What Happened?
Enea recently announced a strategy to expand and strengthen their multicore support for heterogeneous multicore systems. The strategy includes an alliance with Timesys and membership in the Linux Foundation.
VDC’s View
Enea has long supported Linux as a solution for their customers and multicore, especially the telecom segment. We expect that for a time this support was under the radar, visible mostly to their customers looking to deploy both Linux and OSE-based embedded devices and systems. Enea later established their Linux Competence Center (and subsequently its Android Competence Center) as a means to commercialize and offer services for Linux development and integration.
Enea’s support was agnostic to the various Linux distributions customers were looking to integrate whether it is Wind River’s, MontaVista’s or other commercially available distributions or publically available Linux distributions. Flash back to 2009 when we all know that both Wind River and MontaVista Software were acquired. For Enea, Linux is critical to their long term multicore strategy and a partnership with Timesys offers continued access to Linux through Timesys LinuxLink as well as through their Linux expertise.
This announcement continues to focus on a Linux approach by Enea where they look to complement their core offerings (both RTOS and worldwide services) by offering their customers a choice through partnerships rather than invest in assembling and supporting their own Linux distribution. For Enea it also continues to demonstrate the ability to deliver an integrated solution that includes runtime software (RTOS, Linux, hypervisor, etc.), middleware, and software development tools to address the challenges faced by engineering teams in fast moving multicore silicon architectures. Lastly, membership in the Linux Foundation will allow the company the opportunity to participate in the various working groups and technical projects and be part of the discussion and future direction of Linux as a means to ensure the representation of the telecom segment’s needs.
We expect that the continued evolution of the commercial Linux market to now focus more on services and will cater to Enea’s core competencies – which should now be bolstered by Timesys’ experience and expertise. As with Enea’s previous ELPF, one of the key challenges will be for whether there is sufficient customer demand in Linux commercial products to fuel continued R&D investment. This may be the major obstacle to their partnership since Timesys has positioned itself as more of an aggregator of Linux builds then a market innovator.