Day 2 at ESC Silicon Valley: The Embedded Community Begins to Leverage the Cloud

Day 2 of the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) Silicon Valley afforded VDC’s analyst team an opportunity to explore the exhibit areas and meet with a number of senior executives from a range of companies.

One company was displaying solutions implementing two technologies that are always talked about, but rarely implemented together – smart energy and cloud services.  That company was Digi.

The firm was displaying its iDigi Energy bundled platform for energy service providers. This bundled solution uses the firm’s iDigi solution, which combines Digi connectivity products and a cloud based software platform that enables the delivery of a wide array of managed services from the cloud, to provide the kind of smart grid/metering functionality that has been so often talked about but rarely implemented.

This system has already been deployed in Austin, Texas through an energy utility there and provides energy consumers with the ability to monitor their cost of energy in real time, adjust their energy usage accordingly, and do so remotely from a smartphone, laptop, or other network connected device, if desired.
The enablement of cloud-based line of business applications will require elegant solutions that reduce complexity while enhancing uptime, reliability, performance and ultimately, operational and financial impact.  The iDigi solutions illustrate a path forward.

Eurotech was once again showcasing its Everyware Software Framework (ESF). ESF is an inclusive software framework that puts a layer between the OS and the OEM application, with industry-standard interfaces that shorten OEM development time, simplify coding, and allow software to be ported from one Eurotech hardware platform to another.

This collection of cohesive software components lets OEMs modify, reconfigure and maintain their application over time, so it evolves as the market demands change. Adaptability and flexibility to meet market requirements gives OEMs a competitive advantage over static, fixed functionality software applications. In the end, this also looks like a good model to deploy new cloud-based applications and line of business services for embedded applications.

Freescale Semiconductor announced that it had signed strategic alliance agreements with Enea, Green Hills Software and Mentor Graphicsto establish comprehensive enablement solutions for Freescale's QorIQ, PowerQUICC and StarCore processors.

Freescale and its strategic software partners intend to share IP, invest jointly in product and technology roadmaps, and collaborate on related go-to-market activities.

Aimed at providing Freescale's customers with an even broader range of software and enablement solutions for the QorIQ, PowerQUICC and StarCore platforms, the agreements encourage deep collaboration at the earliest stages of design and throughout the entire processor product lifecycle.

The overriding goal of these partnerships then is to produce a wide array of pre-integrated and highly optimized solutions that enable new levels of performance, energy efficiency and most important of all, ease-of-use for Freescale's processors.

VDC sees this alliance as a response to Intel’s acquisition of Wind River last year, and generally good business in the post-recession embedded markets. 

Long a company that has focused on reducing complexity for customers by making computing platforms modular in nature, enabling easy upgrades, Kontron was displaying an interesting new starter kit from its line of COM Express modules.

Designed to enable easy and efficient development and validation of real-time appliances based on the smallest x86 solutions, Kontron introduced the Intel® Atom Processor-based COM Express compatible Kontron nanoETXexpress Starterkit for the latest VxWorks platform. This special starter kit is pre-configured with the Kontron nanoETXexpress-SP Computer-on-Module (COM), featuring the Intel Atom Z530 (1.6GHz) processor, and is validated by the Wind River Partner Validation Program for use with VxWorks.

The Kontron nanoETXexpress-SP Starterkit for VxWorks allows developers to address critical issues such as integration costs, time-to-market, and long-term support, right from the start of platform evaluation.

Netronome, a soon-to-be cash-flow positive startup supplier of highly programmable semiconductor products, introduced a new family of acceleration cards featuring its 40-core network flow processors.
The product family announced was the Network Flow Engine (NFE--‐3240) family of PCIe 2.0 acceleration cards with enhanced I/O virtualization (IOV) support.

Powered by Netronome’s 40-core (and multithreaded) processor the cards are designed for use by network and security appliances that require high performance and low latency, as well as highly virtualized multicore servers. The packaging of the processors on these cards creates a system-like platform that allows ISVs and other users trying to get to market rapidly.  Network Flow Engine(s) allow developers to drop the card into their system and go rather than spend precious development time and dollars on building a complex system around the processor component themselves.

Day 2 brought more things to like at ESC, especially solutions that are geared toward driving the next generation of embedded cloud enabling chip, board and scalable edge nodes (server-appliance hybrids).  
For continued coverage of the ESC Silicon Valley show, look for our announcement of the Embeddie Hardware Award winner to appear on this blog shortly.