Archive for the ‘Market Intelligence’ Category

 

What if the Hokey-Pokey is NOT what it’s all about?

 

Back in the 1950’s and sixties, the rage was a dance called the Hokey-Pokey. It was yesterday’s Electric Slide and Macarena. Everyone did the Hokey-Pokey, or they were social outcasts. The song used the words “You put your whole self in and then your whole self out. You do the Hokey-Pokey and you turn yourself around – that’s what it’s all about.”

 

In year’s past, the Embedded Systems Conferences (whether they were held in San Jose, Boston or Chicago) were what it was all about. If you missed taking a booth at any conference, one went to the bottom of the availability list – cast out to the dungeon. Failing to display at an ESC conference was a tacit admission to the world that you were going out of business. Many years ago Wind River declined to attend ESC Boston and Green Hills Software gave out milk cartons showing a tornado with the caption, “Have you seen Wind River anywhere?”

 

Although the Embedded Systems conferences held in Germany have largely replaced ESC in size and grandeur, CMP’s ESC Boston is still an extremely important venue for our industry.

 

Aside from flash backs from my glory days (I can still do the Electric Slide and the Macarena, thank you – notwithstanding some breathing difficulties), I couldn’t help missing the glory days of ESC Boston as we attended this year’s event.

 

We were shocked to see how much smaller the event was as compared with previous years – this seemed to be the consensus as well of editors who remember the event going back 10 years or more. Second, other than a few large booths (Microchip, Green Hills and IBM stand out in memory) the booths we saw were small and the number of software companies attending with booths were few and far between.

 

We did see, and speak with, executives from a number of embedded software companies who attended without having booths. They will certainly be at ESC San Jose next May – but not in Boston.

 

We’re not sure if we can blame it on the economy since we have seen the decline over the past 3 years. But we did note that the smaller size did put a crimp on the sponsor’s spending. You see, we editors and analysts have been spoiled in the past. The press room was filled with drinks, munchies and sandwiches of all types. This year we couldn’t even get a cup of coffee. We had to walk a hundred yards or more to get a cup which was inconvenient – but we understood that times were tough for CMP Media.

 

ESC has continued to survive thanks to Microsoft – but that is a two-edged sword. Microsoft has made demands on attendees – which in the long run was counter productive. But CMP has had little choice in the matter.

 

We continue to see a lot of board companies, dynamic and static analysis tool vendors and a hodge-podge of services companies. The floor traffic appeared rather light to us, but many vendors said that they received qualified leads – particularly on the first day. CMP has gone to great lengths to arrange teaching sessions so that there would be adequate traffic on the floor.

 

We heard a lot of questions and concerns regarding processors – and in particular those that would be favored during the next two year period. This was good for us as these issues are covered in detail in our research.

 

All in all, we continue to believe in the value of ESC Boston and hope that CMP will continue to provide this important venue – for the advantages to vendors and developers as well.

 

I will live with the knowledge that the Hokey-Pokey is NOT what it’s all about anymore – and that will be my little secret. After all, a recent survey of freshmen entering college showed that they never heard about the Challenger accident, tape recorders or the Kennedy assassination, I can deal with the Hokey-Pokey situation.

 

If they know about the Macarena they probably think it is for grandparents like Dolores and me. We don’t dare tell them about the Hokey-Pokey – they probably think that we are a waste of good oxygen as it is.

 

ESC Boston is dead – long live ESC Boston.

 

Amen

Every year, for the past 12 years, EMF has asked embedded developers to respond to a comprehensive and detailed survey that explores all aspects of their design and development activities in a manner that permits EMF to correlate answers to any questions – or series of questions – with any other question or series of questions. The survey is constructed and conducted in a statistically accurate manner to insure valid interpretations (including the ability to create comparative ROIs between similar product offerings).

 

In 2010, 536 developers responded to the survey resulting in a statistical confidence level of 95% +/- 4.5%. This is extremely important to EMF as many of our subscribers are basing their competitive position by needing to  forecast what chip and OS usages will be two years from now.

 

We can, of course, examine these responses from the perspective of any vendor’s individual operating system (which many of our subscribers do to look at their users as well as their competitor’s users).

 

Year-over-year we ask developers to select from among many alternative responses (we limit each developer to a maximum of 4 responses) to the question regarding which factors are most important to their decision to select an operating system. We also ask what factors would enter into their decision to purchase from either a single vendor or from multiple vendors. We may publish this data in another post.

 

The following table presents comparative responses to the factors regarding the OS selection process for the periods 2009 and 2010. The top 15 responses (out of 33 possible) are presented.

 

	2010	2009
	Industry	Industry
Acquisition cost	44.6%	36.7%
Availability of source code	33.1%	26.4%
Microprocessor support	30.4%	22.9%
Real time performance	29.8%	34.8%
Compatibility with our development tools	27.6%	29.0%
Includes good development tools	26.6%	24.5%
Reliability	25.2%	31.1%
Compatible with Linux	24.1%	17.8%
Availability of perpetual license	22.7%	20.6%
Availability of req. middleware or networking protocols	18.1%	14.3%
Availability of professional services	16.7%	12.1%
Host platform support	15.0%	15.0%
Quality of support	14.4%	19.2%
Royalty cost (production licenses)	14.2%	9.8%
Must be open source	13.4%	10.7%

 

The lists are comparable between 2009 and 2010 with “realtime performance” and “reliability” taking the steepest drop (but remaining important nonetheless), and “Linux” compatibility “microprocessor support” and “source code availability” being the largest gainers.

 

This bodes well for the Linux community. Such items as “safety certifiable (DO178B, etc.)”, “visualization” and ““security certification (NSA, Common Criteria)” received middle single digit response levels.

 

We have seen this result for many years – and, due to the proliferation of communications and consumer devices, this is why we have forecast the growth in ThreadX, Micrium, MontaVista Linux and Nucleus use. These OSes have been deployed in hundreds of millions of devices worldwide. Unless the application calls for a MILS level certification, alternative OSes are being used in place of the high power OSes of the past.

Comparing Modeling Design Outcomes with Comparable non-modeling Design Outcomes

 

 

 

 

In a soon to be published EMF white paper, cadres of comparable design outcomes were developed between developers that used MBD tools and those that didn’t. Cadres were established worldwide, for North America, for Asia, and for Europe.

 

In addition, specific analyses were conducted for MBD and non-MBD cadres for Telecom/Datacom, Medical, Automotive Transportation and Industrial Automation application markets.

 

 

 

Total Cost of Development calculations were conducted using:

• Number of software and hardware engineers per project
• Time from design start to product shipment
• Percent of designs cancelled and the number of months elapsed before cancellation
• Percent of designs completed behind schedule and number of months behind

 

The following table summarizes EMF’s findings. For comparison, the cost per developer man month was chosen to be $10,000. Clearly, this dollar value is high for Asian developers. However this value was chosen for internal geographic analysis only – to establish whether MBD provided an advantage or not. These values are not to be used to compare, for example,  Asian costs with European costs.

 

				MBD
		Non-MBD Cost	MBD Cost	Advantage
	North America	$3,921,519	$3,153,452	24.4%
	Europe	$3,744,894	$2,722,134	37.6%
	Asia	$10,189,266	$3,374,067	202.0%

 

Looking at worldwide developments (that is interrogating the entire database irrespective of geographic considerations), the following table summarizes the EMF findings.

 

	World	World Industry
	Industry MBD	Not MBD
Devel time Months	13.4	13.1
% behind schedule	44.3%	49.9%
Months behind	3.7	3.7
Ave Delay Months	1.63	1.83
% cancelled	10.1%	12.1%
Months lost to cancellation	4.2	4.7
SW Developers/proj	11.0	16.3
HW Developers/proj	8.9	10.9
Total project developers	19.9	27.2
Average Developer months/project	266.2	358.1
Developer months lost to schedule	32.4	49.8
Developer months lost to cancellation	8.5	15.5
Total developer months/ project	307.1	423.4
At $10,000/developer month
Average developer cost/project	$2,662,098	$3,580,843
Average cost to delay	$323,977	$497,835
Total developer cost/project	$2,986,075	$4,078,677
	MBD Adv	36.6%

 

It is interesting to note that in every analysis, regardless of the cadres used (i.e., each vertical or geographic comparative breakout), MBD projects used fewer developers. When analyzing cost overruns (i.e., the number of developer months lost to cancellation or late completion) to total project developer months, the percent of cost overruns to total project developer months was less for MBD in every analysis.

 

EMF suggests that this data shows that the advantages in using simulation-modeling as a design methodology are real and that these practices will be adopted for reasons not only related to design outcomes, but for financial ROI reasons as well.

Insights from the 2010 EMF Survey of Embedded Developers

  

Each year EMF conducts a thorough and detailed survey of embedded developers. Using the EMF Dashboard – a web based tool that permits vendors and developers to correlate information between any responses to any question, EMF presents selected insights from its analysis of the 2010 data. The Dashboard enables vendors to look at the responses of their customers (and potential customers) as well as to their competitor’s customers. This provides invaluable insights for strategic and sales planning. Developers can see what their fellow developers are considering in their selection criteria

 

Product opportunity windows are fleeting and time-to-market issues dominate design considerations. The two factors that invariably make the difference between success and failure are first, the knowledge that comes with an accurate insight into the internal and external forces which drive product markets and second, an insight into the concerns, desires and thought processes of those customers who make the decision to purchase a particular product or deal with a particular vendor.

 

The following data, taken from the 2010 EMF Embedded Developer Survey, addresses many issues of which embedded vendors and developers should be aware. The data presented here represents embedded industry averages across many application verticals, many vendors, many OSes, etc. Subscribers to the 2010 EMF Market Intelligence Program have access to their custom Executive Dashboard with which they can create unlimited cross tabs to further examine the data presented here.

 

 Criteria Most and Least Important to Developers in Selecting an OS

 

Developers were asked to indicate which criteria were most important to their decision in selecting an OS. The top (most important) responses and the bottom (least important) responses are presented in the following tables.

 

There was an interesting reordering of priorities in 2010 with cost remaining the principal factor. Realtime performance fell (no surprise here) and safety certifiable and virtualization remained as a small part of the collective consciousness of embedded developers.

 

 

Criteria most important for selecting an OS:         Top 8 Responses	2010	2009
Acquisition cost	44.6%	36.7%
Availability of source code	33.1%	26.4%
Microprocessor support	30.4%	22.9%
Real time performance	29.8%	34.8%
Compatibility with our development tools	27.6%	29.0%
Includes good development tools	26.6%	24.5%
Reliability	25.2%	31.1%
Compatible with Linux	24.1%	17.8%

 

 

Criteria Least important for selecting an OS	2010	2009
Supports virtualization	4.9%	5.1%
Preferred vendor or on company approved list	4.3%	9.1%
POSIX or SCA compliant	4.3%	4.9%
Provides memory protection	3.9%	4.0%
Security certification (such as Common Criteria or NSA)	2.6%	4.2%
Must not be based on GPL	2.6%	2.1%
ARINC 653 compliant	1.6%	0.7%
Subscription licensing available (annual or fixed term)	1.4%	0.9%
Response to RFP	1.4%	2.8%

You Better Design Right, You Better Not Fail, if You Don’t Follow These Guidelines Your CEO’s going to Jail; The FDA/CDRH is Watching You Now

(Sung to Santa Claus is coming to town)

 

Yes indeed – and it’s about time.

The FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) reported that in 2006, 21% of all medical device recalls were for software defects – it is also estimated that one-in-three software-based products is recalled. They haven’t updated this data since, but one can assume that it might have gotten worse.

Medical device developers and company CEOs should be aware that this is an unacceptable situation and that it is going to rapidly change. Those that don’t get it straight won’t be around when the dust settles.

Is there enough aspirin to relieve the headaches that our government is giving medical device manufacturers? Moreover, is it deserved? The answer – depending on the specific question – is yes and no.

The Obama administration under pressure from Congress has combined the medical device industry with the drug industry as one, and has proposed taxing both industries to pay for universal health insurance (Obama Care). Hopefully thoughtful senators and representatives will see that these taxes will be passed down to patients and other users and will also impact the elderly who most require such devices and can ill afford them – then again it is more realistic to depend on the Easter bunny. But logic is no relief for the headache – particularly when it comes to Washington politicians. It’s no fun being a medical device executive today.

On July 31, 2008 a Senate Bill cosponsored by Senators Edward Kennedy (D – MA) and Chuck Grassley (R– IA) was filed that  would require senior officers or directors of drug and medical device companies to certify under penalty of perjury that all information submitted for a product’s approval is accurate and in compliance with federal regulations.

The Drug and Medical Device Accountability Act Bill expired at the end of the two year Senate session on December 31, 2008, but was refiled in the Senate (2009) with the hope of amending the current legislation by the end of October 2009. This is an important piece of legislation, and medical device executives should get their house in order to accommodate the provisions.

The Bill provided that product applications later found to have contained false or misleading information would be subject to stiff fines (up to $5,000,000), assessed both to companies and their senior officers, who, in addition, could face jail sentences of up to 20 years. These are serious issues. Currently the CDRH has a forensic group that looks at device software only after a device has been recalled.

This is a bad time, and a very costly time (regardless of the Act) for a medical device manufacturer – particularly if software development hadn’t been given the detailed oversight of using best practices. The new Obama tax on medical devices – used to pay for Obama Care – is allready a blow to the industry and to smaller medical device manufacturers.

The “Drug and Medical Device Accountability Act” will change the medical devices industry similarly to how the Sarbanes-Oxley bill impacted corporate accountability. Laws being what they are, we should expect overkill from its enactment. This is why medical device company’s senior management should take time to rethink their strategic approach to the delivery of their products.

EMF has available a report presenting alternative paths for developers to produce quality software for medical devices, minimize product recalls, and affordably provide comprehensive audit trails for CDRH inspectors (Critical Issues Confronting Medical Device Manufacturers). Keeping the company alive and your CEO out of jail are bonuses.

Fearless and no longer loathing in San Jose (with apologies to the late Hunter Thompson)

 

 

Dolores and I made our annual trip to the Left Coast to attend the annual Embedded Systems Conference last week. It was the best ESC West in many years – more booths; larger booths; good floor traffic; interesting announcements and new to embedded players.

 

I’m not sure how Rich Nass does it – but the keynote speaker was again excellent. This time Michio Kaku, the co-founder of string theory and TV science presenter was the speaker and was charming, funny (but Seinfeld can breathe easy), informative and delightful. We joined the mass exodus to avoid the obligatory hour dedicated for the Microsoft Embedded Group (aka MS Purgatory – otherwise known as We B Arrogant). Granted that Microsoft contributes a lot of $$ to these very important events – for which I am grateful – but give me a friggin break MS, Windows 7 is not the promised land for the embedded world.

 

This was the year that the chip companies made confessions of love to many OS companies. Freescale made announcements with such stalwarts as Green Hills, while Intel teamed with LynuxWorks for an ill chosen medical product. ARM was very impressive as was Microchip, while Xilinx ran away with the FPGA application announcements. Xilinx for the 7^th consecutive year (by EMF survey data) was the most used FPGA in the embedded space (and had the best ROI).

 

Green Hills also made a networking arrangement with Cavium (who recently acquired MontaVista and MV Linux) which caused us to ask if Dan O’Dowd (who has publicly claimed that anyone who used Linux was brain dead – or worse) had to be drugged or restrained to cut a deal with a Linux company. We checked the stock market for Prozac manufacturers to see if consumption was up in Santa Barbara. All chuckles aside – it was an excellent deal for Green Hills.

 

It surprised and impressed us that Green Hills made behind the scenes moves that portend for significant growth and positioning against Wind River by hiring two individuals that bring another dimension to the competitive marketplace that will be to their advantage. Although I’m not obliged to keep such under wraps, I do respect the Green Hills folks and will keep these details to ourselves – other than to mention that they are the first of the usual suspects to clearly see the light.

  Read the rest of this entry »

Failure is an Option – what Joe Biden should have said instead of dropping the F-Bomb

A few months back I gleefully reported what the voters of Massachusetts did for the medical device industry by electing Scott Brown as our new Senator. The US Senate had cobbled together a poor Health Care Bill in order to send it onto the House of Representatives assured that the Republicans would not win Kennedy’s seat and gain the blocking vote. It was, by admission of many Democratic Senators, a terrible bill – but that it would be cleaned up in a House-Senate conference. 

With Senator Brown finally seated it seemed to be a no-brainer that the Health Care Bill would have to be dropped or reconfigured as it would not stand a filibuster challenge.

I was one of those relieved given my concern for my beloved medical device industry which was going to be the scapegoat of the current administration and be severely taxed for no other reason than its name sounded a lot like the pharmaceutical industry. I felt that we had ducked a massive bullet.

The gross distortions in favor of forcing through the bill under Reconciliation were mind-numbing. How the public could be convinced that spending more than a trillion dollars would result in a “massive middle class tax reduction” and how could taking $500 billion out of Medicare “strengthen” it?

Here’s what has happened and what we might expect – how much more damage can Congress inflict before the November elections?

Read the rest of this entry »

 

 

 FIPS 140 (acronym for “Federal Information Processing Standard number 140”) is a US government standard, established by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which specifies a series of requirements that must be met by an encryption module before it can be used in a Federal government system.  These requirements cover a range of subjects, from proper key management, to secure generation of random numbers, and from which encryption algorithms may be used, to module self-tests and error detection.

 

Put more simply, if a product performs encryption, the portion of that product which actually implements the encryption is the focus of FIPS 140. FIPS 140 is of interest to the embedded systems industry for several reasons:

 

First, under Section 5-131 of the Information Technology Reform Act of 1996 (Public Law 104-106), and the Computer Security Act of 1987 (Public Law 100-235), FIPS from NIST may be approved by the Secretary of Commerce and made binding to all Federal agencies.  FIPS 140 has been granted such approval, and therefore all Federal agencies are required to use FIPS 140-certified encryption to protect all sensitive information processed by all data processing systems, from embedded systems to mainframes.

 

This means that vendors cannot sell systems which use encryption to any Federal agency unless that system incorporates FIPS 140-certified encryption.

  Read the rest of this entry »

 

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim – George Santiago

 

 

Tough economic times create strange bedfellows. Does one need to purchase a technology, with its attendant costs and complications, when a lease or partner relationship would suffice? Do complimentary technologies and markets provide a return greater than the sum of the parts – or is the result characterized as “subtraction by addition?”

 

 EMF believes that embedded consolidation through acquisition will be the norm over the next few years as roll backs in DoD discretionary funding impact the larger purchasers.

 

 Let’s look to four recent acquisitions with an eye on compatibility, growth potential and whether there is a measurable outcome. Is this a trend, a lifeline or a passing strategic initiative – you decide.

 

 These include:

 

• IBM Rational buys Telelogic
• Intel buys Wind River Systems
• Cavium acquires MontaVista
• Artisan acquires Aonix

 

  Read the rest of this entry »

The market, like the Lord, helps those that help themselves. But unlike the Lord, the market does not forgive those who know not what they do – Warren Buffett

 

The embedded marketplace is facing a financial tsunami that will have severe consequences for the largest consumers of embedded technology – the Tier 1 contractors. This in turn will significantly impact the lower tiers and cause a major upheaval for Tier 3 vendors – the embedded suppliers.

Steve Roemerman, CEO of Lone Star Aerospace a highly respected technology consultant to military and government agencies has written “The Aerospace and Defense Industries of the United States are poised to undergo one of the most significant changes since the end of the Cold War, perhaps the most significant since World War II. We believe observers who expect small changes are mistaken, fostering a false and dangerous sense of security across much of the industry and government”. 

 

This forecast and view is also strongly held by Ken Krieg, former deputy undersecretary for defense acquisition, and in publications from Booze Allen.

 

So you might be asking “Why haven’t we heard of this, Jerry and why are other analysts forecasting a very good year for 2010?” Being long in the tooth and having been here before when CompactPCI was being touted as the VME slayer and industry hopefuls along with participating analysts were forecasting a $2 billion merchant computer board marketplace (which EMF called a $zero billion market). Why were we correct and others in error? Because markets behave in predictable manners – even when disruptive technologies disturb the playing field. 96% of CompactPCI offerings were controlled by 3 companies – this represented a classic commodity market and there was little room for growth. It took 24 VME vendors to account for 75% of the VME market, by comparison – which made it a dynamic and growing market. VME is still around and holding market share. CompactPCI is now a custom product (not a COTS product) and is being abandoned by PICMG for PCIExpress.

The outcome was predictable. Today the Board marketplace is dominated by Kontron, GE, Curtis Wright and RadiSys. Gone are Motorola Computer Group, Force Computers and a litany of others.

The embedded world is characterized by a growing and vital marketplace that is forcing certain segments into commoditization while creating huge opportunities for those that take the time and invest the effort into understanding their market dynamics.

I love the following story – because for me it holds more than a kernel of truth.
 

Its late fall and the Indians on a remote reservation in South Dakota asked their new chief if the coming winter was going to be cold or mild. Since he was a chief in a modern society, he had never been taught the old secrets. When he looked at the sky, he couldn’t tell what the winter was going to be like. Nevertheless, to be on the safe side, he told his tribe that the winter was indeed going to be cold and that the members of the village should collect firewood to be prepared.

But, being a practical leader, after several days, he got an idea. He went to the phone booth, called the National Weather Service and asked,’ Is the coming winter going to be cold?’ ‘It looks like this winter is going to be quite cold,’ the meteorologist at the weather service responded. So the chief went back to his people and told them to collect even more firewood in order to be prepared.

A week later, he called the National Weather Service again. ‘Does it still look like it is going to be a very cold winter?’ When told it would be severe he sent his people to pick even more firewood.

Two weeks later, the chief called the National Weather Service again. ‘Are you absolutely sure that the winter is going to be very cold?’ ‘Absolutely, ‘ the man replied. ‘It’s looking more and more like it is going to be one of the coldest winters we’ve ever seen..’ ‘How can you be so sure?’ the chief asked.

The weatherman replied…

 ‘The Indians are collecting firewood like crazy’ 

So how much does our industry influence itself? Is the embedded industry too small to understand its dependencies?

Continued in Part II