On Target: Embedded Systems

DESIGN West Bulletin

2013-04-30T16:50:30-04:00

As noted Friday, VDC attended the 2013 DESIGN West Conference in San Jose from April 22^nd through April 25^th. We met with more than 40 companies to discuss product announcements and a variety of industry trends impacting the embedded market today. Friday’s post noted our Embeddy award winner, LynuxWorks, and new features within the company’s LynxSecure embedded virtualization technology.

WALKING THE FLOOR

DESIGN West 2013 featured more than 200 exhibiting companies. The following is a round-up of our meetings with several notable exhibitors:

AdaCore made three announcements at the show, two of which involved incremental product releases: Version 2.2 of the CodePeer static analysis tool and version 7.1 of the GNAT Pro IDE. Lastly, AdaCore shared a major design win with Toyota ITC, which has selected the SPARK language and AdaCore’s SPARK Pro for a high-reliability software research project.

ARM shared details regarding the extended scope of ARM Development Studio 5 Community Edition, which now supports ARM embedded Linux applications.

Electric Cloud discussed its release of Electric Accelerator for Android, which can dramatically improve Android software build, test, and release cycles.

Express Logic announced that deployments of its ThreadX RTOS exceeded 1.5 billion units to date. The company also shared details around its partnership with Clarinox, which resulted in the ClarinoxBlue product. ClarinoxBlue is a Bluetooth communications stack that supports ThreadX. Lastly, Express Logic announced that ThreadX has been certified by SGS-TUV Saar for use in safety-critical systems, confirming that ThreadX satisfies safety requirements such as those outlined by IEC 61508 and IEC 62304.

GrammaTech’s CodeSonar static analysis tool is now integrated with the Eclipse IDE. CodeSonar’s Eclipse plugin provides seamless and time-saving integration that enables engineers to correct programming defects from within Eclipse. GrammaTech also announced it had been awarded research contracts totaling more than $8.25 million.

Green Hills Software announced INTEGRITY RTOS and MULTI IDE support for Altera’s Cyclone V SoC and Freescale’s QorIQ T4240 64-bit multicore processor. Green Hills also shared details around its joint presentation with AT&T at the Mobile Device Security for Defense and Government Symposium in Alexandria, VA earlier this month.

Embedded firewall vendor Icon Labs and its partners made two announcements at DESIGN West. Together with Quadros Systems, Icon Labs announced the availability of its Floodgate Packet Filter embedded firewall solution for Quadros’ RTXC RTOS. Also, Icon Labs and Zilog unveiled the ZGATE Security Bridge reference design, a microcontroller featuring an embedded firewall.

LDRA released the LDRA Compliance Management System to help companies develop the infrastructure to become DO-178B/C, DO-278A, and DO-254 compliant. The company also announced that the LDRA tool suite has been integrated with National Instruments’ TestStand and VeriStand products.

McObject released version 5.0 of its eXtremeDB embedded database system. eXtremeDB 5.0 is faster, more flexible, and easier to administrate than previous releases. Other improvements across the eXtremeDB family include accelerated performance of the in-memory database system and new tools to aid application development.

Mentor Graphics unveiled the Mentor Embedded Sourcery CodeBench Virtual Edition product, a native software environment for developing embedded systems pre- and post-silicon.

Parasoft announced a new offering that unites service virtualization and network virtualization to enable more thorough and accurate mobile application testing. The company also shared details regarding a joint solution with Electric Cloud, pairing Parasoft’s service virtualization with Electric Cloud’s software automation technologies to enable optimized continuous delivery capabilities for software organizations.

Vector Software shared details of its partnership with Polarion, in which the two companies will develop solutions that improve software verification and validation in regulated environments.

Wind River made a pair of announcements at the show, introducing security software for Android devices and releasing the latest version of VxWorks MILS. Wind River’s new Solution Accelerators for Android allow engineers to address SE Android, partitioning, and secure boot.

Other leading embedded systems exhibitors included, aicas, AMD, Arium, Cadence Design Systems, CMX Systems, DiSTI, EBSnet, eCosCentric, element14, IAR Systems, IBM, Intel, Lauterbach, Macraigor Systems, MathWorks, McAfee, Micrium, National Instruments, Perforce Software, SEGGER Microcontroller, Texas Instruments, and many, many others.

ABOUT VDC RESEARCH GROUP

VDC Research is the leading M2M market intelligence firm that provides engineering leaders and technology suppliers with research-driven insights to help guide their product development and technology strategies. For over two decades, VDC Research has been conducting research and analysis of the global M2M market. Born out of its embedded engineering research practice, VDC Research surveys and interacts with thousands of engineers from all vertical markets including industrial automation, retail, manufacturing and medical devices, to gain insight into their project requirements, solution selection criteria, preferences and trends.

Based on a unique blend of quantitative and qualitative analysis that offer granularity and breadth of coverage, VDC is organized around four practice areas, each with its own focused area of coverage. Together, they enable a unique 360-degree perspective of the opportunities and challenges resulting from The Internet of Things and M2M.

For more information visit: www.vdcresearch.com

DESIGN West Bulletin – Part 1, Best of Show!

2013-04-26T14:25:45-04:00

VDC attended the 2013 DESIGN West show in San Jose from April 22^ndthrough April 25^th and met with more than 40 companies to discuss product announcements and a variety of industry trends impacting the embedded market today. M2M, the Cloud, security, and Android were among the hottest topics. Be sure to visit the UBM site for complete details and other news items associated with the show.

The Embeddy goes to...

...LynuxWorks, for the company's new approach to zero-day rootkit and bootkit defense utilizing the LynxSecure embedded hypervisor.

Rootkits and bootkits are among the most lethal forms of malware out there today. Because they work at the lowest levels of the OS they intend to attack, they are not thwarted by anti-malware solutions residing higher up in the software stack. As such, combatting these threats calls for a solution that executes at a higher privilege than the attacked OS and monitors and controls all of the communications and activities between that OS, its applications, and the underlying hardware. Enter embedded virtualization. By adding functionality that enables LynxSecure to detect, protect against, and remediate rootkits and bootkits, LynuxWorks has achieved these goals.

VDC would like to congratulate LynuxWorks for being selected our software Embeddy award winner at DESIGN West 2013! (Also a special congratulations to AMD for winning VDC's hardware Embeddy!) Please check out LynuxWorks' official announcement for more details, and check back next week for a complete wrap-up of each of our meetings and associated product announcements.

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

2013-04-25T17:14:27-04:00

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 of the day:

All speakers believe the much-anticipated M2M future has arrived, and they see rapid scaling in their business (as measured by M2M SIM card sales and deployments). Most M2M business leaders within large mobile network operators are carrying aggressive growth targets (handed down from corporate), as their companies look to M2M to drive growth that far exceeds what can be achieved in their established voice and data businesses.

The words “complexity” and “challenges” were used almost as much as “the” and “it” during the course of the day. The difficulties associated with actual M2M deployments were widely acknowledged, often in the same breath as the notion of how large the opportunity is. Clever solutions to the biggest M2M deployment challenges were elusive (understandably, as silver bullets are usually are hard to come by), though familiar suggestions like “test, test, and re-test” and “standards can help” and “pilot first, then expand” were offered up.

The only word used more than “complexity” and “challenges” was…”partner.” Which makes sense. It often takes partnerships to solve complex technical problems such as M2M applications. Every carrier was touting its partnerships, some of which extend geographic coverage while others deliver value-added software and services beyond connectivity. This is the age of M2M promiscuity, as everyone tries to seduce everyone else lest someone be left on the dance floor alone.

For a myriad of reasons, the discussions were largely focused on technology and vendor strategies (particularly carriers’) instead of OEM use cases and customer benefits (…something many audience members were a bit frustrated by). Some attempts by panel members to address questions related to devices and OEM use cases were made, and some light was shed. Overall, however a clear impression was made that senior people with M2M on their business cards are still working their own way up the learning curve (like many others in the industry) when it comes to specific examples of how M2M-based applications can benefit their OEM customers. This knowledge gap could be indicative of carriers and/or senior leaders at carriers being one or two steps removed from OEMs’ application development efforts, rather than a deficiency in an expected area of expertise.

With the second and final day of the event tomorrow, my hope is that panel members will share more about how OEMs are approaching, evaluating, designing, and deploying M2M based systems. Discussions of the supporting business cases would be particularly valuable. If so, it will cap off a very worthwhile two days of M2M immersion in London.

IBM Bolsters DevOps Support with UrbanCode Acquisition

2013-04-22T23:49:53-04:00

On Monday, IBM announced the acquisition of UrbanCode, a provider of software delivery automation solutions. UrbanCode’s continuous release and deployment tools will be integrated into the IBM Rational portfolio to bolster their DevOps capabilities.

“…software is eating the world.” – Marc Andreessen

Software has emerged as the primary agent for differentiation for a growing number of companies. It is defining a greater portion of end-value for organization’s solutions, but also consuming an ever-larger share of their development costs. Many of these companies have re-evaluated their processes and adopted Agile methodologies to help speed software development. Our findings suggest this has helped. In VDC’s 2012 software and system developer survey, engineers using Agile were more likely to be ahead of schedule on their current project, despite code bases three times as large as those not using iterative methods.

“Companies that master effective software development and delivery in rapidly changing environments such as cloud, mobile and social will have a significant competitive advantage,” - Kristof Kloeckner, general manager, IBM Rational Software.

Unfortunately, Agile methodologies only address the software development. Just increasing the pace of software design can place considerable strain on an organization and result in bottlenecks elsewhere in the development lifecycle. To move in the right direction, development and operations need to operate at the same velocity. This is where the incorporating the UrbanCode Application Release Automation should provide synergy. By automating much of the testing and deployment processes, organizations can speed up the operations side of their business to match the pace of the Agile software development.

Integration of the UrbanCode offerings into IBM Rational’s portfolio represents a valuable extension of their DevOps implementation support. We expect much of the initial market traction to come from enterprise applications. However, with the volume of embedded software code continuing to grow while project timelines shrink, this approach will increasingly resonate in several embedded industries.

More insight

For further investigation and discussion about Agile development, DevOps and other important shifts in systems lifecycle management, please see our 2012 Software & Systems Lifecycle Management Tools Market Intelligence Service.

Don't Water-Scrum-Fail.

2013-04-15T14:53:47-04:00

Agile is a great weapon available to OEMs to fight the challenges inherent in device development today. It is not, however, a silver bullet.

In a recent post, we explored how Agile projects are still finishing behind schedule, despite favorable comparables against standard V-model workflows. The truth of the matter is that Agile projects are subject to many of the setbacks as traditional ones. They can and will fail. It is more important than ever for engineering organizations to recognize what specialized or unique implementation strategies they need to use to increase their chance's for long-term success with Agile.

Many of you have heard the expression - water-scrum-fall in the past. It speaks to the reality that Agile is often implemented in some sort of a hybrid fashion – as in not true “Agile” per the manifesto. This is especially true – and important - in the embedded market. As you know, there are a ton of differences between development for an ISV and an engineering organization. The number of verticals markets, process standards, and multi-engineering domain considerations make some level of hybridization or customization necessary.

But customization does not come without its cost. For example:

Light weight Agile project management tools can't cut it alone. Integrated, formal automated tooling is required to manage traceabilty across the lifecycle.
Ongoing training and coaching takes center stage. Embedded engineers are creatures of comfort. Left alone for too long and they will revert to a more primitive state.

Interested in learning what else you should do and consider when implementing Agile in your organization?

Listen in to our webcast:

Tomorrow, April 16^that 12pm ET / 9am PT

How can you register?

http://bit.ly/13u7U9h

Help ~ Someone Hacked my Toaster!

2013-03-31T22:32:23-04:00

In the PC world, security issues are generally well understood and often even addressed by the masses. It’s a different story in the M2M and embedded market. Recognition of security risks and the number of steps taken to address security vary across each level of the embedded ecosystem - by industry, manufacturer, component supplier, and end user.

The potential impact of consumer device security failures extends across the Internet of Things ecosystem - far beyond traditional mobile and consumer devices. Thankfully, the general public appears to be catching on. Results from our consumer survey confirm that a growing number of people are recognizing the potential security issues that come with their increasingly connected lifestyles.

We asked device purchasers and users how concerned they were with security for each type of device they personally bought, were planning to buy, or were operating regularly. Some of these devices are a large part of peoples’ lives already today, like ATMs and smartphones, while others like connected cars that are not yet widely used are an almost unavoidable consequence of a device class’s continued evolution.

Although it is probably no surprise that ATMs are rated highest for security concerns since they are directly pinned to personal finances, no connected device class was immune to consumer concerns. While the relative perception of risk varies rather dramatically across the device classes shown on this chart, one thing is glaring clear and consistent – there is both a recognized need and a growing demand for more secure consumer devices.

One of the biggest challenges facing the industry, however, is that although there is a general recognition of risk in some of these emerging consumer device classes, most consumers don’t yet have firsthand experience with hacks of this type. So people are going to be much more concerned with those devices with which they already have a lot of experience, like smartphones and ATMs. Connected cars and home medical equipment, however, are relatively new. Meanwhile, the consequences of failure for those devices can be much more dire.

Overall, there also hasn’t been as much reported change in any of the consumer device usage patterns as you might expect, given the recognition of risk. It’s almost as if many consumers want to reduce their exposure to risk, but have accepted the fact they are playing Russian roulette in the short term. The frequency and magnitude of consumer device security failures will only continue to increase over the coming years, however. Not only will consumers expect a higher level of security built into their devices, but they will need (and finally demand) new classes of post-deployment security augmentation solutions.

ALM Connect Executive Day and EclipseCon, March 2013

2013-03-29T12:18:44-04:00

ALM CONNECT EXECUTIVE DAY

VDC was excited to attend the ALM Connect Executive Day, which was run in parallel to EclipseCon 2013 in Boston this week. The objective of the executive day, to provide a platform for software delivery executives to discuss modern ALM practices in the context of business problems, is tightly aligned to our Software & System Lifecycle Management Tools research.

The day brought together leaders from ALM suppliers, ISVs and consulting firms to discuss how ALM is evolving in response to the changing software delivery environment. The M2M Embedded Software team investigates many of the same questions ALM Connect aimed to answer such as:

How does ALM work in the world shifting from 'Systems of Record' to systems of engagement?
How does SaaS, Mobile and open source change ALM?
What does Agile mean to ALM?
What does complex sourcing do to ALM?

Among the ALM Connect Executive Day highlights:

“What ALM knowledge you can expect from Computer Science Graduates” with Gary Pollice, Professor of Practice, WPI Computer Science Department. A great description about what you should look for in a recent computer science graduate and, more importantly, why.

“Managing Complex Supply Chains with ALM” with Mik Kersten, CEO, Tasktop. Mik demonstrated how Tasktop is helping large corporations work through the mess they’ve made of their development lifecycle through piecemeal tool adoption at team levels, corporate expansion, mergers and other realities of business as usual.

“Scrum - Success Ends with Middle Management” with Ken Schwaber, the Co-creator of Scrum and CEO of Scrum.org. Ken stressed the importance of individuals and interactions over processes and tools as organizations look to create more agility. Also presented was the “Agility Index”, a means to track progress towards of process improvement goals.

“Future of ALM Panel” with Sam Guckenheimer, MS Visual Studio; Jeffery Hammond, Forrester Research; Raziel Tabib, HP; Mik Kersten, Tasktop; Mike O'Rourke, IBM Rational. The panel gave us a lively discussion on a number of topics including developer resistance to change, estimates on the enterprise ALM market size, and ongoing heterogeneity and integration challenges of ALM.

More information on ALM Connect Executive Day can be found here.

ECLIPSECON BOSTON 2013

We also made time to visit some booths and sit in on a few presentations of EclipseCon.

The focus of the open source Eclipse community is software development tools as well as the intersection of tools, process, and new business models. As more and more organizations view their ability to manufacture software as a competitive advantage, ALM is becoming a vital business process.

Among the EclipseCon highlights:

CollabNet’s Laszlo Szalvay presentation, "Making Agile ALM Work in Regulated Industries”: The discussion focused on some of the uncertainty towards Agile that remains in highly regulated industries such as Finance, Telecommunications, Pharmaceuticals and Government. VDC sees the same concerns about control and increased developer autonomy in the embedded industry. Likewise, we share the opinion that Agile can succeed in these industries with the use of the right processes and tools.

The session entitled, “High Quality Agile - Incorporating Quality into Your Agile Process and Organization Means Working Faster and Smarter,” by Lorinda Brandon of SmartBear Software. Lorinda outlined some best practices for maintaining high quality as an organization moves towards a continuous software delivery business model.

More information on EclipseCon 2013 Boston can be found here.

About VDC Research Group

VDC Research Group (VDC) provides market research and advisory services to the world's top technology executives. Our clients rely on us to provide actionable insights to support their most important strategic decisions. The firm is organized around four practices, each with its own focused area of coverage including: automatic identification and data collection, embedded hardware, embedded software and enterprise mobility.

Our market research is the basis for the many ways that VDC can help our clients to grow their business. We offer a range of services designed to meet their specific corporate development, opportunity assessment and lead generation needs. Founded in 1971, the firm is located in the Boston area. Please visit our Web site at www.vdcresearch.com to learn more.

VDC has been providing embedded systems market intelligence for over 20 years.

Model That MIMO

2013-03-28T08:56:29-04:00

Wireless networks have been pressed to rapidly evolve as ever greater numbers of subscribers utilize mobile devices to transmit an increasing volume of data. In fact, Cisco projects the number of mobile-connected devices, driven by a combination of personal devices and machine-to-machine (M2M) applications, will exceed the world’s population by the end of this year and that mobile data traffic will expand at a CAGR of 66% through 2017.

Technologies such as Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) and other multiple antenna techniques have emerged in response to this increased demand for wireless network throughput. MIMO systems employ multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver end of the communication system. This approach considerably improves performance, providing higher data rates while maintaining spectral efficiency. However, a price paid for these advances is greater system complexity facing embedded engineers tasked with designing the networks.

Accurate design of the wireless communications channel is key to optimizing network system performance. This requires consideration of a large number of variables and is a challenge well suited to software-based modeling tools. VDC Research has spoken with leading suppliers of commercially available modeling tools as we update our coverage of Software and System Lifecycle Management solutions for 2013. These conversations have revealed a growing interest in system design tools within the communications market.

Suppliers are responding to this demand. For example this week, MathWorks announced software enhancements to the Phased Array System Toolbox and SimRF to enable wireless communications and radar system designers to speed up modeling and simulation within the MATLAB and Simulink environments. Going forward, telecommunications engineers will increasingly leverage software and systems modeling tools as they design the complex next-generation networks of tomorrow.

More insight

For immediate access to further investigation and discussion about software and systems modeling tools, please see our 2012 Software & Systems Lifecycle Management Tools Market Intelligence Service. The M2M Embedded Software team at VDC is in the process of updating this research for 2013. The 2013 Software & System Modeling Tools volume will be available in the next couple of weeks.

M2M Requirements Changing OS Selection Criteria

2013-03-26T18:41:55-04:00

Embedded devices and systems have permeated where we live, where we work, how we travel, and the way we communicate. There are billions of devices shipping on an annual basis, spanning various applications that can include high availability, safety-critical, and security requirements. Historically, many of these types of devices would have limited resources with respect to processor performance, memory, and connectivity - creating islands of technology and disconnected data. The availability of more complex system/hardware architectures, more advanced software, and connectivity has created new scenarios for intelligent connected systems, opening up new experiences for business and consumers.

Because of these changes, OS vendors must be vigilant and maintain flexibility in meeting evolutionary changes within device development platforms. That is, vendors must be sure to meet customers’ requirements around security, continued support for new hardware architectures, embedded virtualization, cloud computing, and other emerging trends within the market.

So as I thought about end-user demands, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how requirements – in this case specific to operating system selection – have changed over the years as a result of all of these M2M related capabilities. The exhibit here shows how the importance of several key OS selection criteria have changed over a period of ten years, from 2002 to 2012.

One key takeaway here is that many features and capabilities of embedded operating systems today
are becoming ubiquitous, at least at a high level. As processor technology has improved, vendors have been able to continue adding more functionality to their platforms - and more complementary products to their portfolios - allowing competing OSs to catch up with each other in terms of the uniqueness of their respective feature sets. As a result, criteria such as real-time capabilities and availability of development tools have halved in importance over the years. The importance of technical support has also waned – as a differentiating selection criteria, anyway – with so many vendors offering similar support services.

Instead, reliability and stability have become increasingly critical. With so many high-quality, highly-capable OSs out there, the ability for a platform to reliably carry out all of its many tasks has become paramount. Software driven functionality has grown to comprise a much greater portion of embedded system differentiation in recent years, which has also helped to raise the stakes in terms of reliable OS performance.

Of course, overall cost remains the trump card, with constant budgetary pressures and cost-reduction requirements forcing engineers to select a platform that is a fit not only from a technical standpoint, but also from an economical one.

3 Steps to Automate Your Way to Agile

2013-03-26T15:12:24-04:00

In a recent VDC View, I wrote that "software engineering is broken." Although our industry continues to deliver new and innovative products, too often projects miss the mark. Late. Buggy. Unprofitable. We all hate these words, but hear them repeatedly. Enter Agile.

We all know that Agile enables software organizations to continuously deliver working software faster to customers (internal or external). This helps software teams to not only deliver products faster but also in tune with the changing market needs. In practice however, organizations still struggle to get the full benefits of Agile methodology because they have not fully automated their practices (development, build, test, release).

Listen in on April 16^th to hear Ashish Kuthiala, Director of Marketing at Electric Cloud, and I address the fundamental issues and recommendations you should consider as you adopt Agile:

Understanding the true drivers for adopting Agile
Critical organizational, process and tooling issues to consider and pitfalls to avoid
Recommendations on how to do this right by automating your processes

When is the webcast?

April 16^that 12pm ET / 9am PT

How can you register?

http://bit.ly/13u7U9h