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Siemens drops its IPC OS for a commercial product
Published:  22 December, 2014

After using an in-house-developed operating system in its industrial PCs for many years, Siemens has moved to the VxWorks real-time operating system (RTOS), developed by Intel subsidiary, Wind River.

Siemens’ Digital Factory division needed an RTOS to execute factory-floor tasks that need determinism, fast response times, and safety. It concluded it could speed up development and cut its costs by changing to a proven commercial RTOS, so chose VxWorks to replace its own operating system.

“Using VxWorks versus building and maintaining our own operating system has enabled us to accelerate our time-to-market by four months, cut our engineering costs by 50%, and improve the overall productivity of our engineering team,” explains Siemens’ Simatic IPC product manager, Anton Sauter.

According to a recent report from the market analyst, VDC Research, Wind River now accounts for almost 40% of global RTOS revenues, and more than half of global revenues for embedded Linux systems and related services. In both cases, its share of the market is more than twice that of its closest competitor.