Venture Development Corporation (VDC) provided the following report from the Embedded Systems Conference held in Boston, MA last week . . .

The Embedded Systems Conference, Boston, was held this past week. Although the actual attendance count is not available at this time, VDC estimates an attendance of 3,000 and over 160 exhibitors. The show floor was over twice as large as last year. While attendance seemed a little light, most exhibitors thought that turnout might be worse than it was.

Michael Tiemann, CTO, Red Hat, provided the second day keynote address on open source and embedded. Tiemann described the world of embedded systems in the context of Clayton Christensen's book The Innovator's Dilemma. The room was mostly filled and a number of high-level executives from traditional embedded OS companies were standing in the back of the room.

Overall, most exhibitors we spoke with had a high level of enthusiasm at the show and noted the better than expected attendance for the show. Despite a slumping economy, most companies we met with and spoke to expressed an optimistic view for 2001. While some of these companies may be putting on a brave face, VDC perceives these companies to be bright spots in the midst of a global downturn — introducing innovative technology, diversifying into new vertical markets, and creatively pricing their products and services.

Name Changes: Be prepared to start using some new names for companies that you do business with or compete against . . .

• “Poet” is migrating to “Fast Objects”
  
• “Enea” will be “OSE Systems”
  
• “Tasking” has gone from “Protel” (following the acquisition) to “Altium”

VDC was particularly impressed with IAR's demonstration of their VisualState product. What we liked about the demo was the end-to-end creation of a simple embedded application. We though that the building of a simple digital voice recorder was very effective and clearly showed how the IAR family of products worked together and what their capabilities were. To be fair, we sat through their competitors demos as well.

Java remains hot . . .

• Savaje was in Boston showing its XE operating systems, which allows portable devices to use all the features of the Java 2 Standard Edition.
  
• Esmertec showed its Jbed product that bundles a Java virtual machine and an RTOS into one tightly integrated package.
  
• Also in attendance were Java companies Newmonics, Aplix, Microware, Skelmir, Wind River, and Fast Objects.

Nifty things you might not have seen at the show . . .

If you missed these two time-saving features at the show, take a few minutes on the web to check them out:

• Green Hills Project Wizard for the Multi 2000 IDE (v3.5) that makes out-of-box startup and target connection faster and easier.
  
• I-Logix Webify Tool Kit for Rhapsody enables developers to build embedded web servers into their projects at the push of a button, enhancing remote monitoring, control and updating.

Walking the floor . . .

• Altium Limited (formerly Protel International Ltd. / Tasking) — Altium Limited is the new corporate brand that will serve as 2 an umbrella for all current and future individual products and serving as a highly recognizable corporate platform to help engineers turn ideas into products in the easiest and most productive way possible.
  
• Green Hills Software — Also launched a versatile hardware debug probe for 32-bit, 64-bit and multiprocessor SoC embedded systems.
  
• Highlander Engineering — Announced VisiBroker-RT for C++ CORBA support for VxWorks AE, accelerating development of distributed applications with high availability requirements. They also announced a CORBA-compliant Real-Time Notification Service (RTNS) providing software developers with a turnkey solution for distributing data or event notifications between components of an application.
  
• I-Logix — Announced Rhapsody 4.0 and Rhapsody TestConductor with availability in Q4 CY01. Rhapsody 4.0 will feature a new user interface designed to improve usability and enhance productivity, and enhancements that address large-scale collaboration. Rhapsody TestConductor, a UML compliant scenario-based test generation suite for real-time embedded applications, is the first product component from I-Logix's testing product roadmap with a goal to bring formal verification and test generation to embedded product design. TestConductor will allow developers to introduce early testing into the development process.
  
• NewMonics — Announced the availability of its PERC 3.2 Java Virtual Machine complete with compiler optimizations that more than double execution speed. With the new release and improved capabilities, developers will be able to build management and control agents faster, reuse more code, and easily integrate third-party network management capabilities for such demanding network elements such as routers, gateways, etc.
  
• Poet Software — Poet announced the port of their FastObjects database to VxWorks, providing object oriented persistence solutions for the rapid and cost-effective creation of packaged and embedded high-performance applications developed with C++ and Java programming languages.
  
• QNX Systems Software — Announced the new QNX Networking Infrastructure Platform that provides a comprehensive suite of tools and protocol stacks to accelerate product development, a customizable high-availability (HA) toolkit, built-in distributed networking, and system analysis tool kit.
  
• Skelmir — Made its trade show debut. Established in 1998, Skelmir specializes in embedded Java solutions, specifically virtual machines and compiler suites for enabling Java on resource constrained devices. Skelmir's clean room CEE-J virtual machine technology has been deployed to nearly 2,000,000 consumers to date.
  
• TenAsys — Announced the availability of iRMX for Windows INtime add-on software providing a path for iRMX for Windows users to migrate from legacy applications to current Microsoft Windows operating systems.
  
• Wind River Systems — Continues to focus on providing end-to-end and targeted vertical solutions such as Tornado for Industrial Automation, Tornado for Managed Switches, and Tornado for Intelligent Network Acceleration. In addition, Tornado AE 1.1 (VxWorks AE + Tornado Tools 3) introduced along with Foundation HA. Foundation HA, a set of software extensions for VxWorks AE, provides a foundation for the development of high availability systems and targets data, service, and mission-critical applications.

Please note: the preceding article is copyright © 2001, Venture Development Corporation (VDC) and has been reproduced by LinuxDevices.com with permission.

 
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