The Challenge: Balancing Time to Market with Development Platform Control

In today's competitive environment, development teams are pressured to build intelligent devices with leading-edge features and functionality, and at the same time get them to market quickly and cost-effectively. Against this backdrop, the choice of operating and development platform for these devices is more critical than ever.

One approach traditionally favored by many vendors has been to build their own development platform, often from an open source codebase such as Linux. While this has the advantage of giving the team complete control over the platform, this control comes at a cost - time to market. Designing, creating, and maintaining a development platform can take months or years, and demands a significant commitment of developer resources - resources that could be put to use developing end-user products.

Another approach is to adopt a proprietary development platform. These platforms promise to solve the time to market issue, since they can be implemented and used immediately; however, they come at the cost of lack of control. If developers require new functionality in the platform the development team must negotiate with the proprietary platform vendor, and even if the vendor does agree to the changes, the new functionality won't be available until the next platform release.

The MontaVista Solution

MontaVista Linux delivers the time-to-market advantages of a proprietary platform along with the control that would be expected from open source Linux. As a pre-tested, integrated platform, MontaVista Linux can be installed quickly and developers can be up and running right away. But as a Linux platform, development teams have complete control, with the ability to customize the platform using home-grown code, or modules from the vast libraries available to the Linux community.

With offerings that extend beyond the commercial OS into development tools, professional services and support, a best in class test environment, and the world's broadest hardware support, MontaVista is the leading center of intellectual property for intelligent device Linux. With customers including leading mobile device manufacturers, carriers, and consumer electronics companies around the world, MontaVista currently boasts over 40 million devices running on MontaVista Linux around the world today, establishing MontaVista as by far the leader in Linux for intelligent devices.

MontaVista offers open source platforms that allow designers to innovate across a wide range of intelligent devices. With offerings geared toward embedded devices, consumer electronics devices, and mobile devices, as well as carrier-grade platforms conforming to the high availability requirements of the telecommunications industry, MontaVista has a broad range of offerings designed to suit nearly every development need.

MontaVista also has the broadest set of open-sourced development platform offerings available. By combining its expertise in embedded technologies and Linux with complementary software from third-party partners, MontaVista supports the broadest spectrum of CPU architectures, both board and system-level platforms, of any Linux provider.

Read more about how MontaVista solutions can help reduce costs, improve time to market, and reduce development and other risks.

Offerings Tailored to Industry Needs

Different industries have different requirements, from communications infrastructure with its requirements for high availability and uptime, to mobile phones and consumer devices, in which minimizing the operating system footprint on the device is of paramount concern. MontaVista appreciates these distinctions, and has developed a range of Linux offerings, each targeted to the needs of different industries.