On Target: Embedded Systems

Embedded Industry Expert Opinions Needed

VDC is conducting its annual survey of mobile and embedded engineers so if you are involved in the engineering of mobile or embedded systems/software, this is your chance to influence key solution suppliers.

 

The research covers embedded software, hardware, tools, and development practices. Your thoughts will improve our insights into the engineering community and help to influence next generation solutions.

 

In addition, VDC will provide all respondents who complete the survey:

 

* Instant access to a summary of VDC's 2009 survey findings;

* Entry into a prize drawing for one of five $100 Amazon.com gift certificates (drawing to be held August 15th, 2010); and

* A summary of the 2010 survey findings once the survey is complete later this year

 

 

To begin the survey, go to:http://vdcresearch.com/survey/10_esdt.html?RID=OT

 

 

Thank you very much for your assistance.

 

 

Best Regards,

 

The VDC Embedded Software and Tools Research Team

Embedded World Bulletin – March 2010

VDC attended the 2010 embedded world Exhibition & Conference in Nuremberg, Germany March 2^nd and 3^rd. This bulletin presents a summary of the event.

 

This is the first time VDC Research has attended embedded world and according to the show closing report, there were 730 international exhibiting companies and 18,350 trade visitors. Both represent a record number of exhibitors and visitors participating in the exhibition and conference over previous years.

 

The show floor consisted of four interconnected halls with exhibitors logically grouped by the type of products offered. Over the course of two days VDC met with over 20 exhibitors and stopped in to chat with a number of others.

 

Wow! What a high energy event! The exhibitor halls quickly filled up with attendees in the morning hours. Many booths were filled with engineers presenting opportunities for exhibitors. Most exhibitors had big broad smiles when asked about the potential for quality leads. All and all, an exciting show for all participating in the conference!

 

However, these types of shows also offer an opportunity for exhibitors and non-exhibiting companies to examine their strategic partnerships including strengthening, expanding, and establishing new alliances. It also serves as a checkpoint for scoping out your competitors as well as new potential entrants. 

 

The 2010 Embedded Systems Conference/Silicon Valley is just around the corner. We hope that embedded world is a prelude to the type of energy and interest to be expressed by attendees at ESC/SV. If so it could just be the medicine that the embedded market needs for growth in 2010!

 

The complete press release and more information & downloads for embedded world can be found here.

 

WALKING THE FLOOR

 

Atego announced that it had acquired Blue River Software, a provider of embedded software development tools and related services based out of Nuremberg, Germany. This is just the latest in a recent spree of M&A activity undertaken by Atego/Artisan’s leadership.  To see our coverage of this and their previous moves, including a Q&A with Atego Chairman James Gambrell, please visit the links here.

 

Auriga, Inc. was co-located in the Birdstep Technology booth and was demonstrating with their partner the Raima Database Manager Embedded on Android. Auriga is an IT outsourcing services provider with operating software development centers in Russia since 1990 and was incorporated in the US in 1993.

 

dSPACE announced that the company is cooperating with Elektrobit in offering a coordinated AUTOSAR tool chain for developers of automotive electronic control unit software. In addition the company announced that they are also working NAVTEQ to create an integrated development platform for digital map-enhanced driver assistance systems.

 

Enea announced their hypervisor that implements multiple high performance computing environments on top of multicore processors. The hypervisor is based on OSE micro kernel technology and runs OSE applications at native speeds. In addition the company announced that they had been selected by FatSkunk, a supplier of anti-malware technology for mobile phones, to ensure delivery of its Android proof of concept.

 

Esterel Technologies featured announcements around their upcoming release of SCADE, version 6.2 which will incorporate enhancements to both SCADE Suite and SCADE Display with respect to integration with other tools in the development tool chain. The release features support for the SCADE Suite Rapid Prototyper and enhancements to the SCADE Suite Model Test Coverage. In addition the company announced that it is launching the Aerospace and Defense DO-178C Readiness program where Esterel will assist companies in their preparation for development of safety critical software under the pending DO-178C standard.

 

ETAS, a subsidiary of Robert Bosch GmbH, conducted a number of product demonstrations at the conference including a prototype of their RTA operating system for multicore CPU’s and AUTOSAR.

 

GrammaTech, Inc. announced that CodeSonar, the company’s flagship source code analyzer, has been selected by major U.S., European and Asia/PAC medical device manufacturers.

 

Green Hills Software had several announcements at the conference. On the first day the company announced that the INTEGRITY RTOS received CENELEC EN 50128 (railway industry standard) SWSIL 4 certification. This press release was complemented by an announcement that Bombardier had selected the Green Hills Platform for Industrial Safety which will be used in the development of their next generation train control management system. Other announcements at the show included a partnering agreement with IS2T to provide their hard real-time Micro-Jvm for use with the INTEGRITY RTOS and the availability of the INTEGRITY RTOS for the CPU Tech Acalis CPU872 secure processor.

 

IAR Systems had several announcements at the show including commercial-grade integration of Express Logic’s ThreadX RTOS and IAR Embedded Workbench IDE with support for 32-bit architectures, including ARM’s ARM7, ARM9 and Cortex-M3, Freescale’s ColdFire, NEC’s V850, and Renesas’s H8. In addition the company announced that their integrated development environment IAR Embedded Workbench has been selected as a part of Fujitsu’s SK-86R03 'Jade-L Starterkit' package.

 

IntervalZero announced that Acontis Technologies GmbH released its EtherCAT Master Stack AT-EM for IntervalZero’s RTX hard real-time software for Windows.

 

Keil, an ARM Company announced the release of MDK-ARM v4.10 which is the first software development tool to support the ARM Cortex M4 processor.  In addition the company announced the C51 V9.01 Professional Developer’s Kit with support for the Infineon XC82x and XC83x series. The XC82x and XC83x series expands Infineon's 8-bit XC800 microcontroller family to provide more scalable performance for cost-sensitive automotive applications.

 

LDRA and Visure Solutions announced the release of Embed-X, an end-to-end application lifecycle management (ALM) system for the embedded space. Embed-X, like other ALM solutions, merges product requirements, business objectives and metrics in a uniform actionable perspective. Embed-X also delivers these ALM objectives with full certification support for critical development standards in the avionics, defense, automotive and medical markets.

 

Mentor Graphics received the embedded award 2010 in the software category at the show for their Inflexion GUI Technology for Android. The Inflexion GUI is comprised of an embedded user interface (UI) engine and designer tool for the rapid creation and customization of visually rich, highly-usable GUIs for all types of Android devices featuring a graphical display.

 

QNX Software Systems, a Harman International (NYSE:HAR) company, announced its new smart energy reference, a pre-integrated software stack that makes it easier to design, deploy, and extend smart-home energy management systems. The company also announced that Texas Instruments is providing pre-integrated hardware support for the QNX CAR application platform. The collaboration will allow QNX CAR participants to take advantage of TI’s AM3517 and OMAP3530 processors, both of which are based on the highly popular ARM architecture.

 

Real Time Systems GmbH recently announced an alliance with QNX Software Systems and demonstrated their recently released RTS Hypervisor version 2.2 running the QNX Neutrino RTOS on the same hardware as Windows, and is also capable of running Linux and other operating systems.

 

SYSGO AG announced that B. Braun selected the company to develop the software application related to SpaceCom, one of the key components for its automated infusion systems. The company also announced the version 3.1 of their PikeOS that integrates multi-core support which is part of the DO-178B certified code base.

 

TenAsys announced the availability of eVM for Windows, an embedded virtualization manager that enables different RTOSs to run alongside Windows on the same multi-core processor platform. The eVM for Windows’ embedded virtualization technology utilizes hardware-assisted features built into Intel processors to allocate hardware resources and is available for download from the company’s new online store. In addition the company announced support for new Intel Atom processors with their INTime RTOS.

 

ULMA Embedded Solutions was present at the exhibition with their manufacturing partner Trelec. The company was founded in 2009 from the ULMA Group Business Incubator and focuses on providing embedded systems engineering services.

 

Wittenstein High Integrity Systems, a subsidiary of the German industrial technology group, Wittenstein AG, announced OpenRTOS support for the Renesas SH7216 microcontroller. In addition the company announced a SafeRTOS Design Assurance Pack for the SafeRTOS kernel that meets US FSA510 (k) Class III and European IEC EN62304 medical device certification requirements to run on Cortex-M3 and ARM7 based microprocessors.

 

Other leading embedded systems exhibitors included aicas GmbH, Altera, Analog Devices, Arrow Embedded Solutions, AvNet Embedded, Birdstep Technology, CMX Systems, CoFluent Design, Coverity, Datalight, DENX, eCosCentric, Express Logic, Freescale,  GEENSOFT, IBM, Intel Corporation, itemis AG, Klocwork,  Kontron AG, Lauterbach GmbH, LDRA, LynuxWorks, Marvell, McObject,  Micrium, Microsoft, MKS GmbH, National Instruments Germany, Nokia Norge AS, Parasoft, Perforce Software Europe, PragmaDev, RadiSys GmbH, Serena Software GmbH, SparxSystems GmbH, Target Compiler Technologies, TASKING by Altium, Texas Instruments, The MathWorks GmbH, Vector Software, Willert Software Tools , Wind River GmbH, Xilinx Europe,  and many, many others.

Another PLD start up – Can Tabula Succeed Where Others Have Failed?

What Happened?

 

After nearly seven years in stealth mode, yesterday Tabula announced its first product offering, Spacetime, a programmable logic architecture that uses time as a third dimension for configurability.

 

VDC’s Views

 

The PLD, or more specifically, the FPGA market has evolved into something most closely resembling a duopoly where two companies, Xilinx (NASDAQ: XLNX) and Altera (NASDAQ: ALTR), have dominated market revenue and unit shipments.

 

So what appears to be so different with Tabula, who is entering a market where so many other companies have failed (Ambric, MathStar, and Velogix to name only a few)?  The company claims that it has to do with a fundamental difference in their approach to the PLD’s architecture and functionality. 

 

Supposedly, the rapid rate of reconfiguration in their technology allows portions of a function to be executed by different “folds” within the processor across time, so that the results for each part of the function can be locally stored and used to rapidly and efficiently execute the next portion of the function.

 

Although Tabula claims that their compiler can automatically map standard RTL to their new device thereby reducing some of the potential impact on the engineering process, the ultimate adoption of this technology will likely be limited be the same factors that have affected many new start-ups in this arena:

 

• Potential impact on project workflow versus established processes
• Issues pertaining to integration with current tools
• Implications regarding any legacy code bases (including those for hardware, software, and algorithm engineering) and the investment they represent
• Lack of partner evangelism or strong ecosystem
• Potential effect on project schedules and time to market
• Risk inherent to engineering organization when changing any processing platform or component, especially in an unstable economy when start ups (or any other company) can fail.

 

While there is certainly an opportunity for new PLD technology to enter the market and steal share from the incumbents and/or from ASIC shipments, Tabula and any other start up will need to obtain significant buy-in from leading software and system tool vendors and embedded OS suppliers in order to build up the sufficient ground swell and robust ecosystem needed to drive substantial adoption over the long term.

Embedded M&A Continues - Atego Makes Another Acquisition

What Happened?

 

At embedded world this week, Atego announced that it had acquired Blue River Software, a provider of embedded software development tools and related services based out of Nuremberg, Germany.

 

VDC’s View

 

Artisan, Aonix, Atego – It doesn’t matter what you call it, this company, or rather this amalgamation of companies, continues to scoop up small companies to expand its size, geographic footprint, as well as the breadth of its technological capabilities.

 

Although the acquisition will only have a small impact on Atego’s bottom line, it is more noteworthy because it marks a further expansion of Atego’s solutions beyond model-based design (from Artisan) and the niche, but stable Ada and real-time Java (from Aonix).  By expanding their tools and capabilities for C and C++, Atego can potentially enhance their relevance to and gain entry into the vast majority of embedded projects that today use C and C++, which were reported to be used by 86% and 42%, respectively, of the engineers that responded to our 2009 Embedded Engineering Survey.

 

This acquisition will also serve to further expand the company’s presence in the German automotive market that was initially strengthened by the acquisition of EXTESSY AG in November of last year.  Blue River also reportedly derives additional business from the industrial automation/control and telecommunications vertical markets.

 

This is just the latest in a recent spree of M&A activity undertaken by Atego/Artisan’s leadership.  To see our coverage of their previous moves, including a Q&A with Atego Chairman James Gambrell, as well as our coverage of other recent industry consolidation, please visit the links below:

 

• Embedded Market Consolidation Continues
• Artisan Acts Rational, Acquiring Companies to Broaden Solution Set
• Synopsys Doubles Down, Acquires CoWare
• Further Shakeup in the VSPS Market – Intel acquiring Virtutech
• Synopsys Acquires VaST, becoming #1 in VSPS Market
• Embedded Market Consolidation Continues
• Cavium Networks Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire MontaVista Software: Part 2
• Cavium Networks Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire MontaVista Software
• Intel to Acquire Wind River Systems ~ Update 2
• Intel to Acquire Wind River Systems ~ Update 1

 

embedded world 2010 – Nuremberg, Germany – March 2-4

Embedded world 2010 is just around the corner. VDC will be attending the exhibition and conference on March 2 and 3. We are currently scheduling meetings with companies at the conference.

 

Interested in meeting with VDC? Please get in touch with Steve Balacco to schedule a day and time at sbalacco@vdcresearch.com / 508.653.9000 x124.

 

 

For more on the conference

 

Exhibitor list

 

Exhibition and conference registration

Synopsys Doubles Down, Acquires CoWare

What Happened?

 

Yesterday, Synopsys announced they were acquiring CoWare, the third acquisition within the Virtual System Prototyping/Simulation (VSPS) market in the last week (Intel/Wind River is acquiring Virtutech and Synopsys acquired VaST).  Similarly to the other acquisitions, the terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the second quarter, were not disclosed.

 

VDC’s View

 

Although the VSPS market (a niche segment within the Electronic System Level (ESL) tool market) is small, it is has certainly generated a barrage of recent activity recently.

 

As discussed within our post on Friday, VSPS tools have been gaining adoption within the embedded market as engineering organizations continue to look for new ways to speed software development and accelerate time-to-market.

 

So with the majority of VSPS market revenue now in the hands of two players, Intel/Wind River and Synopsys, what’s next for this market that had previously been a bastion of growth for an otherwise stagnating ESL and, more broadly, EDA market?

 

What drove Synopsys to acquire CoWare, an ESL tools vendor that VDC estimates to be four times the size of VaST?  Could it also be their virtual platform offering, which by VDC estimates accounted for less than 25% of its revenue but was a strong driver of its overall growth?

 

Will the other two major players within the ESL/EDA market, Cadence and Mentor Graphics, now make a push into VSPS segment and/or reemphasize the broader ESL value proposition, looking to capitalize on the recent stream of media attention and the potential influx of uncertainty into VSPS tool customers?

 

After ARM’s divestment from ESL and the refocusing of its remaining System Generator/Fast Models tool, will another semiconductor or semiconductor IP vendor look toward this technology segment tool as a means to enable their customers’ success and/or as a direct contributor to a future P&L?

 

Also, given the addition of Simics to Wind River’s tool suite, will Green Hills refocus development/marketing around its Virtual Prototyping tool or will other software development/lifecycle management tool vendors look to add a VSPS offering to their portfolio?

 

This most recent acquisition certainly may raise more questions than it answers and it will take some time before the ultimate consequences of the past week’s activity unfolds. 

 

In the mean time, we would be interested in hearing your opinion on the recent market news so please submit your comments.

 

Related Posts:

 

• Further Shakeup in the VSPS Market – Intel acquiring Virtutech
• Synopsys Acquires VaST, becoming #1 in VSPS Market
• Embedded Market Consolidation Continues
• Intel to Acquire Wind River Systems ~ Update 2
• Intel to Acquire Wind River Systems ~ Update 1
• Synopsys to Acquire Synplicity
• Virtutech Announces Standards Initiative for Virtualized Software Development

Bits and Bytes – In case you missed these announcements from the last week or so…

Green Hills Software Announces End of Embedded Industry Recession

 

Wind River Extends Virtualization Support with New Release of Wind River Hypervisor

 

Synopsys Acquires VaST Systems Technology Corporation

 

Green Hills Software Supports Freescale P2020 Multicore Processor

 

Wind River Delivers Suite of Multi-architecture Embedded Software Development Tools

 

Dell Announces Alliance with INTEGRITY Global Security

 

Synopsys to Acquire CoWare, Inc.

 

Enea signs partner agreement with Freescale

 

LDRA and Visure Partner to Offer Embedded Application Lifecycle Management Solution

 

Symbian Completes Biggest Open Source Migration Project Ever

 

Wind River to Add Virtutech Simics Products to Comprehensive Embedded Software Portfolio

 

Mentor Graphics Catapult C Adds SystemC Synthesis and Expands Full-Chip Capabilities

 

Nuance Voice Control for Automotive Powers Speech for Leading QNX Car Application Platform

 

Macraigor Systems Extends On-Chip Debug Support to Intel’s Atom Processor

 

Lauterbach, Discretix Announce Alliance to Provide Secure Chip Debug Capability

 

Wind River Updates VxWorks DO-178B Platform for Aerospace and Defense Systems

 

Apple Launches iPad

 

GrammaTech Achieves Record Growth in 2009

 

OpenTV and Coverity Announce Software Integrity Collaboration

 

Atego launches as the foundation for an integrated tool chain strategy

 

GNAT Pro support for PikeOS – New Safety-Critical RTOS Platform for GNAT Pro High-Integrity Edition

 

BAE Systems Selects MontaVista Software to Power New Artillery and Naval Gun Systems

 

 

VDC Research looks forward to companies contacting us for a briefing on new announcements around products, new partnerships and alliances, or other changes within your organizations. At a minimum please make sure that we are included in your press/analyst relations distribution list for new announcements as they become public.

Telephone: 508.653.9000.

Steve Balacco, Director, sbalacco@vdcresearch.com, x124

Chris Rommel, Analyst, crommel@vdcresearch.com, x123

Jared Weiner, Analyst, jweiner@vdcresearch.com, x143

Further Shakeup in the VSPS Market – Intel acquiring Virtutech

Wind River to add Simics Virtual System Prototyping/Simulation Solution to Portfolio

 

What Happened?

 

Wind River, a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel Corporation (NASDQ: INTC), today announced it will add the Virtutech product line to its embedded software product portfolio after the completion of Intel Corporation’s acquisition of Virtutech which is expected to close later this quarter.  

 

VDC’s View

 

This announcement marks the 2^nd major acquisition in the VSPS market this week.  On Wednesday Synopsys announced that it had acquired VaST Systems Technology Corp.  As we stated previously – Synopsys’ acquisition of VaST gave the combined entity the top spot for the VSPS market revenue share.

 

What we did not specifically spell out is who a combined Synopsys/VaST would be leapfrogging…You guessed it – Virtutech.

 

Why all the fuss about a relatively small market segment?

 

It is no secret that the level of functionality required and expected within mobile and embedded devices has skyrocketed in recent years.  Meanwhile, development timelines and time-to-market requirements certainly haven’t eased off.  In fact, many engineering teams are being asked to meet or exceed previous time tables with fewer resources.

 

Not surprisingly, engineering organizations continue to look for ways to speed software development, sometimes through the use of new types of tools and/or methodologies.  Virtual System Prototyping/Simulation (VSPS) solutions, such as those from Virtutech, Synopsys, and CoWare, offer a way for development teams to potentially shorten the entire development process by accelerating the software development tasks to earlier in the overall project’s workflow.

 

So is this the cure-all for embedded software development woes?

 

In short – No.  First off all, as with any new technology, you cannot expect overnight transformation of entrenched development processes.

 

However, our 2009 Embedded Engineering Survey showed a significant increase in the use of VSPS tools over 2008 results (14.1% vs. 8.5% of respondents).  This increase should be viewed in a broader context confirming that engineering teams are adopting new tools (VSPS among others) in greater frequencies as part of comprehensive strategies aimed to revamp embedded system engineering processes in order to adequately and efficiently address the next generation of system requirements and challenges.

 

But is this a fit for Intel/WR and what should we expect going forward?

 

Beyond just the long-standing partnership between Wind River and Virtutech, our research shows that the companies’ business should, from a revenue perspective, map well together with telecommunications and military/aerospace traditionally generating the majority of both companies’ revenue.

 

Need we forget that Wind River is also now owned by a semiconductor company?  If nothing else, we can view this acquisition as confirmation that Intel is seriously serious about not just pursuing the embedded market but actually trying to dominate it.  Even though Wind River has stated that, similar to with its own products, Simics will continue to support other architectures – at the end of the day, Intel is still trying to sell silicon and Wind River was acquired to help them do that.

 

We fully expect that Wind River will continue to push to maintain and develop their, and now also Virtutech’s, partnerships with other semiconductor/IP vendors.  It should be noted that since Intel’s acquisition of WR back in June, our discussions with other industry participants appear to confirm that WR is making its best effort to evangelize and follow through on its messaging of silicon neutrality. 

 

The greatest factor left undecided at this point, however, might be whether or not all of Virtutech’s partners continue to play (as) nice with a WR/Intel-owned Virtutech over the long term (even if all of their external messaging suggests that).   

 

Whereas on Wednesday we suggested that Synopsys’ acquisition of VaST may create some opportunities for Virtutech and CoWare to capitalize on uncertainty in the market, today’s news potentially reverses the pendulum of market sentiment with perhaps an even greater magnitude.

 

With the potential acquisition targets quickly disappearing, can we expect any new entrants to the VSPS market from other EDA or ESW companies?

 

 

Related Posts:

 

• Synopsys Acquires VaST, becoming #1 in VSPS Market
• Embedded Market Consolidation Continues
• Intel to Acquire Wind River Systems ~ Update 2
• Intel to Acquire Wind River Systems ~ Update 1
• Synopsys to Acquire Synplicity
• Virtutech Announces Standards Initiative for Virtualized Software Development

 

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VDC is currently in the process of planning an expansion of our research covering the Lifecyle Management market.  We welcome your input and suggestions to help us refine the scope of this research program.  If you have a few minutes, please click here to provide us with your feed back.

Dell and INTEGRITY Global Security Announce Alliance

Bringing secure solutions to the desktop –

 

What Happened?

 

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) announced an alliance with INTEGRITY Global Security  to be the exclusive provider of the INTEGRITY separation kernel for general-purpose secure computing to government agencies.

 

VDC’s View

 

In November 2008 Green Hills Software announced that it had formed INTEGRITY Global Security, LLC (IGS) as a wholly owned subsidiary of Green Hills Software, Inc. The timing of this announcement coincided with another company announcement of having received certification of its INTEGRITY-178B separation kernel to the Common Criteria EAL 6 + / High Robustness. This certification was conducted by the National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP), a joint government initiative governed by the National Security Agency (NSA).

 

From our perspective the IGS spin-off from Green Hills Software represented a first-mover advantage in defining the market opportunity. So to speak - a sole source opportunity – to capitalize on their NIAP certification in defining the market in advance of other market players such as Wind River and LynuxWorks receiving their certifications.

 

The spin-off represented a chance for the company to formally expand beyond its traditional “embedded roots” into critical infrastructure systems and the much larger enterpri$e/de$ktop environments. However, this scenario created challenges for Green Hills Software with respect to their traditional partnerships and alliances around semiconductor, software, CPU boards, hardware debug, and a host of others – all focused on the embedded market.

 

Enter Dell – a well known and respected worldwide provider to business, education and government environments for enterprise and desktop solutions. With the emphasis on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS), this announcement represents an integrated solution with Dell’s OptiPlex desktop PC’s and IGS’s INTEGRITY separation kernel - the Dell | INTEGRITY Secure Consolidated Client Solution.

 

While the solution is based on the INTEGRITY-178B Separation Kernel that was certified by NIAP to EAL 6+ and High Robustness, the validation and certification was based on a Target of Evaluation (TOE) that included PowerPC architectures. This Dell/IGS solution will include the x86 architecture so we expect that at some point Green Hills Software/INTEGRITY Global Security would submit a package to NIAP under assurance maintenance for evaluation on this architecture (TOE).

 

Military organizations are expected to be first adopters, however, this solution could span to support critical infrastructure systems and networks in areas such as power, energy, communications, transportation, financial services, and ultimately within commercial enterprises – all domains that can be leveraged by Dell with this integrated solution.

 

Both parties bring their strengths to the alliance – commodity product integration, end-to-end solutions, service, support, market reach, and of course an integrated secure separation kernel. The big leap will be whether private enterprises will agree that this is a solution to meet their needs and that the timing is right.

 

Related Articles:

• Maybe What We Need Here is Some Common (Criteria) Sense
• Embedded Systems Bulletin - September 2009
• Green Hills Software Announces Launch of INTEGRITY Global Security, LLC

Partnership Underscores Integration & Consolidation Trends in Embedded

 

What Happened?

 

In case you missed it, LDRA announced yesterday that it has partnered with Visure Solutions to create an ALM solution specifically targeted at safety-critical embedded applications.

 

 

VDC’s View

 

The heterogeneity of embedded projects had previously insulated, or at least dampered, some of the pressures facing tool companies competing in the embedded world as compared to those in the enterprise/IT market. 

 

The complex and unique development requirements typical in the embedded market fostered a commercial tool market in which best-of-breed or point solutions could still garner the lion’s share of market revenue.  However, times are changing.

 

It is clear that embedded market participants are feeling the pressure to expand their products suites and service offerings in order to meet the demands of engineering teams who are under pressure to do more – in less time, with less help, and with tighter budgets.  Meanwhile, we have seen one of the stalwarts of the enterprise/IT space (and previously embedded), IBM Rational, refocus on embedded with the acquisition of Telelogic (/I-Logix) – further expanding its already broad set of tools.

 

The recent acquisitions undertaken by Artisan Software (Atego) and yesterday by Synopsys further underscore this self-reinforcing trend as companies look to augment their value proposition and improve the abilities to address the needs of customers in new segments.

 

 

Related Posts:

 

• Synopsys Acquires VaST, becoming #1 in VSPS Market
• Embedded Market Consolidation Continues
• Artisan Acts Rational, Acquiring Companies to Broaden Solution Set
• IBM/Telelogic Acquisition Update: Part 2

 

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VDC is currently in the process of planning an expansion of our research covering the Lifecyle Management market.  We welcome your input and suggestions to help us refine the scope of this research program.  If you have a few minutes, please click here to provide us with your feed back.

Synopsys Acquires VaST, becoming #1 in VSPS Market

What Happened?

 

Synopsys(NASDAQ: SNPS) announced that it acquired VaST Systems Technology Corporation.  The terms of the acquisition, which closed February 1^st, were not disclosed.

 

VDC’s View

 

A report that we coincidentally released this morning, Virtual System Prototyping/Simulation Tools for Software Development & Verification – A Market Update, shows that a combined Synopsys-VaST would garner the leading share of revenue in the virtual platform market. 

 

Our research also appears to confirm Sysnopsys’ claim that the acquisition of VaST provides them with access to industries, namely automotive, where there was little overlap with the existing revenue streams of Synopsys’ Innovator product line.  Much of this difference had been driven by the functionality of the two companies’ solutions - Synopsys’ Innovater which provides faster simulation, better suited for the mobile market; and Vast’s METeor/CoMET which provides more cycle accurate simulation, which is more attractive to safety-critical markets such as automotive.

 

The factor that holds the most potential in affecting the future of the VSPS market  is whether Synopsys can maintain and/or expand the customer accounts and relationships that they are inheriting from VaST.  In the mean time, we are sure that Virtutech and especially CoWare are looking to capitalize on any uncertainty in the market.

 

VDC intends to comment further on this acquisition, so stay tuned…

 

 

Related Articles:

• Synopsys to Acquire Synplicity
• Virtutech Announces Standards Initiative for Virtualized Software Development
• Planning to Fail?: Current Project Management and System Architecture Specification Activities Causing Delays in Software Engineering and System Integration