On Target: Embedded Systems

IoT Market Complexity Demands Buyer Personas

The complexity of the market for IoT products and services creates enormous challenges for the IoT solution marketer. An unlimited set of applications, a complex ecosystem of partners and channels, a wide range of decision makers and influencers, and a continuously changing competitive set can leave the marketer forever chasing his tail. Critical decisions about the content, placement, and timing of marketing messages become extraordinarily difficult in the face of these complex and dynamic conditions. Observing these challenges, VDC undertook a disciplined search for tools and methods that could help IoT marketers think and act more strategically, and achieve better... Read more →

Community Development Critical for IoT Success

The IoT has democratized product engineering and innovation. Increasing device connectivity and open APIs are enabling new types of organizations and developers to innovate in a world previously confined to engineers with highly specialized skill sets. While the traditional embedded ecosystem and its engineers will remain at the heart of the IoT device movement, this new cadre of potential developers and entrepreneurs comprise an important part of the creative base designing future IoT systems. And from giant conferences to local maker fairs, the technology ecosystem has recognized the importance fostering the growth of this “citizen developer” community. In fact, VDC... Read more →

The Battle for the IoT is Being Fought in the MCU Software Ecosystem

System resource restrictions around memory and processing power were one of the fundamental issues that first fueled the development of the embedded operating system ecosystem. Overtime, however, the relative importance of these issues diminished in favor of more robust offerings capable of enabling sophisticated user interfaces and more advanced device connectivity. Now, however, the IoT has catalyzed a new level of market demand for OSs that can operate on MCU-class devices. Most Important Characteristics When Selecting Primary Operating System (Percent of Respondents Indicating MCU Used on Current Project) The sheer volume of small-footprint devices is enticing to silicon and software... Read more →

IoT Necessitates Changes in Both People and Technology

The requirements of the devices composing the Internet of Things are changing rapidly. The embedded market no longer consists of dedicated-purpose devices that may or may not be connected. Engineering organizations and deploying enterprises must now design scalable system topologies that can integrate new devices and adapt to the IoT’s evolution. While these next-generation systems are required to facilitate downstream device/node management as well as efficient upstream data transfer and analytics, they must also do so dynamically, allowing for more intelligence and flexibility in node role and workloads within sub-network architectures. This recognition of a need for change in legacy... Read more →

Secure Your Software Supply Chain

The rapid growth in software-driven content for embedded devices is not new - nor is the recognition that connectivity and the Internet of Things are fundamentally changing the ways that OEMs deliver value to end clients. The ways in which OEMs are responding to these new content and feature creation requirements, however, are adding new layers of complexity to the SDLC - and vulnerabilities - to their products. While many engineering organizations are scaling internal software development efforts and receiving a increasing percentage of their code bases from third-party sources, they are often not placing proportional investments into their security... Read more →

Android to Transform Medical Device Market

In an increasingly mobile environment infused with continual technological innovation, OEMs are considering new platforms to develop embedded systems. While there are various platforms to choose from, Android has emerged as the foundation of many new embedded systems. It boasts natural advantages compared to other operating systems – iOS, Blackberry, and Windows to name a few – such as its robust open source user-interface, integrated connectivity, and royalty-free licensing, which can minimize cost and provide OEMs flexibility as they try to fit technology to specific industry needs. Emerging tools in the medical space mark the potential innovation Android can bring... Read more →

Controlling Complexity with Automated Testing

The increase in the volume and complexity of software code in recent years is indisputable. Software has now become the most critical component for end product differentiation. It is likewise intuitively understood that it is, therefore, the most critical path within the product development cycle. Unfortunately, the larger, more complex software projects of today inevitably result in higher volumes of defects within these code bases. More and more organizations are recognizing the need to identify critical quality, safety and security issues early in the lifecycle where they are the least expensive to fix. The use of automated test and verification... Read more →

Controlling In-Vehicle Innovation with IVI Design

Automotive differentiation is no longer driven by gears and grease. Electronic systems now control most aspects of a vehicle’s operation and the software within those systems has risen to account for an increasing share of their functionality and differentiation. Today, software content growth in the automotive industry continues to outpace most other embedded device classes. In no automotive sector is this trend more acute than in IVI. The culture of conservatism, rooted in automotive’s safety-critical requirements, that has traditionally characterized the domain must adapt. The recent financial crisis imposed an unparalleled catalyst for such change. Entire supply chains followed the... Read more →

Got Ugly Code? Test to See if Quality Runs Deep

In today’s celebrity culture, inner beauty isn’t always a valued trait. But when it comes to embedded software development, beauty is truly on the inside. High quality, well-designed and reliable products necessitate high-quality and highly secure embedded software. Development Testing is one of the most effective ways to achieve this. Development Testing is a rapidly emerging category, including a set of processes and software, designed to easily find and fix quality and security problems early in the development cycle, as the code is being written. All this serves to dramatically improve time to market, reduce development costs and improve customer... Read more →

M2M World Congress – London – Highlights from Day 1 of 2

VDC’s CEO Mitch Solomon is participating in M2M World Congress (one of the industry’s larger M2M-centric conferences) this week in London, and sent in the following post from the field. First off, the event is oversold and is standing room only, a testament to building interest in M2M (…and perhaps the strong promotional efforts of its producer). The day consisted of roughly a dozen presentations and panels, covering a broad landscape of topics. Speakers were largely from major wireless carriers, primarily European. Below are a few key insights (…derived from a much longer list), just hours after the last session... Read more →