Almeda, California and Eching/Nuremberg, Germany — Wind River and Kontron today announced a global, multi-year agreement under which Kontron will distribute Wind River’s industry-leading VxWorks and Wind River Linux operating systems. This agreement extends a decade-long collaboration, and is expected to extend the software and service offerings of Wind River and Kontron. The two companies will initially target the industrial, medical, military and aerospace, transportation, and networking market segments.
Kontron also joins the Wind River partner validation program, initially with its Kontron nanoETXexpress-SP module validated for use with VxWorks 6.7. By working together to validate Wind River’s embedded operating systems with leading partner software and hardware, Wind River and its partners are together providing a pre-validated solution stack to directly address integration costs, time-to-market, and long-term support.
“Our customers will benefit from the closer alignment with Wind River across all market segments and regions,” said Dirk Finstel, chief technology officer of Kontron. “This distribution agreement enables us to further reduce time-to-market requirements, and increase our value-added services by providing our customers a richer out-of-the-box experience with a compelling set of tools and operating system options.
In parallel, Kontron will continue to leverage its strategic relationship with Wind River to deliver tightly integrated solutions that help reduce our customers’ total cost of ownership. The inclusion of the Kontron nanoETXexpress-SP in the Wind River partner validation programme, including optimised VxWorks 6.7 platform evaluation in the box, is a good example.”
“The distribution agreement between Wind River and Kontron will allow both companies to more quickly respond to new design win opportunities,” noted Roger Williams, vice-president of strategic alliances at Wind River. “I am also pleased that Kontron’s nanoETXexpress-SP is the first embedded module to be listed with our Partner Validation Program. With both distribution and market-leading solutions in place, both companies are well positioned to capture next-generation design wins in a number of key vertical market segments.”
Under terms of the distribution agreement, Kontron will be able to resell VxWorks production licenses, and also agrees to work with Wind River to proliferate Wind River Linux for use by joint customers. Wind River will continue to provide hardware and software tools, development environments, source code and support contracts for joint customers.