A recent study from the Kauffman Foundation stated that from 1977 to 2005 firms within the first year of their founding generated nearly three million new jobs per year within the United States. In the engineering world, new jobs mean new project starts and new development seats. While entrenched tools and development processes can make it difficult – and costly – to capture mindshare and R&D spend from mature organizations, these fledging engineering firms are proving to be an incubator and launching pad for new technologies and trends.
It is no secret that over the last ten years Linux has steadily extended its presence within the embedded market, altering the dynamics of the market and fate of commercial software vendors in the process. Although debates around Linux and its value in the embedded market often seem to turn to disputes bordering on religion, its decade-long ascension has now provided it an unassailable position within engineering organizations as a leading operating system choice for both host and target systems.
Research from our recently completed 2010 Embedded System Engineering Survey has shed further light on these emerging trends. Not only is Linux’s (both public and commercially supplied) use as a host and target OS increasing in embedded projects, but there is also a distinct correlation between the use of the platform as a host and target OS in current projects as well as across the migration plans for respondent engineers’ future plans.
While the directional trending of these statistics might not be a huge surprise, this next facet provides them with even greater weight – the use of Linux as a host operating system within small engineering companies (less than 50 engineers) is outpacing that within mid- and enterprise-size organizations. What perhaps makes the future impact of this trend even more acute is the fact that these smaller firms are embracing public Linux in an even greater frequency. Although cash flow considerations are certainly influencing the use of public Linux in some small companies, the increasing use of the platform will continue to help drive the development of the Linux ecosystem as well as the level of in-house expertise and software assets supporting the platform within growing organizations.
Clearly, software and tool vendors should take notice of these emerging market dynamics and reevaluate the current positioning of their products, services, and partnerships in order to maxmize mind share within these smaller organizations and potentially channel and/or redirect this market momentum in their favor.
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