Part 2: Where do those Embedded Forecasts come from – and why this question should make you nervous
January 14th, 2010 | 
Author: 
Forecasting involves two distinct activities;
- Measuring the pulse of embedded developers to understand what they are doing, what success they are having, what are their deepest concerns and how do the use of different technologies (e.g., comparative RTOSes, development tools, communication middleware, testing processes, etc.) affect design outcomes (ROI, time to market, percent of designs completed ahead or behind schedule – or cancelled). Also it is helpful to compare final design outcomes to pre-design expectations.
- Following purchasing trends, funding sources and levels, and whether purchasers are bringing developments and tools in-house or by purchasing.
It is important for embedded vendors to use available data and information and to be able to cross-correlate findings to search out relationships that help define market directions as well as to provide sales support materials to better pursue qualified leads.
EMF published research has used developer-based user surveys and collaborative industry/government based usage and funding insights to forecast market segments that are growing and those that are contracting (at least in the short term). Given these insights there are steps that vendors can take to minimize risk while maintaining a positive positioning.
These include:
- A serious analysis of your competitive position is essential to not only getting qualified leads but also to having a competitive sales support program with which to follow up these leads. Customers are buying your competitor’s products. Do you know why? Do you know how best and affordably to find this information (talking to a few customers won’t get you there)? Can you prove that your products help your customers get to market faster?
- You really need to know what your customers really need – how do you find out? In our surveys we discover what issues are most troubling to them and what would motivate them to move towards you (or away from you).
- If your products and those of your competitors exceed the needs of current and prospective customers (notwithstanding how truly cool your products may be) mitigating factors will affect their purchasing decision – even if your product isn’t as cool as those of your competitors.
- Be able to demonstrate your value (they won’t do it for you). Be able to provide factual information – ROI if you can.
- Promote yourself. Is your marketing targeting the right customers and do they have compelling information to state your case? Be proactive – your competitors might have access to information that makes their case – and you wouldn’t know about it.
Be exceedingly careful as you look to expand your marketplace – either offensively or defensively. Vendors realizing the impending shortfall in mil/aero are looking to alternative markets without understanding the dynamics and true needs of those markets. Medical, for example, has been targeted by some of the larger mil/aero vendors stressing their DO 178-B and Common Criteria certifications. For the most part this is laughable given that the highest frequency response for monitoring a non-attended patient is 100 HZ.
We are seeing companies that have been successful in EDA (e.g., Synopsys) and IT communication systems (e.g., IBM) bringing their proven technologies to enhance systems development and deployment – which in turn change development paradigms by offering OEMs and systems integrators better long term solutions.
Smaller vendors need to be able to show their value and the ability to integrate their solutions with these more advanced solutions. IBM Rational’s Rhapsody is an example of a very powerful model driven development (MDD) tool that allows for competitor’s requirements management, RTOS, static and dynamic analysis technologies to be comfortably integrated.
Be careful where you get your information – and before you pay for it make sure you understand where it came from and how it was obtained.
Warren Buffett offers the following timely advice: “For some reason people take their cues from price action rather than from values. Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”
Posted in Best Practices, Market Intelligence, Marketing and Sales, Uncategorized | 
Tags: Forecast, Marketing
I’m not sure why mil/aero vendors targeting medical is laughable. Are you saying the safety/security assurances given by certifications such as DO 178-B are not valuable enough for any medical devices to be designed with a system powerful enough to support a certified OS?
No all medical products – just those patient monitoring products that have minimal frequency response requirements (under 100HZ). Patient monitoring safety, over the years, has been most effective by the design of alarm systems – many of which can distinguish between a patient disconnect, 60 cycle noise and an actual cardiac incident. They can also detect a systems failure – or power loss so that a patient will not go unmonitored. Also, there are OSes (ThreadX, MontaVista Linux and Nucleus – Micrium can be included but has 178B) that are used in hundreds of millions of applications – most of which having more severe requirements than patient monitoring. Having built 4 medical device companies and taken 2 of them public, I feel qualified to comment in this regard. Thanks for your comment – Jerry
I regret that I do not know much about the medical device industry, which may be part of my confusion. There are still 2 points I am unclear about: 1) Are the majority of medical devices considered patient monitoring products with minimal freq. resp. reqs? If not, isn’t there still a large market for certified OSs in the medical industry? 2) I can understand how applications could have more severe requirements than patient monitoring, but if these are devices detecting cardiac incidents, wouldn’t having something like a separation kernel (which I believe is part of the Common Criteria certifications you mentioned) provide safety/security that is a critical requirement?
I’ll be posting a medical device paper soon. To respond to your question, one has to look at patient attended (e.g., ultrasound, dialysis, CT scan, etc.) and patient non- attended (e.g., monitoring – even remote) devices for specific requierments (e.g., realtime, high speed, etc.). So – if I need to measure ECG (100HZ), pulse (4 HZ), temperature (minutes or more), respiration (3-20/minute), oxygen and CO2 concentration, etc., why would I need a separation kernel? MILS, Common Criteria and EAL, as well as DO 178B offer assurances specific to catastrophic events in unusual environments (avionic, etc.). Unless I have to use multiple OSes in a single application virtualized capabilities are unnecessary. ThreadX has been ceritifed by Welsh Allyn for certain applications but Express Logic hasn’t taken the trouble to incur the cost for other certifications as they are focused on different markets. Same for Nucleus, MontaVista Linux and Micrium. EMF data shows that these OSes enjoy as good or better design outcomes as do the more powerful OSes such as Integrity, VxWorks and LynxOS. Are they less capable for non-mission critical applications? I think that the fact that they are deployed in hundreds of millions of applications speaks for itself.