New Wind River Development Environment Heralds Channel Embrace

Workbench 2.0 is a critical element of Wind River's plans to recruit VARs that not only build custom systems, but also integrate custom systems with enterprise systems, said company CEO Ken Klein.

"The opportunity in this space for VARs is in the integration area," Klein said. "There are a lot of remote devices now that need to communicate with enterprise systems. In the next four years, there will be 14 billion remote, intelligent devices. It is a huge market opportunity for VARs."

Earlier this year, Wind River signed a pact with Red Hat under which the two companies agreed to jointly develop a Linux offering for the embedded systems market. As part of that effort, Wind River has created its Workbench 2.0 IDE by making use of Eclipse, the open-source application development framework that allows solution providers to add their own plug-in modules.

For VARs such as Spectrum Signal Processing in Burnaby, British Columbia, the ability to develop custom systems running on top of Linux offers intriguing possibilities.

"There's a lot of interest in Linux," said Mark Briggs, director of marketing at Spectrum Signal, which specializes in developing reconfigurable software-based radio systems for military applications. "Whenever a company like Wind River moves to legitimize Linux, it raises a lot of eyebrows."

According to Klein, VAR opportunities in the embedded systems market are exploding because products are increasingly based on software running on embedded processors.

"Companies across the board are finally realizing they are in the software business," Klein said. "They understand now that 70 percent of their engineering spend on product development is now tied to software."

To help VARs tap into the embedded systems market, Wind River has created an alliance group to partner with companies that have expertise in specific vertical industries.

"From a software perspective, we think this is a $3 billion opportunity that is underpenetrated," Klein said. "On top of that, there are about 300,000-plus in-house developers that are gagging on complexity and need help. That's a $20 billion opportunity."

Klein said he has remodeled the Wind River sales model to support VARs. But currently, the company only has 100 active VARs in its program.

"We're open for business," said Klein. "We're putting in place a channel-friendly sales model so we can synergistically work with VARs vs. compete with them. This is a great opportunity for us to re-engage with a whole set of VARs. There's no way we will be successful without a very strong, robust partner ecosystem."