Venture Development Corporation (VDC) has released summary findings from studies examining the use of commercial operating systems and development tools in the telecommunications and industrial automation markets. The reports find Linux “making inroads” in telecom, and “expected to increase rapidly” in industrial automation.

Worldwide telecommunications market for embedded OSes and development tools

VDC finds that telecommunications remains the “largest consuming market” for embedded software, despite a major economic downturn that began in late 2001. It says telecom is the most “software-intensive” of the vertical markets, with software expenditures accounting for 40% of total embedded development costs, a figure 5% greater than the embedded market as a whole. Software expenses are expected to increase or remain the same for 90% of respondents.

Other VDC findings pertaining to telecom include:

• Embedded OS vendors have increasingly targeted specific markets and applications over the last two years
• When selecting an OS, Telecom embedded developers care most about real-time capabilities, small footprint, support, royalty-free licensing, and reliability
• Linux has “begun making inroads in the telecom market both at the core and the edge. The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) has produced an evolving specification for Carrier Grade Linux. A number of vendors are offering OSDL-based Carrier Grade distributions.”
• When selecting tools, embedded developers in telecom care most about price, chip support, technical support, and past experience with the vendor
  • Developers prefer sourcing tools and components from multiple vendors by a factor of 2 to 1

• Increasing software sophistication — with carrier class devices typically requiring hundreds of thousands of lines of code — are driving OEMs to use design automation tools, especially those that abstract code into graphical models

An html overview and PDF whitepaper are available from VDC with further details.

Worldwide industrial automation market for embedded OS and development tools

VDC finds that the worldwide embedded market for industrial automation applications remains a “traditional” and “hardware-centric” embedded market due to stringent real-time requirements. However, the emergence of PC-based platforms “on which third-party software can flourish” has increased the importance of software.

VDC's key findings include:

• Developers are “hardware centric”
• Embedded software development has increased in complexity due to the use of more powerful hardware, and demands for connectivity, high availability, and fault tolerance
• “Industrial automation is moving toward innovation and an emphasis on software”
• Interoperation of field devices, controllers, and enterprise systems is enabling increased levels of automation
• Software providers are simplifying licensing and striving to make costs more predictable
• Developers prefer sourcing software from multiple vendors
• A majority of development is done in C, assembly, and C++ using Microsoft Windows-based platforms. However, “The use of Linux operating systems for industrial automation projects is expected to increase rapidly over the next two years.”

An html overview and a PDF whitepaper are available from VDC with further details.

 
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