Wind River: the Other OS - Company Business and Marketing

When the cable industry thinks about operating systems, the first names that come to mind are usually Microsoft CE or perhaps Sun Microsystems Java products.

But when digital interactive set-tops get deployed over the next few years, it just may be that the VxWorks operating system from Wind River Systems will give Windows CE a run for its money.

"We make VxWorks and have deployed millions of units around the world," says Jason Coogan, market development manager for Internet appliances at Wind River, which has been a sleeper company in cable up until the past year.

Wind River OS systems help run cell phones, NASA space vehicles, digital cameras and the electronics in General Motors cars. VxWorks also is the core OS in the Liberate Technologies platform, and Wind River's pending acquisition of Integrated Systems Inc., another smaller OS provider, will mean Wind River product products will be in the Philips set-tops shipped to DirecTV.

"We are one step removed from the cable companies," Coogan said, as Wind River works with value added resellers. But the company also feels it's important to inform cable operators that VxWorks will be behind many of the products they buy.

Last year, Teralogic Corp., which uses VxWorks for its HDTV products, began working with CableLabs on various standards issues, Coogan said. Teralogic recommended Wind River's testing suite software for CableLabs POD standards work. "The default POD testing module is based around VxWorks," Coogan said.

But Wind River laid the groundwork to enter the cable business years ago when it first hooked up with Liberate when the latter was a stepchild in the Oracle Corp. empire.

"Oracle had the backend software and was building middleware," Coogan said. "There was the promise of interactive TV on the horizon. You still needed the underlying functionality and we said `You could outsource all that to us.'"

Wind River began working with Liberate more than four years ago, long before AOL or Cox or Comcast invested in the Oracle spinoff. Now Wind River is sitting pretty, with the potential of Cox and Comcast to join AOL TV and Cable & Wireless as platform providers using VxWorks. The AOL merger with Time Warner could add another big customer to Wind River's stable.

The company generates revenue from royalties for every device shipped with its operating system. Wind River also licensed Personal Java from Sun Microsystems, so content providers can use the Java toolset that will integrate into Liberate's and Wind River's software.

"Sun puts out a lot of blueprints," is Coogan's analogy on Personal Java. "We build the house."

There is no doubt that Liberate and Wind River compete against Microsoft in this space.

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