Wind River Opens IoT Marketplace for VxWorks OS

Wind River is creating an online app store for solutions that are based on the company’s VxWorks operating system for the Internet of things.

The Wind River Marketplace, announced June 16, will offer software products that the company has tested and validated for interoperability with VxWorks, a real-time OS that had spent most of its life running in embedded systems and now targets the fast-growing Internet of things (IoT).

Wind River, a subsidiary of giant chip maker Intel, is essentially using the same strategy that Apple and Google have applied so well in driving the development of mobile apps based on their respective iOS and Android operating systems, and one that some vendors—such as Hewlett-Packard and Ciena—are looking to leverage in the software-defined networking (SDN) and network-functions virtualization (NFV) spaces.

Customers of the Wind River Marketplace will be offered VxWorks-compliant software solutions in such areas as security, safety, storage, connectivity and development tools, according to company officials. There will be options for customers to test software before buying it and easy evaluation and installation of the applications.

For partners, the online store gives them a central place for selling their products, according to Wind River officials. The third-party vendors that initially will be selling products include Core Avionics and Industrial (OpenGL drivers and certification artifacts), LDRA (software verification tools) and McObject (database management).

“Marketplace creates a robust ecosystem offering for our customers, and provides our partners with a unique opportunity to showcase their products and distribute evaluation versions to our vast customer base,” Dinyar Dastoor, vice president and general manager of operating system platforms at Wind River, said in a statement.

Officials with both Wind River and parent company Intel view the IoT as a huge growth opportunity—as do most other tech vendors. Cisco Systems officials expect the number of connected devices globally to grow from 25 billion in 2014 to more than 50 billion by 2020. IDC analysts are predicting that the IoT market will grow 19 percent this year over 2014 in everything from digital signage and retail to connected vehicles and manufacturing.