Wind River, a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel Corporation, recently announced it has been named the embedded Linux market leader by VDC Research Group. Released in VDC’s 2009 Linux in the Embedded Systems Market report, Wind River achieved the market share lead in 2008 with greater than 30 percent of total market revenue, more than seven percentage points over the next closest competitor. Wind River entered the Linux business in 2004 to complement its market-leading, proprietary operating system, VxWorks.
“In four years Wind River established its Linux business from merely a concept to a market-leading global operation,” said Vincent Rerolle, senior vice president and general manager, Linux Product Division, Wind River. “We can attribute this success to regular and systematic customer feedback, rigorous product testing, focused investments in leading open source consortia, and a world-class support organisation Our customers have grown to rely on Wind River to take advantage of the flexibility and cost benefits that an open source operating system can provide, while still being offered the stability of commercial-grade support.”
Due to its scalability, portability and large ecosystem of applications and tools, Linux continues to gain momentum as one of the most popular operating system choices in the embedded market. According to VDC's 2008 Embedded Engineering Survey, Linux was being integrated as a target operating system within current development projects by 18 percent of surveyed engineers, making it the fastest growing operating system type among both public and commercial operating systems. The transparent business model of Linux offers device manufacturers choice, access to a large ecosystem of developers, and an operating system that’s well-suited for a wide range of applications across numerous industries ranging from automotive and mobile to networking, and increasingly, aerospace and defence
“Linux has demonstrated value in the embedded market as a proven and reliable alternative, and, in many cases, a complement to proprietary operating systems,” said Stephen Balacco, director of the Embedded Software and Tools Practice at VDC Research Group. “Linux continues to offer the necessary groundwork for teams looking to build more sophisticated embedded devices and software applications, and leading commercial vendors like Wind River are making great strides in the market as Linux continues to permeate into more specialised embedded applications.”
Wind River Linux 3.0, announced earlier this year, offers a complete software development environment, resulting in a highly customised, commercial Linux distribution tailored for devices. It’s backed by worldwide, commercial-grade support and services, five years of software maintenance and a comprehensive partner ecosystem.
Wind River Linux offers a broad range of hardware support optimised for leading CPU architectures, such as ARM, MIPS, PowerPC and x86. In addition, Wind River Linux 3.0 comes with more than 500 software packages, complies with the Linux Foundation’s Carrier Grade Linux 4.0 specification, and offers enhanced real-time and networking capabilities, and sophisticated multicore features such as demineralization and multicore offload.