Experts believe DSO is an Empty Marketing Strategy



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April 15, 2006 —  (Page 1 of 2)
If Device Software Optimization (DSO) were a new car and you popped the hood looking for the technology that “drove” the vehicle, you’d be looking at an empty space where the engine should be.

“There’s nothing new technologically,” said Chris Lanfear, director of the Embedded Software Group at Venture Development Corp. (VDC). “The IDEs, RTOSes and middleware are already in place—there’s no new type of tool.”

The question in Lanfear’s mind is: How much substance does DSO actually have? To date, he said, there has been no legitimate piece of research showing the return on investment (ROI) that DSO delivers. Yes, DSO looks good on paper, but no one has tested the benefits. At this point, it’s a product strategy, he said, more than a press release.

If there has indeed been no technological innovation, then it’s no wonder that vendors like MontaVista Software and QNX Software Systems have declined to comment on it.

Nevertheless, some vendors are being vocal about what’s not to like about DSO even if they’ve embraced the concept. Middleware provider Real-Time Innovations is one example.

Mark Hamilton, a senior field applications engineer at Real-Time Innovations, defines DSO as an approach to bring a suite of tools, methodologies and middleware together so developers can design reusable code—it’s essentially a set of tools. One potential hesitation among would-be DSO adopters, he said, is the trade-off between performance and openness. As memory and CPU processing power continue to increase, what developers lose in performance, they will make up for in product reuse and development cost reduction.

As a technology, DSO is not ready for prime time. Part of the problem is the “battle scars” carried by embedded developers who were previously skewered for adopting a concept that sounded good but had no technological substance or actual benefits.

Hamilton said his customers (primarily military and aerospace organizations) are very risk-averse and that they need proven security in addition to technology standards. Essentially then, among laggards, DSO faces a maturity issue that can be solved only by documenting actual cases and revealing actual numbers.




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