Wind River’s Next Chapter

It’s been roughly 90 days since Wind River became a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel, and I wanted to take this opportunity to share with you the state of our business and a few personal thoughts of mine in what marks my inaugural contribution to the Wind River Blog Network.

Let me begin by saying what an exciting road it has been. This has been one of the most frenetic years in recent memory. Just last month I returned from visits to many of our offices in North America, Europe and Asia. During those visits I was reassured that our employees understand and embrace the Intel acquisition. Of course, there were lots of questions and luckily I had answers to most of them. Personally, I’m ecstatic with the transition to Intel’s Software and Services Group. We closed the acquisition in near record time, in just six weeks, allowing us to avoid distraction. Since then, we’ve made significant progress in identifying alignment opportunities, and establishing clear rules of engagement and business metrics.

Intel understands that in order to build a successful software franchise, Wind River must operate as a “firewalled” subsidiary and do business with its competitors. In a recent article in the Oregonian, named after the state in which Intel’s software group is based, this point was clearly articulated within the context of Intel’s software aspirations and with Renee James as the lead architect.

Partner Commitment

Since the close of the acquisition, we’ve publicly committed to future hardware roadmaps with long-standing partners Cavium and Freescale, and jointly developed a Linux SDK with NEC Electronics. We’ve also received public validation from Cavium, MIPS Technologies, RMI, and customers such as Huawei as part of our Carrier Grade Linux leadership, as well as from a host of software partners as part of a new program to bring vertical-specific software platforms to various market segments.  We’ve worked tremendously hard to ensure partners understand our commitment to them and how to engage with us now that we’re part of Intel. I believe we’ve made tremendous progress here, but we need to continue to reassure partners of our commitment to future roadmaps and additional co-development efforts.

Accelerated Leadership

We’re honored to have been acknowledged as the market leader in embedded Linux, a major feat considering we entered the Linux business just five years ago and to compliment our market-leading VxWorks product line.  Since then, we’ve achieved the market segment lead in 2008 with greater than 30 percent of total market revenue, according to a recent report by VDC Research Group. I’m really proud of this accomplishment and the hard-working team that has led us to this achievement. Of course, now this just means we have to work even harder to maintain the lead.

Also, we’re increasing our investments in our product portfolio including our non-Intel platforms. One key area is our investment in multicore. This includes our hypervisor product, paravirtualization, and continued advances across our entire portfolio. Customers and partners tell me they think we’re about two years ahead of our competition in providing the breadth and depth of multicore software. We want to keep it that way. Another major emphasis for Wind River is safety and security certification technologies, specifically MILS, DO-178B and IEC-61508. Compliance to these stringent certification standards and other market-specific standards are imperative for our customers, and our increased investments in this area demonstrate our long-term commitment.

Integrating Our Own Acquisitions

We can’t forget that we’ve recently made a few acquisitions ourselves, most recently February’s acquisition of Tilcon Software. In just six short months of the acquisition we fully integrated Tilcon into our existing software portfolio. You’ll also hear more about last year’s MIZI acquisition shortly, so stay tuned.

So, what does all this mean, you might ask? The succinct answer is: Wind River largely remains the same, but now with renewed focus and energy. We’re advancing our technology leadership, strengthening our hardware and software partnerships, and now in the process of writing the next chapter of the embedded and mobile industries. After all, we’ve been pioneering computing inside embedded products since 1981, and now we’re in the position to pioneer for decades to come.

I invite all of you to follow Wind River online by subscribing to the RSS feed from our Wind River Blog Network and Newsroom, or follow us on Twitter at WR_Linux, WR_Multicore and WR_VxWorks.

I look forward to sharing even more developments with you soon. In the meantime, our very own experts will continue to update you regularly via this blog. I welcome your feedback.  Please comment so that I can either answer any questions you might have or incorporate your feedback into my next blog.

Thanks for your continued support and feedback.