
Intel to Acquire Wind River Systems for Approximately $884 Million - muon
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20090604corp.htm?iid=pr1_releasepri_20090604r
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bengtan
About 6-7 years ago, Wind River was a big player in embedded software. And
then embedded linux came along and disrupted their market. Like most
incumbents, they moved to the new paradigm (ie. embedded linux) very slowly
and at one point, they were stuck in the uneviable position of maintaining
their proprietary OS and linux at the same time (ie. double development
costs). Back then, the outlook for them wasn't good in light of the trend of
embedded electronics manufacturers moving to linux.

Anyway, that was back then. It's been a while since I was in that industry, so
I don't know what the recent history is.

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joezydeco
That's pretty much correct. WindRiver was gaining a lot of ground recently in
the embedded linux area, especially doing baseports of the kernel to new
processors.

Considering a lot of those new processors are ARM-based and Intel would like
some embedded developer love for Atom, it looks like a purely strategic
decision.

Considering they were part of the Android open handset alliance (I believe
they helped with the first kernel on the G1), it'll be interesting to see what
happens with future development in that area. Most of the new Android handsets
are ARM cores (Google wrote an ARM-optimized libc especially for the system).

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gruseom
That's less than 3x revenue. Isn't that low?

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scorpioxy
Yeah. The annual revenue is almost 400 million, this seems like a low price to
pay.

I think the deal involved something else. Otherwise, I am not sure why would
anybody find this number attractive.

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ars
The stock was trading at 8, so it's not really that low to pay 11.50.

It's now trading at 11.75 for some reason that I do not understand (maybe
short sellers?)

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paulsb
I read this morning that Wind River make an embedded OS for ARM based
processors, which is used by many of Intel's competitors in the netbook
market. Looks like a strategic move from Intel.

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frig
What're the odds of intel trying to develop some x86 extensions (read: new
instructions + other hardware optimizations) that'd be better-suited to doing
hard-realtime (or at least "low latency") embedded work, and then making sure
at least VxWorks + Wind River's linux flavors worked with it?

Have there been any rumors to that effect?

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myth_drannon
They were headed that way for a while now, chapter 11 or being acquired. From
what I remember they were in deep trouble since the beginning of this year
(laying off people) ....

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SwellJoe
Wow. Wind River is way bigger than I ever realized.

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spatulon
One story I heard was that, at the height of the dotcom boom, Wind River were
receiving $1 in OS royalties for every HP printer sold. They do a lot of other
business, but that alone would make any company very rich.

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joezydeco
VxWorks had a reputation of being extremely expensive. Long time back we asked
for a quote to use Vx in a casino gaming system. They asked what our annual
revenue was before giving us a quote. We decided at that moment to write our
own RTOS.

I wonder if things like that eventually came back to haunt them as the OS
world went open source.

