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Valuable Strategy, or A NEW LABEL ON AN OLD PACKAGE?


Critics call it mere marketing, while supporters claim it focuses embedded market on software development

By Lisa L. Morgan
April 15, 2006 — 
Device Software Optimization is a relatively new concept that is meant to effect a fundamental shift in the way developers approach embedded designs. Its purpose is to bring software development efficiencies common to enterprise development—code reuse, openness, standardization, process efficiencies and software development cost savings—to the embedded design community. The problem with DSO is that it lacks a common definition at an industry level, which makes it all the more difficult to tell whether DSO is a marketing ploy, a methodology or a new technology.

Wind River Systems coined the term Device Software Optimization, or DSO, to give a name to the trends it saw emerging in the embedded space, to put a label on a product strategy that would better enable Wind River to address those trends, and to rally the industry in a manner that would essentially change how embedded designs are approached.

One sure way to establish “industry leadership” is to create a new market category that competitors, partners and customers adopt. Wind River has achieved this to some degree. Enea and Green Hills Software are actively promoting DSO. MontaVista Software and QNX Software Systems refused to discuss the subject with SD Times.

“Wind River put the concept out and everybody jumped on board, but the vendors are fine-tuning the message to fit their own stories,” said Chris Lanfear, director of the Embedded Software Group at research firm Venture Development Corp. (VDC).

As Lanfear observed, the three big proponents—Enea, Green Hills and Wind River—all have a slightly different view of DSO and each is placing a slightly different marketing spin on it. Wind River is investing significantly in DSO, and not just from a promotional standpoint. The company also is realigning its product strategy to reflect the DSO trend.

“DSO is Wind River’s realization that the key to software development is getting to market faster with better code,” said Dan O’Dowd, CEO of Green Hills.

Improving Developer Efficiency
O’Dowd claimed there has been a historical debate in the embedded software community about whether the real-time operating system (RTOS) or the development tools provided the core value. More recently, he said DSO makes the debate moot since all the DSO vendors agree that the “value” of DSO is speeding development, reducing costs and improving product quality.

In O’Dowd’s view, DSO is nothing more than what his company has been doing for the past 20 years: optimizing embedded design. It’s just that “DSO” is a catchier phrase than “embedded software development tools.” His opinion implies that DSO brings nothing new to the table technologically speaking (see sidebar, “Experts Believe DSO Is an Empty Marketing Strategy”).

O’Dowd said developers need a means of accelerating development cycles so they don’t fall victim to delays such as those that can be caused by intermittent bugs. The problem is, developers’ employers hesitate to spend US$10,000 or $20,000 on development tools that can speed the development process because they see it as a cost rather than as a capital investment that reduces operational costs. As a result, companies spend $150,000 to $180,000 per year total cost to employ a developer (including overhead) and encourage cost reduction through the purchase of cheap tools or the use of free tools that offer only modest productivity improvements.

“People have not focused on the software development process; they’ve focused on the operating system, hardware and chip,” said O’Dowd. “Software development is more expensive and controls the product’s success. DSO is the recognition that the core success factor is software development.”

Call to Action
Enea is taking a forward-looking stance on DSO, encouraging broader industry involvement. Of the vendors, Enea is the least vocal about how DSO relates to its own product portfolio. Instead, CEO Johan Wall and vice president of marketing Tom Hayes point to the higher level of industry dedication that will be required for DSO to achieve its ultimate goals—namely a common industry definition of DSO and the development of appropriate standards.

“DSO is the recognition that developers have to do things differently because code [complexity] is outgrowing our capacity to cope,” said Hayes. “The industry hit a wall and has to change.”

Wall explained that wireless and telecom infrastructure vendors want to double features and technology performance every 18 months or so. To achieve that, they need to reduce development time while increasing complexity, which requires them to think and act differently. Specifically, developers need to stop building proprietary software and start buying preintegrated components off the shelf. Further, they need to embrace a methodology that allows them to bring products to market faster.

“DSO is like a religion you have to believe in,” said Hayes. “The industry needs to define [it in] a sentence. We need a call for action that brings us all together.”

What’s Driving DSO
Wind River has creatively used its marketing funds to educate the market and fuel the adoption of DSO. The company maintains that embedded systems design has been platform-centric, and as a result developers are used to being tied to operating systems and tool sets that have been “optimized” for a particular chip.

The problem with that approach in today’s connected world is redundancy, which is both inefficient and unnecessarily costly. It takes more time and money to develop software targeted to one platform at a time. In addition, managing the resulting complexity is difficult at best.

Enterprise development trends that have become mainstream—code reuse, openness (such as through APIs) and common standards—means developers can get to market faster with products at a lower cost. To date, embedded development has not mirrored enterprise development, although the broad adoption of the Eclipse framework is a step toward standardization and higher levels of development efficiency.

“Twenty-four to 36 months ago, the device landscape changed from simply running applications on devices to greater complexity,” said John Bruggeman, chief marketing officer at Wind River. “Today’s devices run multiple applications providing more sophisticated user capabilities and functionality.”

Another change is the move from stand-alone to networked devices. Today’s cell phones and PDAs connect to the Internet, provide e-mail and calendaring capabilities, run several applications, and support MP3 and digital video content. Bruggeman pointed to Apple’s iPod as an example of a device that effected a revolutionary change in consumer devices. Originally the iPod was a simple MP3 player. Today, users can customize the interface, download video, pod casts, music and TV. Similar changes are occurring in other industries as evidenced by the evolution of cell phones, automotive GPS systems and telecom infrastructure.

“CLI and printf are still the No. 1 development tools for single applications running on single devices that are not connected,” said Steven Heintz, head of product management, developer technologies and tools at Wind River. “Multiapplication devices with multicore processors are complex and require security standards, so printf and CLI don’t work. To drop costs and accelerate time-to-market, you can’t use the same approaches—achieving quality requires a radical change.”

Making Radical Changes
“Radical” changes have been afoot at Wind River over the past couple of years. During that time, the company has shifted from providing an RTOS (VxWorks) and tool set (Tornado) to the broader Workbench OS-agnostic IDE that allows developers to view projects across the enterprise and reuse code. VDC’s Lanfear said that Wind River had to sell its broad portfolio in a more strategic manner, which DSO achieves. Prior to the arrival of CEO, chairman and president Ken Klein, and Bruggeman, Wind River had been re-evaluating Linux in an effort to become more technology-agnostic and to reflect how embedded developers were working.

“DSO is not just a press release,” said Lanfear. “Wind River has backed it up by acquiring tools and extending the testing in Workbench.”

Wind River’s Workbench is not tied to a particular operating system or processor, like traditional IDEs. The idea is if developers can buy off-the-shelf RTOSes, middleware and tools, they can avoid the time and cost of building them in-house and instead focus their efforts on differentiating their products.

“There are 200 individual tools for embedded developers because they’re tied to a task, an OS or a processor,” said Wind River’s Heintz. “That doesn’t work at higher levels or when you’re working with millions of lines of code.”

If the mindset of embedded developers is changing, then vendors such as Wind River can’t gain much traction if they continue to sell the same old products in the same old way. If, on the other hand, the mindset of embedded developers is not changing, then vendors like Wind River cannot train developers to think differently if they fail to address embedded development in a new way. In that sense, DSO can be thought of as a methodology—that is, thinking in terms of openness rather than device-specific development.

the Operative Word
What DSO modifies is the definition of “optimization” itself. Historically, developers have optimized device designs for performance. DSO optimizes design processes to accelerate development and reduce development costs.

“DSO represents a fundamental change because you start at the device and work down rather than work from the processor up,” said Wind River’s Bruggeman. “You’re not optimizing for the task; you’re optimizing for the device.”

To achieve that, he said a common framework is needed into which standards, open technologies, partners and utilities can plug. Toward that end, Wind River rearchitected its offerings, moving away from a monolithic IDE to a modularized version that is lightweight, allows plug-ins, and provides greater scalability and an open DSO framework.

The move was necessary for Wind River, Heintz said, otherwise the company would be offering a commoditized RTOS and tools when the market actually needs a project-based approach.

Because DSO as embodied in Workbench abstracts the operating system, developers can use the best operating system for the device, potentially opening up new markets for chip and software tool vendors alike.

In the meantime, DSO may help sell more products at Wind River, Enea and Green Hills, if nothing else.


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