Jaluna Joins Eclipse

Another win for the open-source movement: Jaluna is today announcing that it has become a member of the Eclipse Foundation.

As part of its Eclipse membership, Jaluna will develop a tool suite for its virtualization softare based on the Eclipse platform. The move will ease the way for developers who are already familiar with the Eclipse environment to adopt virtualization technology, Jaluna says.

For those unfamiliar with Jaluna, it's a French company (with a U.S. office in San Jose, Calif.), and its Jaluna OSware virtualization software platform lets customers streamline their device-software architecture by combining differing operating system application environments in a single device.

Both Jaluna and Eclipse will be at ESC Silicon Valley next week, and the Eclipse tool suite will be demo'd in booth 1220.

Also, Jaluna's executive VP of corporate strategy, Michel Gien, has written next month's DSO.com Industry View column. Look for it on Monday.

Posted at 12:20 PM | Comments

DSO World Theater Lineup

The final speakers list for next week's DSO World pavilion within ESC Silicon Valley is here, and it's a winner. Here's who, and what, we have on tap:

Tuesday, April 4:
* Stef Schurman, Rational Software/IBM
* Johan Wall, Enea
* Bill Weinberg, OSDL
* Mike Milinkovich, Eclipse Foundation
* Anthony Tam, Intel
* Leo Samson, Wind River

Wed., April 5:
* An industry panel headed by moi
* Mike Christofferson, Enea
* Tomas Evensen, Wind River
* Stef Schurman, Rational Software/IBM
* Chris Lanfear, Venture Development Corp.
* Anthony Tam, Intel
* Mark Ruthenback, Freescale
* Nigel Day, Enea
* Glenn Seiler, Wind River

Thurs., April 6
* Terry Pearson, Enea
* Chip Downing, Wind River
* Anthony Tam, Intel
* Stef Schurman, Rational Software/IBM

Plus, DSO World will feature many DSO-related product demos from the industry's leading vendors: Wind River, Enea, Klockwork, Rational Software/IBM, Freescale Semiconductor, Encirq, CRC, ALT Software, DDC-I, AdaCore, Opera Software, Solid Info Tech, RadiSys, Coverity, Express Logic, and IP Infusion.

What a program! You gotta be there, right? Right.

More details (including the program, registration page, travel details, etc.) here: DSO World.

Posted at 09:58 AM | Comments

Encirq VP of Marketing to Present on Mobile Optimization at ESC

The Encirq executive, John Smolucha, will host two 90-minute sessions entitled "Software Performance Optimizations for Mobile Devices" at the upcoming Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley.

Smolucha' first session (ESC-343) is scheduled for Wed., April 5, from 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. His second (WIR-961) is set for Thurs., April 6, from 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.

For more info, check this EE Times story: Veteran to present on optimizing mobile device software at ESC Silicon Valley.

And don't forget to check out the new DSO World at ESC. I plan to be there, and I hope to see you there, too.

Posted at 05:41 PM | Comments

Green Hills Adds Freescale Dual-Core Support

Green Hills Software just announced the availability of its entire DSO product line for the latest Freescale platform SoC, the dual-core MPC8641D processor, which is based on PowerPC cores.

The Green Hills DSO offering includes the INTEGRITY real-time operating system (RTOS) running on both cores, PowerPC compilers, TimeMachine debugger, MULTI integrated development environment (IDE), Green Hills probe, and SuperTrace probe.

For more info:

Green Hills press release

Freescale MPC8641D processor fact sheet

Posted at 10:50 AM | Comments

Boeing Picks Wind River Workbench for U.S. Army Program

DSO vendor Wind River announced a big contract win today. Boeing, the lead systems integrator for the U.S. Army’s Future Combat System (FCS) program, will standardize on Wind River Workbench as the foundation of the FCS Software Development Environment for its software development activities.

Boeing reportedly selected Wind River Workbench, the Eclipse-based development suite, for its ability to operate across multiple development sites, hosts, operating systems, and companies developing for the FCS program.

More information:
* U.S. Army Future Combat System
* Wind River press release

Posted at 02:14 PM | Comments

DSO Speakers at MultiCore Expo Next Week

DSO companies will be among the presenters at next week's MultiCore Expo in Santa Clara, Calif.

Wind River CMO John Bruggeman will give the keynote on March 21. The company's CTO, Tom Evensen, will speak on Developing for Symmetric Multicore Systems on March 22. Wind River will also be presenting several sessions on TIPC.

Enea's director of product management, Mike Christofferson, will give a presentation entitled Multiprocessing Models on March 23.

From Green Hills, Jack Greenbaum, director of embedded software engineering, will give a March 23 presentation on Addressing the Requirements of Multicore ARM/DSP Processors.

Robert Craig, a senior software engineer at QNX, will speak on Software Strategies for Multicore Processors, also on March 23.

John Carbone, VP of marketing at Express Logic and the author of DSO.com's latest Industry View column, The DSO Challenge, will participate in a March 21 panel discussion on the pros and cons of multithreading and multiprocessing.

Other companies presenting will include ARM, Freescale, Intel, LynuxWorks, MIPS, Nortel, and Sun.

All the details here: MultiCore Expo 2006.

Posted at 12:04 PM | Comments

DSO World Update

The agenda for DSO World is shaping up nicely, and I hope to see you in San Jose the first week of April.

In case you don't know yet, DSO World will be a pavilion within the Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif., April 4-6.

DSO.com will have a booth within DSO World, as will an impressive list of software and hardware vendors. (I don't have the final list of DSO World exhibitors yet, but will share it here as soon as I do.)

We're also planning a series of panel discussions on the DSO World stage with leading software and hardware vendors, industry analysts and others. Discussion topics will include the benefits of DSO to developers, the future of DSO, special requirements of vertical industries, and more. I'll post the complete schedule soon.

If you haven't registered yet for DSO World, hurry up and visit the DSO Events page.

Posted at 04:35 PM | Comments

Wind River Adds Intel Dual-Core Support to Network Linux

Wind River announced that its Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition, now supports Intel's dual-core, 2-GHz Xeon processor.

The Wind River Platform is a commercial-grade Linux 2.6.10 solution for servers; most customers are telecom providers.

The added support is important. Intel expects 70% to 85% of all new desktop, mobile and server processor shipments will be dual-core by year's end. (More info from Intel here: Intel Dual-Core Processor.)

I don't see anything about the announcement on Wind River's site, but there's a PR Newswire release here: Wind River Announces Support for Dual-Core Intel Xeon Processor.

Posted at 02:20 PM | Comments

Enea Up Close

With impeccable timing, DSO.com contributor Larry Lange has delivered what I believe—if I do say so myself—may may be the most complete profile of software vendor Enea in some time, if ever. Larry's timing is impeccable because Enea today announced Linx, the latest in its ever-broadening array of software products.

As part of his research, Larry had access to many of Enea's top executives and partners, as well as some of the DSO industry's leading market analysts. His article, exclusive to DSO.com, portrays a company striving to expand, both geographically (beyond its home turf in Scandinavia) and on the product front (beyond its core RTOS product). I urge you to read Larry's profile, The Swedish are Coming! The Swedish are Coming!, today, and let us know what you think. You can post a comment below, or write me at: editor@dso.com.

PS – We've just added a Technorati Profile for the DSO.com blog. Please tell your friends and colleagues on the blogosphere to check us out there.

Posted at 05:10 PM | Comments

Cost, Time Pressures Push IT Departments to Take DSO-Like Measures

Corporate IT departments are changing how they handle in-house software development in a way that mirrors what's happening in the world of device software, according to a new article by three McKinsey & Co. consultants. Despite the rise of commercial software, many corporate IT departments spend well over half their applications budgets on custom software. To reduce this cost, and to speed development and customization time, these IT departments are taking some very DSO-like approaches.

Progressive IT departments are standardizing—mainly, on maintenance, support, and maintenance, the authors say. They're building apps from common, internally built "modules of functionality," essentially reusing code. They're standardizing app-dev processes across the enterprise. And they're creating standard application interfaces.

The leverage seems to come from taking work that was formerly done in development silos, and moving it to the enterprise, according to the McKinsey consultants. Vendor relations, for example, can be leveraged to obtain lower prices. Routine tasks can be coordinated, eliminating duplicative work. Product options can be defined by the CIO or other top IT execs to reduce the time spent designing the infrastructure for the most common applications.

For more, read the full McKinsey Quarterly article: The Next Generation of In-House Software Development. It's free, but registration and log-in is required.

Posted at 11:26 AM | Comments

Wind River Reports Q4, Full-Year Financials

DSO vendor Wind River reported its Q4 and full-year financial results for fiscal 2006, which ended this past Jan. 31, and all the numbers are trending up nicely. Q4 net income hit $10.3 million on revenue of $70.2 million. For the full 12 months, net income came to $25.9 million on revenue of $266.3 million.

That means fourth-quarter net income rose by 65% from the year-earlier quarter, while Q4 revenue rose by 11%. For the full year, net income rose an impressive 118% over fiscal 2005, and revenue rose by 13%.

Wind River CFO Mike Zellner pointed out that the company's Q4 revenue mix did not meet expectations, the company's strength in subscriptions resulted in a sequential increase of more than $10 million in current deferred revenue.

Looking ahead, Wind River is projecting Q1:07 revenue of $65 million to $67 million. But full-year earnings per share were projected at just 38 cents to 43 cents per share, well below what stock analysts had been expecting.

That seems to have upset investors. Wind River's stock, after closing yesterday at $15.36, dipped 22%, to $12, today. (The stock's 52-week high was $17.68, and the year low was $11.04.)

More info here: Wind River's March 8 Investor Relations release

And here: Wind River Shares Shot Down on Outlook (AP)

And here: Today's Tech Winners and Losers (TheStreet.com)

Posted at 03:35 PM | Comments

Wind River Launches Test-Drive Center

Interested in testing DSO software? If so, you're in luck. Wind River recently launched an online product evaluation center that lets visitors download and test-drive selected software offerings for free.

Currently, the site offers evaluation versions of two DSO software packages: Wind River General Purpose Platform, Linux Edition; and Wind River Workbench, On-Chip Debugging Edition (with Wind River Compiler).

Both are available for free, 30-day evaluations. To get more information (including system requirements) and to download the packages, visit the Wind River Product Evaluation Center.

Posted at 09:41 AM | Comments

News Shorts: Enea Polyhedra FlashLite; CMC Selects Green Hills

Two quick news stories today: Enea introduced a Flash-based database for mobile phones and diskless home systems; and CMC Electronics selected Green Hills' avionics platform for its flight-management system.

Enea's Polyhedra FlashLite is a Flash-based SQL relational database management system (RDBMS) that features a client-server architecture, active queries, and a trigger language that lets business logic be embedded in the database. Polyhedra FlashLite has been designed for standalone, low-power devices such as mobile phones, and disk-less systems such as home gateways and set-top boxes. More information: Enea Announces Flash-Based Relational Database Management System.

CMC Electronics Inc. has selected Green Hills Software's Platform for Avionics for the CMC Flight Management Control and Display system. The Green Hills platform includes the company's Integrity-178B RTOS, Gstart Ravenscar-compliant Ada kernel, and AdaMULTI development environment. Canada-based CMC designs and produces electronics products for the aviation and global-positioning markets. More details: CMC Electronics Selects Green Hills Software Platform for Avionics

Posted at 01:48 PM | Comments

Encirq Webinar on Speeding App Dev Times

Encirq, supplier of the Data Foundation Framework, is hosting a Webinar tomorrow, March 7, entitled "Building device-optimized embedded applications in one-quarter the time." The Webinar will be held at 10 a.m. PST / 1 p.m. EST.

Topics covered will include how data-centric techniques are being used to simplify application design and development while yielding more flexible applications.

Get more information and register on this Encirq Webinar page.

Posted at 01:06 PM | Comments

Wind River Announces 2006 User Conference

If it's (almost) spring in Orlando, Florida, then it must be time for conferences. And indeed, DSO software vendor Wind River has announced the date and venue for its 2006 Worldwide User Conference: May 15-18, the Omni Hotel, Orlando.

The program should be a good one. Some 180 papers have been submitted for presentation, according to my sources, so the program coordinators have a good (or, at least, big) pool to pick from. Celebrity keynoters will include Steven D. Levitt, an economist and author of the best-selling book, Freakonomics, and Phil Gordon, a professional poker player and co-host of Bravo's Celebrity Poker Showdown on TV. Wind River's CEO, Ken Klein, and CMO, the irrepressible John Bruggeman, will speak, too.

It was just last May that Wind River unveiled its master DSO strategy. Not incidentally, that's also when DSO.com was launched, with Wind River as our launch sponsor. This was the same conference at which John Bruggeman made his on-stage entrance by sledgehammering his way through the backdrop, accompanied by a full-tilt rock band. I can't wait to see what he's got planned for an encore.

Learn more and register on this Wind River User Conference page.

Posted at 04:17 PM | Comments