 billion in
revenue as quickly achievable, but he hedged on the company's commitment to the
Linux market, which competitors have embraced. In a Thursday earnings report,
the company said its fiscal 2000 net income was $27.2 million on revenue of $171
million, up slightly from the previous year.
Wind River also announced it has acquired embedded-tools outfit Embedded Support
Tools, Canton, Mass., for 6.3 million shares of Wind River stock.
Under the new corporate structure, Fiddler is chairman and ISI founder Narend
Gupta is vice chairman of the merged company. Five business units will target
markets ranging from consumer to military.
Platforms, where the core software work will emerge, is to be led by John
Fogelin and Dave Stepner; networks, focusing on communications, will be run by
Dave Fraser; consumer is headed by J.C. Sarner; and TDI, focusing on
transportation, defense, and industrial, is led by Scot Morrison. Embedded
Support Tools, the new acquisition, also will become a business unit, but those
merger details have yet to be worked out.
Though competitors at the Embedded Systems Conference said questions over the
outcome of the merger had prompted worried Wind River and ISI customers to
contact them, Fiddler maintains all customers will be brought on board the
single platform during the next 24 months.
"This means more products faster for our customers," Fiddler said.
To facilitate the move, Wind River plans a third quarter release of the next
version of the Tornado environment and VxWorks RTOS. Called Cirrus, it will
include a new Tornado IDE; a next-generation VxWorks with a Linux host, and the
new Protection Domain Technology to cut down on memory-protection issues that
can cut into system uptime. Wind River has recently landed seven patents related
to this technology, officials said.
"It's a new type of system with protection, without the performance hit," said
CEO Tom St. Dennis.
Companies such as Lynx and QNX have had memory protection for some time. The
technology modularizes a system so that if portions of it, such as device
drivers, run off and use other memory space, the system doesn't have to be
rebooted. The memory protection makes it possible to fix just the corrupted
portion.
After Cirrus, the convergence of traditional ISI and Wind River customers will
come in 2001 by means of Cumulus. Building on Cirrus, this package will offer a
scalable OS with three configurations for flexibility: a traditional
microkernel, domain protection, and advanced features for high availability. The
system will include a pSOSystem application programming interface and features
unique to pSOS. Cumulus will also feature the next-generation Tornado IDE and
enhancements targeting smart devices, such as connectivity drivers and Java.
For ISI customers, the first step away from pSOS comes from Stratus, an upgrade
of pSOS v2.5 and Prism+ v2.5. Its run-time enhancements include memory
protection and it will be compatible with the latest Diab-SDS IDE releases. The
combined company will maintain both GNU and Diab IDEs, with Diab being the
premium compiler, Fiddler said.
Wind River said it will provide customers with migration teams and a free
migration kit to ease their pain.
Executives put the best face on the uncertainty surrounding the transition.
"The beam seems higher than it really is," Gupta said. "Customers generally have
been happy that we can now address things that we couldn't in the past."
The merger seems gentle on employees of Wind River and ISI, which traditionally
have had turnover rates of 12 and 18 percent, respectively. At least 30 people
will lose their jobs to redundancy, saving "millions" of dollars, St. Dennis
said.
Yet competitors said even the detailed road map the companies offered last week
won't allay customers' fears.
Even though ISI customers are being offered the olive branch of transition
packages, users are likely to open up their next-generation designs now that
pSOS' days are numbered, said Greg Bergsma, vice president of North American
operations for QNX Software Systems, Kanata, Ontario.
"Companies will start evaluating all their choices now," he said. "It's also
been very distracting to Wind River to get this all together."
On another front, moving users accustomed to Wind River's traditional
flat-memory approach to a memory-protection-based architecture is no mean feat
either, he said.
"We've had to educate our own customers about how difficult it is," Bergsma
said. "You can't directly port VxWorks to the new OS."
Bergsma said a system using memory protection does take a performance hit. But
on the upside, he said that one of his customers, Olin Chemicals, has not had to
reboot its QNX-based system in six years.
But it is on the Linux front where competitors seem to be really licking their
chops.
"I'm guessing they feel pretty threatened by Linux," said Steve Verleye,
president and CEO of Applied Microsystems, Redmond, Wash.
Greg Rose, a strategic market segment specialist for Lynx Realtime Systems,
Dallas, said Linux is a force to be reckoned with. Lynx offers customers a
two-pronged approach, fielding its traditional LynxOS for hard-real time systems
and BlueCat for Linux-based designs. Linux is gaining fast in popularity, and
"when that freight train hits you, you're going to have skid marks" if a company
isn't prepared with a strategy, Rose said.
Fiddler isn't dismissing Linux, although he described it as a "four-star pain in
the ass."
"It exists because Microsoft exists [to bring a common software platform to the
X86 world]," he said.
But in the embedded world "every customer has custom hardware," Fiddler said.
Thus, the promise of a free operating system gets diluted, since each company
must, in essence, write its own version of Linux to its hardware specifications.
"How does open source [software] work?" Fiddler said. "Well, you make it so
general that you can't use it on a spacecraft design. Who's going to unify this
[Linux] thing? I don't see it happening."
Copyright (C) 2000 CMP Media Inc.
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