pSOS falls as Wind River consolidates OSes

pSOS falls as Wind River consolidates OSes
CHICAGO — Five months after embedded-software powerhouse Wind River Systems announced it was merging with Integrated Systems Inc., the other shoe dropped — squarely on ISI's operating system.

Executives from the two companies gathered here at the spring Embedded Systems Conference this week to detail how the merged companies would operate, and what everybody had long suspected — that ISI's pSOS real-time OS would fall by the wayside — became policy.

"At the end of the day, you've got to have one platform, otherwise you're not running the company properly," said Wind River Chairman Jerry Fiddler.

While the high-profile operating system will be phased out in coming years, Wind River (Alameda, Calif.) is keeping ISI's Prism development environment and rolling its Dr. Design design-services operation into one of five newly formed business units.

At a news conference and in a wide-ranging interview afterwards, Fiddler sketched out a newly joined operation with a mission to develop and help build the next-generation Internet infrastructure and devices — everything from switches using the Tornado integrated development environment (IDE) to emerging picture screens that dial up a server and display rotating digital images. Fiddler saw $1 billion in revenue as quickly achievable, but he hedged on the company's commitment to the Linux market, which competitors have embraced. In a Thursday earnings report, the company said its fiscal 2000 net income was $27.2 million on revenues of $171 million, up slightly from the previous year.

Wind River also announced it has acquired embedded-tools outfit Embedded Support Tools Corp. (Canton, Mass.) for 6.3 million shares of Wind River stock.

Under the new corporate structure, Fiddler is chairman and ISI founder Narend Gupta is vice chairman of the merged company. Five business units will target markets ranging from consumer to military.

Platforms, where the core software work will emerge, is to be led by John Fogelin and Dave Stepner; Networks, focusing on communications, will be run by Dave Fraser; Consumer is headed by J.C. Sarner; and TDI, focusing on transportation, defense and industrial, is led by Scot Morrison. Embedded Support Tools, the new acquisition, also will become a business unit, but those merger details have yet to be worked out.

Though competitors at the Embedded Systems Conference said questions over the outcome of the merger had prompted worried Wind River and ISI customers to contact them, Fiddler maintained that all customers will be brought on board the single platform during the next 24 months.

"This means more products faster for our customers," Fiddler said.

To facilitate the move, Wind River plans a third-quarter release this year of the next version of the Tornado environment and VxWorks RTOS. Dubbed Cirrus, it will include a new Tornado IDE; a next-generation VxWorks with a Linux host, and the new Protection Domain Technology to cut down on memory-protection issues that can cut into system uptime. Wind River has recently landed seven patents related to this technology, officials said.

"It's a new type of system with protection, without the performance hit," said CEO Tom St. Dennis.

Companies such as Lynx and QNX have had memory protection for some time. The technology modularizes a system so that if portions of it, such as device drivers, run off and use other memory space, the system doesn't have to be rebooted. The memory protection makes it possible to fix just the corrupted portion.

After Cirrus, the convergence of traditional ISI and Wind River customers will come in 2001 by means of Cumulus. Building on Cirrus, this package will offer a scalable OS with three configurations for flexibility: a traditional microkernel, domain protection and advanced features for high availability. The system will include a pSOSystem application programming interface and features unique to pSOS. Cumulus will also feature the next-generation Tornado IDE and enhancements targeting smart devices, such as connectivity drivers and Java.

For ISI customers, the first step away from pSOS comes from Stratus, an upgrade of pSOS v2.5 and Prism+ v2.5. Its run-time enhancements include memory protection and it will be compatible with the latest Diab-SDS IDE releases. The combined company will maintain both GNU and Diab IDEs, with Diab being the premium compiler, Fiddler said.

Wind River said it will provide customers with migration teams and a free migration kit to ease their pain.

Executives put the best face on the uncertainty surrounding the transition. "The beam seems higher than it really is," Gupta said. "Customers generally have been happy that we can now address things that we couldn't in the past."

The merger seems gentle on employees of Wind River and ISI, which traditionally have had turnover rates of 12 and 18 percent respectively. At least 30 people will lose their jobs to redundancy, saving "millions" of dollars, St. Dennis said.

Yet competitors said that even the detailed road map the companies offered last week won't allay customers' fears.

Even though ISI customers are being offered the olive branch of transition packages, users are likely to open up their next-generation designs now that pSOS' days are numbered, said Greg Bergsma, vice president of North American operations for QNX Software Systems Ltd. (Kanata, Ontario). "Companies will start evaluating all their choices now," he said. "It's also been very distracting to Wind River to get this all together."

On another front, moving users accustomed to Wind River's traditional flat-memory approach to a memory-protection-based architecture is no mean feat either, he said. "We've had to educate our own customers about how difficult it is," said Bergsma. "You can't directly port VxWorks to the new OS."

Bergsma noted that a system using memory protection does take a performance hit. But on the upside, he said that one of his customers, Olin Chemicals, has not had to reboot its QNX-based system in six years.

But it is on the Linux front where competitors seem to be really licking their chops.

"I'm guessing they feel pretty threatened by Linux," said Steve Verleye, president and CEO of Applied Microsystems Inc. (Redmond, Wash.).

Greg Rose, a strategic-market segment specialist for Lynx Realtime Systems Inc. (Dallas), said Linux is a force to be reckoned with. His company offers customers a two-pronged approach, fielding its traditional LynxOS for hard-real time systems and BlueCat for Linux-based designs. Linux is gaining fast in popularity, and "when that freight train hits you, you're going to have skid marks" if a company isn't prepared with a strategy, Rose said.

Fiddler isn't dismissing Linux, although he described it as a "four-star pain in the ass. It exists because Microsoft exists" to bring a common software platform to the X86 world, he said. But in the embedded world "every customer has custom hardware." Thus the promise of a free operating system gets diluted, since each company must, in essence, write its own version of Linux to its hardware specifications.

"How does open-source [software] work? Well, you make it so general that you can't use it on a spacecraft design," Fiddler said. "Who's going to unify this [Linux] thing? I don't see it happening."