Every year VDC conducts an extensive worldwide survey of embedded engineers and their development projects to better understand engineering requirements, preferences, and trends. This information is available from VDC in unique cross tabbed reports to offer readers a detailed, in-depth, view of engineers in the development project trenches.
Quite frequently we receive requests from suppliers of the embedded community for statistics around company project starts as this metric is often seen as an important indicator of health and growth for the embedded industry. Based on VDC’s 2011 survey embedded engineers expect about a 15% increase in the aggregate in the number of project starts from 2010 to 2011. Certainly good news for embedded solution providers – both software and hardware.
However, while aggregate survey statistics are metrics of importance to many in the community, segmentation of data creates an additional lens on the information from which to analyze and develop product and marketing strategies. The following data is based on VDC’s 2011 embedded engineer survey and included in our Track 2 Volume 1: Operating Systems report which segments respondent data by the use different types of operating systems in their development projects. The good news for suppliers is that all communities expect the number of project starts to increase year-over-year, however, engineers working at companies using no formal operating systems in there development project cite a much smaller percentage of increase.
Embedded engineering organizations continue to place value on development projects that do not require a formal operating system primarily around the requirements and functionality of the device/system under development. However, to a lesser extent commercial licensing costs, retraining, and protection of investment in legacy code can also be considerations for continued use of no formal OS in their development projects. The demand for new functionality, connectivity, and other capabilities is creating greater sophistication of devices and systems being developed and to be developed in the future. As such VDC continues to observe a migration of development projects to the use of formal operating systems creating increased opportunity for embedded software suppliers to offer their solutions.