Intel to Acquire Wind River Systems for Approximately $884 Million | Hacker News Reader

Intel to Acquire Wind River Systems for Approximately $884 Million

intel.com

21 pointsmuon11 comments

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.

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).

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

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.

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?)

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.

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?

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) ....

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

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.

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.

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