Green Hills expands security business

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Green Hills Software has launched a security business division and upgraded its security software platform. The company also struck a deal to co-develop and market tools for Freescale Semiconductor's QorIQ and PowerQUICC processors.

The news was announced at the Embedded Systems Conference where Green Hills' chief executive made his pitch for the importance of embedded software in a keynote. Car makers, trucking companies and chip designers spend as much as $100,000 on productivity gear for every employee, but many companies are reluctant to spend $10,000 on tools for their programmers, said Dan O'Dowd.

"Embedded programmers are the people primarily responsible for the success of their company, and there are tools that can double or triple their productivity but they are often seen as too expensive," the Green Hills CEO said.

O'Dowd told of one company that had two programmers working for a month to find a bug with no success. An engineer from Green Hill's consulting group came in and found the bug in one day, thanks to use of a trace probe and other advanced tools.

"They spent $33,000 in two man-months of labor before they called us--and the tools we use only cost $10,000," O'Dowd said. "Our guy didn’t even know their code," he said.

O'Dowd described the latest tools as the equivalent of crime scene investigators having cameras running in a room where a murder is committed. "We can rewind back to a frame where we effectively get a picture of the murderer' drivers license," he said.

Whether it's from tools or services, Green Hills is expanding. The company announced it has reaped more than a billion in total revenue to date.

To keep the expansion going, Green Hills announced a new Integrity Security Service division. It will sell a FIPS-complaint security toolkit available for Linux, Windows and VxWorks on ARM, Intel, Power, MIPs and others processors. The toolkit is available now and will be free to existing Integrity OS licensees at no additional cost for a 12-month period.

Separately, Green Hills announced an upgrade of its Platform for Secure Networking, a package that consists of an embedded operating system, secure virtualization, development tools and middleware. The upgrade includes a new multicore communications API, optimizations for packet processing, support for native and virtualized third party Linux operating systems and optimizations for Freescale’s QorIQ processors.

In addition, Green Hills and Freescale signed a multi-year agreement to co-develop and sell single and multicore operating systems, secure virtualization, and tools for Freescale’s QorIQ and PowerQUICC processors.