Wind River segments the embedded market from a similar industry segmentation: 1. Industrial measurement and control. This is a pretty well-established arena that can be very resistant to major technological change -- it wasn't until the past few years that we've really seen a broader migration from in-house proprietary operating systems to commercial RTOS vendors. Usually of much greater concern to this space is the reliability of the computing environment and its resistance to odd factors like EMI/radiation interference, with some minimal amount of interaction with backoffice control systems. 2. Automotive. The auto industry is in the middle of a significant technology shift away from analog control systems to a digital bus network for controlling a variety of things in a car. You'll eventually see antilock brakes, power windows and steering, transmission/gearbox control, engine tuning, dashboard displays and other things all integrated and communicating over a common network. 3. Telecom/datacom. I believe everybody understands these pretty well; these are the makers of switches, carrier-grade equipment, wireless hubs, DSL routers, and a whole other collection of devices. This is the land of the protocols. 4. Consumer devices. This is where we see Java compatibility being of the greatest potential benefit and marketability; this includes your typical palm-held devices as well as other things you may not think of yet as requiring Internet connectivity. One plausible scenario is the initial introduction of home Internet wireless gateways using 802.11a or other newer, faster wireless technology. This would then be followed by a few core appliances such as DVD players or televisions with built-in Internet-enabled features. 5. Military/aerospace. Usually not interested in integrating or connecting with other applications, the mil/aero space has extremely high performance and determinism requirements. We've not seen much Java penetration in this space, although our other RTOS and tools products continue to do well. From my point of view, something like an embedded application server (or subset of those technologies) is best targeted at the datacom and IMC markets as a seeding strategy, to provide the infrastructure required to support distributed services (being hyped as web services right now) in the future. You'll then see consumer appliance makers needing similar technologies to enable their products to connect to those exported services. Many companies in the above industries are not big fans of the x86 CPU family. Compared to others like ARM or PowerPC, the x86 is hot, noisy, and expensive both in terms of dollars and watts. If the ME project wants to see broader success we'll need to first think deeply about which CPU architectures to support or test. Yes, JavaME and the KVM or CVM are supposed to make this straightforward but in our experience there is a huge gap between capability and reality. Porting to other CPU's requires certain capital resources and funky development environments. -Jason At 09:58 AM 8/29/01 -0700, you wrote: >Welcome Jason, > >August is probably a dumb time to launch a new open source project, >especially when a good deal of the contributors of the projects are from >Europe and take vacation then. :) > >Certainly, I think we all see that there are approximately 3 broad markets >to go after: > >a> Embedded / machine to machine interaction (sometimes referred to as >telematics, examples include weather stations, HVAC systems, etc.). In the >USA, providers like Aeris.net provision cellular backchannel for pennies and >offer <1K packet data with 2-3 second latency covering about 98% of the >populated area of the country. Obviously, QualComm and others offer similar >provisioning services. EnhydraME will be important here provided the cost >impact of upgrading the weather station hardware from an 8088 chip to a >80386 doesn't wipe out the benefit of a standards/Java based approach versus >native code burned on the chip. Aeris is very sceptical that Java on >weather stations / telematics stations will happen... > >b> Industrial applications: these are the field workforce automation apps, >warehouse apps, trucking services (both location, capacity, etc), etc. style >apps that either use the Aeris/QualComm cellular networks, wireless LAN >networks [wi-fi / 802.11b], other proprietary networks, etc. It is likely >that Micro App Servers, like the ME project, will be extremely valuable >here, especially with kSOAP, kUDDI, kHTTP/Locumi, etc. > >c> Consumer applications: these are the least interesting to me, in that >there is no business model for these in the USA today [no imode like shared >revenue systems that pay providers of content]. > >Is this about how you at WindRiver segment the market? >kb > >-----Original Message----- >From: me-admin@enhydra.org [mailto:me-admin@enhydra.org]On Behalf Of >Jason S. Anderson >Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2001 8:00 AM >To: me@enhydra.org >Subject: ME: I'll start a new thread then... > > >...by saying Hello and introducing myself. I just joined the list a couple >of days ago; I work at Wind River, who if you work in the embedded space >you've probably heard of before. :) I should first say that I joined of my >own accord -- this isn't a sanctioned or sponsored activity. However I felt >that one of the important success criteria for any software platform in the >embedded space is support of a broad inventory of operating systems and >hardware platforms; I'm curious how others feel about this. > >I haven't thought much about how I can help, just that I would like to. I >do have pretty good access to hardware of various CPU families, and if the >project felt it was worth pursuing I could also work to proxy within the >organization on things like compatibility with our commercial RTOS's. One >specific comment (and I haven't finished reading through all of the >existing document, so bear with me) is that I notice a significant mention >of wireless devices. A broader opportunity you may not want to ignore is >that as 'web services' become more established, other types of networked >devices (wireless or not, consumer or not) will also either want to be able >to connect to those services or expose services of their own. > >These are just ideas. Any others? > >-Jason >---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Jason Anderson email: jason.anderson@windriver.com > Manager, Platforms Operations Programs ph: 510-749-2202 > Manager, FreeBSD Engineering fax: 510-749-2010 > Wind River cell: 510-708-3588 > >_______________________________________________ >ME mailing list >ME@enhydra.org >http://www.enhydra.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/me > >_______________________________________________ >ME mailing list >ME@enhydra.org >http://www.enhydra.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/me |