Platform strategy fuels Wind River rebound

摘要

Orlando, Fla. — Ken Klein, who took over as chief executive officer of Wind River Systems Inc. 18 months ago, kicked off the company's users' conference here last month in slightly contrarian fashion. The company that rode the VxWorks operating system for its first two decades is now "OS-agnostic," Klein said, declaring that "the OS is not our core business." Wind River has gone well beyond a U-turn on Linux, which earlier management publicly opposed. This year, its engineers have taken the lead in adapting the open-source Eclipse platform— which started within IBM as an IT-centric user interface—to the needs of embedded-software developers. Rather than using VxWorks as its leading punch, Wind River has adopted a platform strategy—packaging the appropriate OS, middleware and runtime tools—tailored to major industry segments, said chief marketing officer John Bruggeman. As part of that strategy, the Alameda, Calif., company has courted smaller software vendors as partners—companies that got mostly lip service from Wind River until recently.