Thousands of business travelers took advantage of the offer and sales soared. Leave it to some marketing moron to contact the traveling “wives” and ask them how they enjoyed their trip. Seems that many of the “take me alongers” were not the wives but someone else.

Hundreds of divorces ensued and the airline was sued by many and sales took a turn for the worse.

Fast forward to 2011 and it seems that the grandsons/granddaughters of those hapless AA marketing mavens might now be working for Freescale.

Freescale is giving away free the MQX operating system – but is Freescale helping or handicapping their customers?

In a recent EMF survey of 660 embedded developers, we were able to compare design outcomes among all of the major operating systems (using our unique Dashboard tool – see video).

Citing just a few highlights,

So we are left wondering whether Freescale realizes what they are doing to their customers – and whether the grandsons/granddaughters of American Airlines marketers can find a place where their efforts can’t do any more harm. The Obama administration comes to mind.

I have recently been contacted by senior executives from RTOS companies mentioning UBM’s survey of embedded developers that placed FreeRTOS as the most used RTOS for embedded use in 2011 (14% of respondents). FreeRTOS placed 3^rd in the 2010 UBM survey. Year-over-year EMF data is at substantial odds with these findings.

EMF takes no position on how UBM conducts their survey or on their results. EMF data for the past two years have shown that FreeRTOS usage has garnered less than 1% of total developer responses. This encompasses over 1200 responding developers. This is a significantly lower response than the 14% reported by UBM. EMF has no idea of how this discrepancy came about. We stand by our data as our surveys and responses are restricted and carefully monitored. We make no judgment regarding UBM’s methods or results. We are responding to requests to report our findings.

In EMF’s 2011 Annual Survey of Embedded Developers, eleven thousand embedded developers were statistically selected and sent invitations to participate in the 2011 survey. Six hundred and fifty three developers responded to our invitation. PIN numbers were assigned to each request so that we could insure that only those invited participated in the survey – and that they could respond only once.

In 2011 developers reported using an in-house RTOS (20.1%), Android (19.3%), XPE (16.5%) and CE (15.9%). FreeRTOS was used by 0.9% of respondents. From our perspective, the suggestion that FreeRTOS use would exceed that of in-house, Android, XPE, CE, or VxWorks use is beyond any reasonable reality check.

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.

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.

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.

 The year 2010 is just around the corner, and we are doing what we do best — forecasting. After all it’s our name. But we aren’t just guessing — we base our forecasts on historical facts and data. For the past 12 years, we have been tracking what developers are doing, what tools, OSes and processes they are utilizing and what their design experiences have been. We also report on what issues trouble them the most.

Now we are preparing our 2010 detailed and comprehensive EMF Executive Survey of Embedded Developers and Managers. We will be inviting you to take the survey to see how you our “loyal readers” compare with the larger statistically based responses (please contact us at surveys@embeddedforecast.com if you are willing to participate). Respondents who take the survey will receive a complimentary copy of our survey overview (a $399 value).

With our unique Executive Dashboard tool we are able to crosstab and simultaneously compare (for tools, programming languages, processors used in designs, etc.) “time to market” as well as “percentages of developments completed ahead of schedule/behind schedule/and cancelled”. We also know how close to pre-design expectations developer’s final design results compared.

We do this analysis for OSes (commercial and roll your own), IDEs, modeling tools, communication middleware, static analysis tools, requirements management/change management/validation tools, etc. The Dashboard allows vendors to compare the use of their products to those of their competitor’s – and it permits developer/managers to make design decisions predicated on the experiences of fellow developers.

Every year we speak with users and vendors to get their take on what they are expecting, and every year the survey results frequently surprise us – one and all.

Mark Twain wrote, “it’s not what you don’t know that can come back to bite you; it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true”. So we are not only challenging ourselves – but all who care to offer what they “know for sure” to speculate along with us.

Let’s first look at embedded markets – which ones we predict grow and which will suffer.

Winners

Medical

The medical device marketplace has been growing at a double digit rate – and new considerations should enhance opportunities for embedded vendors in 2010 – IF they take the time to correctly understand the selling points

• Considerable attention has been given to the medical marketplace by vendors seeking a safe haven from the expected decline in mil/aero. EMF believes that many such vendors don’t understand the market segment, how to sell to it, or what the users need and will purchase
• It would be funny if it wasn’t sad that certain leading RTOS vendors are pushing their certified high power, mission critical OSes towards an industry that develops products whose defining frequency requirements are less than 100 Hz

A Senate Bill cosponsored by Senators Edward Kennedy (D – MA) and Chuck Grassley (R– IA) was filed (Drug and Medical Device Accountability Act of 2009) 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. 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.

EMF will soon publish 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. EMF has identified 15 major best practices points which medical device developers can follow to align them with CDRH (Center for Devices and Radiological Health – FDA) suggestions. 

Consumer Devices and Products

There are three segments of the consumer electronics marketplace that are experiencing significant growth. Moreover with “smart devices” that will interact with IT based data reservoirs, the future for embedded technologies will involve this segment. EMF expects this market segment to grow the fastest and achieve large revenues. 

The three are:

• Consumer electronics including cell technologies and gaming devices
• Home entertainment
• Hand held devices

Industrial Automation (IA) 

IA is highly fragmented yet growing in many segments. Industrial automation, industrial controls, robotic factories, and automated assembly/manufacturing have huge security needs, testing requirements and process controls.

IA has grown to be the largest among the emerging embedded market segments.

Losers 

Telecom/Datacom

• Verizon’s rural assets following their acquisition of Alltel and the required divestiture have been bought by smaller rural service providers who are under no pressure to offer advanced services or do any network build-out. This means that less network equipment will be purchased. Of the larger service providers, both Sprint-Nextel and Qwest continue to show weakness and financial difficulty. These circumstances will have a dampening effect on telecom opportunities
• Wireless subscription growth has diminished as the market nears saturation. Approximately 89% of teenage and adult Americans have at least one cell phone. Wireless service providers have limited options and have found that customers are not likely to pay for new data services
• China is restructuring and consolidating their telecom services from six providers to three full service carriers. They are trying to break the monopoly that China Mobile has had
• Fewer buyers make the segment more competitive and harder to get design wins. This filters down to embedded vendors that supply the communications OEMs and systems integrators

Mil/Aero

• 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 that observers (embedded vendors included) who expect small changes are mistaken, thereby fostering a false and dangerous sense of security across much of the industry and government
• The impact to our economy goes far beyond our current financial problems and involves fundamental structural changes taking place in the industry and in the market. As in prior shifts of this nature, there will be winners and losers – however these shifts may be profound, creating more dramatic winners and losers than in the last cycle
• That the DoD will experience an 18% to 40% reduction in discretionary funding is a certainty. Such luminaries as Ken Krieg, former Deputy Secretary for Defense Acquisition, and Booze & Company have affirmed this to be the case. The ripple down effect from Tier I primes to Tier III embedded suppliers will be severe
• According to the Congressional Budget Office, the share of the US gross domestic product (GDP) allocated to defense spending declined from 5.6% in the 80’s to 3.8% in the 90’s and 3.1% in the new millennium. This is expected to become worse in the ensuing few years 

Automotive 

The government bail out of GM and Chrysler and the attendant end-of-life for many auto brands has been devastating to this market segment. Moreover, the efforts of the current administration to engineer the government takeover of these industries by imposing requirements created by inexperienced bureaucrats is setting back technological innovation and the acquisition of embedded technologies for many years to come

What we learned in 2009 and what we might expect in 2010 

Operating systems 

2009 saw the continued use of embedded OSes as ThreadX, Nucleus and Micrium. ThreadX continued (for the 4^th consecutive year) to show the best time to market and percent of designs competed on or ahead of schedule for a commercial OS while MontaVista Linux had the best ROI for a commercial Linux product. All commercial Linux products outperformed free Linux offerings. 

It became abundantly clear that the smaller OSes have a significant role to play – and are preferable to the high power OSes for many applications. Linux has become pervasive across many embedded verticals. 

It will be interesting to see what the 2010 EMF Embedded Developer Survey will teach us. 

Chips

That we are heading into a multicore world is a certainty – we expect the 2010 survey to show this trend. What multicore needs is better development and testing tools than what is currently available. FPGA use and FPGA technologies have advanced to the point that they are becoming preferred over DSPs and commercial chips for many applications. Long term programs that are commonly found in military systems deployments have a vested interest in processor availability. FPGA vendors won’t play the end-of-life game that the larger processor companies play. Xilinx continues (consistent with the preceding 5 years) their lead over Altera for embedded use.

In 2010 EMF added a list of multicore processors to examine which are preferred. It will be interesting to see if ARM continues to gain ground over Intel’s Atom.

Modeling Tools 

Simulation-modeling tools have enjoyed the greatest growth of any embedded tools. We expect to see this trend continue. EMF has posted for free download several papers showing the advantages of using model driven development (MDD).   

Rhapsody, now an IBM Rational tool, continues to find applications for complex designs. MDD is the only technology for effectively dealing with systems and systems-within-systems developments and maintenance. 

Other Embedded Offerings

The embedded industry has long had frugality – or the notion of a free lunch – as a strategic initiative. The fallacy herein is that the “total cost of ownership” has been ignored at the altar of acquisition costs. 

Principal among this aspect of the embedded marketplace is that of embedded communications middleware. The use of roll your own (RYO) middleware consumes more than 50% of the marketplace – notwithstanding the lack of scalability, the large cost of managing and supporting deployed systems, and the unnecessary complexity of such systems.

It will be interesting to see if RTI again is shown to have the best design outcomes and if RTI and OIS continue to outperform RYO communication middleware developments. 

It will be interesting to see whether the use of requirements management, change management and static analysis tools become more prevalent in embedded development. 

Finally, we will see which development and management practices produce the best design outcomes; which interconnect technologies are used; which programming languages are used; and which tools are purchased and used and which have been purchase but NOT used.

On November 10, 2009, Cavium, a publicly traded provider of highly integrated semiconductor processors that enable intelligent networking, communications, storage and security applications, signed a definitive agreement to acquire MontaVista. Cavium stated that MontaVista would continue to operate separately and their customers would not be restricted to using only Cavium processors.

Immediately, questions arose: 

• Who is Cavium and why did they make this acquisition?
• Was Jim Ready clipping Burger King Coupons?
• Was MontaVista motivated by Intel’s acquisition of Wind River?
• Does this mean that commercial Linux is facing financial do-do?
• What is really going on behind the scenes and is this a good or poor marriage? 

Security is one of the most neglected aspects of the embedded world and whereas the embedded focus has been on MILS and EAL security (which is a systems level orientation), the National Security Agency’s (NSA) mandated requirement for communications security (FIPS 140-2) is largely ignored. 

Cavium owns and markets the NITROX XL CN16XX-NFBE Adapter family; the world’s fastest FIPS 140-2 level 2 and 3 certified Hardware Security Module (HSM) with PCI-Express Gen2 connectivity in a low profile form factor and integrated Network Interface Card (NIC) functionality. 

Cavium’s more than 100 customers include Cisco Systems, Inc., F5 Networks, Inc., Sumitomo, SonicWALL, Inc., Citrix Systems, Inc., Blue Coat Systems, Inc., Juniper Networks, Aruba Networks, Inc., Nokia Siemens Network, IBM, Yamaha Corporation and Nokia Corporation. This is a very good match for MontaVista as well as for the embedded Linux marketplace.

EMF research has shown, year-over-year, that all commercial Linux products out perform “roll-your-own (RYO)” Linux developments – and MontaVista’s commercial Linux offerings showed a higher ROI than other commercial offerings. Their latest MVL-6 offering would permit RYO developers to move to MontaVista in the middle of their design without having to restart the development. EMF data also shows that embedded Linux use has become pervasive across many verticals and is preferred in many cases to commercial RTOSes.

EMF has been publishing and warning embedded developers, OEMs and systems integrators about the need for NSA required FIPS 140-2 security for the past 5 years – and we have been largely ignored. Cavium’s customers are keenly aware of the NSA’s requirement. Hence, we believe that this acquisition will further expand the use of MontaVista Linux by adding a security component that is unique in the embedded industry. 

The world of computer technology is rapidly changing and Tier 1 vendors that depend on military revenues are facing an 18% to 40% reduction in DoD discretionary funding. EMF believes that there will be a ripple down effect that will have dire consequences to Tier III (embedded) vendors. 

Hence, this acquisition makes sense to us as it brings financial stability to MontaVista and to the broader Linux community that it serves. 

In summary, we believe that this acquisition is an excellent one for the following reasons: 

1. Acquisition gives Cavium multiple revenue account opportunities. One by winning the processor design, two by selling SW and services during the design phase, and three by generating revenue in software and services even if they lose the design

2. Cavium’s 140-2 security certification make MontaVista the only embedded OS vendor that has this important security capability

3. The investment of a public company like Cavium in MontaVista adds stability to the embedded Linux market. We believe that it positions MontaVista in a more favorable light by dispelling rumors (true or false) regarding their financial stability (an important consideration in up selling to military and prime contractors whose projects run for decades)

4. Cavium has a history of delivering solutions that work with other company’s processors.

5. MontaVista should be able to invest in more multi-core and virtualization technologies. While this benefits Cavium, it also benefits all of their semi partners with multi-core processors. Another potential win-win.