Be's entry and the integrated product plan Wind River is readying for the Embedded Systems Conference in Chicago later this month will heat up a systems-software battle that involves a number of in-house and third-party operating systems, all vying to power a new class of Web crawlers. Target products include everything from PDAs and smart phones to set-top boxes and home audio servers that download music from the Internet.

Indeed, it appears that Wind River's bid last year to acquire Integrated Systems Inc. was also a bid to play in the consumer market, terra incognita for the real-time operating-system powerhouse. Shareholder meetings for both companies are scheduled for Feb. 15, and the deal is expected to close then.

"Fundamentally, [the Net-centric market] is what's behind the acquisition of ISI, because I can tell you, you can't be a little pipsqueak and play in that space," said Curt Schacker, vice president of marketing for Wind River. Schacker said his company is "in the throes of planning" a unified product strategy for the Internet, and will make an announcement at an ESC press conference Feb. 29.

Native TCP/IP

The new platform from Be (Menlo Park, Calif.), dubbed BeIA, is aimed squarely at Internet appliances. Those devices seemed more appropriate than PDAs or smart phones, said Lamar Potts, Be's vice president of marketing, in part because the Be operating system runs TCP/IP natively. That gives it a speed advantage over other OSes that place the TCP/IP stack atop a proprietary environment, Potts said.

"We're in a really nice position," Potts said. He called BeIA "a modern operating system that started from a very small kernel that's modular. The ability to scale is just inherent in the operating system."

Besides TCP/IP support, BeIA comes equipped with two other features that are becoming must-haves in RTOSes for consumer electronics products: Java and a Web browser. BeIA uses a Java Virtual Machine from Sun Microsystems Inc. (Palo Alto, Calif.) and a browser developed by Opera Software A/S (Oslo, Norway).

Beginning this week, Be will be touting multiple design wins for BeIA. In every case, the end product is an Internet appliance designed to draw content from the Web without much programming from the user, Potts said.

For Wind River (Alameda, Calif.), the Internet strategy represents a major shift on two fronts. It will mark the company's entry into consumer markets, but those markets also will consist of programmable devices rather than the fixed-function machines that traditionally use its VxWorks RTOS.

Wind River's lack of consumer presence might not be a handicap, the company believes. "There's no obvious winning supplier for that space, and the reason is, it's something brand new," Schacker said. "We at least feel we understand what the success criteria are going to be."

In some ways, the flowering of OSes aimed at the Internet appliance market testifies to the gravitational pull of Linux, which proved that a new operating system could attract users in a software universe dominated by Microsoft. "Linux helped us in many ways, because it said an alternative operating system could make a go," Potts said.

Linux as example

Yet Linux is serving more as example than model. Potts said that many companies have tried tinkering with Linux for Net gear, with lackluster results. One problem, he said, is the necessity of developing Linux support for all the plug-ins and applications usually associated with a Web-access device. "When we get candid feedback from the engineers in the field that we work with, they just can't pull that off," he said.

Instead, what is emerging is a market full of alternatives in which Windows CE appears to be lagging, by most accounts.

In Schacker's view, Microsoft will need an attitude adjustment if it wants to succeed in embedded markets. "The business approach is still screwed up," he said. "They don't understand the space, and they don't have a value proposition that OEMs are comfortable with."

In PCs, Microsoft has been the one to "control the eyeballs of the user," Schacker said. But with Net appliances, the OEM or service provider wants that control.

"Whoever controls the customer's experience with the client device is in the best position to drive other customer relationships," Schacker said. "If you're watching TV, and you see it as a Sony TV, then Sony has the best chance to be your ISP [for TV-based Internet services]. If you see it as a Microsoft TV, then Microsoft has that pole position." That puts Microsoft in the position of "encroaching on potential customers' businesses," Schacker said. He termed VxWorks, by contrast, invisible to users and thus no threat to OEMs.

Schacker also thinks the traditional embedded-software vendors will be operating at a handicap in the Internet appliance market, because most of them provide tools or OSes or stacks, but not all three. "It's going to be harder to be successful if all you do is provide one part of a solution," he said.

Though Japanese consumer giants such as Sony, Matsushita and Hitachi have all licensed Windows CE, they claim they have no intention of applying it across product categories. Many of them are pursuing multiple-RTOS strategies, including fielding homegrown operating systems for the post-PC era or seeking partnerships with third-party RTOS companies.

Sony Corp. has its internally developed distributed-computing OS, called Aperios, while Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. has been working on the Pie OS, a derivative of the iTRON operating system originally developed with funding by the Japanese government. Victor Co. of Japan has been working with Tao Group, an RTOS and run-time engine company based in Reading, England, since 1995.

Other RTOS vendors, such as QNX Software Systems Ltd. (Kanata, Ontario) in particular, are also said to be making inroads among Asian consumer electronics manufacturers.

Meanwhile, Hitachi Ltd. will display what Be's Potts called an "entertainment-type device" built around BeIA at the Demo 2000 conference this week in Indian Wells, Calif. Intel Corp. will show a similar gadget there, said Potts, describing both as looking more like stereo-system components than like desktop computers.

Wireless devices are in the works as well, as in Qubit Technology's Web-access tablet. According to Potts, Qubit (Denver) had tried building a Linux-based tablet but found the task too difficult.

Be, whose OS efforts started in the desktop and workstation realms, claims to have also secured a design win from Compaq Computer Corp. Potts said Be is now courting Taiwanese manufacturers, who often supply the likes of Compaq or Dell with hardware.

BeIA requires 32 Mbytes of RAM and at least 8 Mbytes of additional storage. The architecture supports Universal Serial Bus and IEEE-1394 interfaces. Among its plug-ins are Macromedia Flash and RealNetworks' RealSystem G2.

Name recognition

For its part, Wind River is attempting to make itself more visible to OEMs. To that end, the company this year will embark on a marketing campaign to promote the VxWorks brand name, hoping to become a prime alternative to OEMs who reject WinCE. "We want to provide adequate technology and be there with the appropriate business model so they have some place to turn to," Schacker said.

Wind River plans to sell its Tornado development environment directly to consumer OEMs, but the company also will work on selling indirectly through value-added resellers (VARs). For example, the software from Liberate Technologies Inc. being sold into the set-top market is based on VxWorks, with special middleware added. Both Liberate and Wind River get royalties on the products produced.

Another VAR example is the company's bundling deal with Lucent Technologies Inc., under which Lucent will include VxWorks with its single-chip Internet Protocol telephone.

Wind River said it also will do custom work, taking a page from the Cadence Design Systems book by offering direct aid to engineers in developing OEMs' products. Those services "may be the fastest-growing part of our business right now, because we're starting from a small base," Schacker said. "We can't keep up with the demand."

Short cycles

Wind River is banking on what it perceives as an increased need for outsourcing in the emerging consumer product categories. The software requirements will be more complex than they are now, said Schacker, with Internet connectivity a requirement for an increasing number of devices. At the same time, product cycles will be characteristically short. "It's tremendously more complex than the world that we're dealing with," Schacker said.

Thus, consumer OEMs will need to outsource more pieces of product development, and Wind River is hoping to cash in on the software side of that process.