Wind River unveils cloud suite to accelerate IoT technologies

BENGALURU: Wind River, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Intel Corporation that delivers software for the Internet of Things, has significantly expanded its product portfolio with the introduction of a comprehensive cloud suite, Wind River Helix Cloud, and free cloud-connected multi-architecture operating systems, Wind River Rocket and Wind River Pulsar Linux. With these new products, Wind River not only grows its presence in the cloud, but further extends its well-established OS footprint at the edge beyond devices and gateways, to microcontrollers (MCUs).

“These key additions to our edge-to-cloud portfolio provide our customers and the developer community with a compelling and differentiated set of products that scale from experimentation to development to full commercial deployment,” said Barry Mainz, President of Wind River. “From makers to commercial developers, this new offering opens IoT application and device development to a wide range of individuals who want to participate in the IoT opportunity, and provides a foundational toolkit to greatly simplify and accelerate the development of IoT technologies across industries.”

Uniquely Edge to Cloud:

With Wind River Helix Cloud, Wind River delivers a family of software-as-a-service (SaaS) products providing anytime, anywhere access to development tools, virtual labs, and deployed devices. It simplifies and automates how developers build and manage their IoT technologies throughout their entire lifecycle—from design and testing to deployment and decommissioning.

Wind River Helix Cloud SaaS products now available include:

• Wind River Helix App Cloudis a cloud-based development environment for building IoT applications.
• Wind River Helix Lab Cloudis a cloud-based virtual hardware lab for simulating and testing IoT devices and complex systems.
• Wind River Helix Device Cloud is a cloud-based platform for managing deployed IoT devices and their data.

A critical component of simplifying edge-to-cloud development is having an OS that can support connectivity and communications between the device and the cloud. Based on Wind River commercially proven OS technology and expertise, the following free cloud-connected operating systems are now available:

• Wind River Rocket is a tiny-footprint commercial-grade quality real-time operating system that is directly connected to Wind River Helix Cloud. It offers multi-architecture support, and is designed for applications running on 32-bit MCUs such as those used in small-footprint sensor hubs, wearables, and devices comprising the IoT edge.

• Wind River Pulsar Linux is a small-footprint commercial-grade quality binary Linux OS based on the Wind River Linux distribution that is directly connected to Wind River Helix Cloud. It offers multi-architecture support, and is designed to run on applications scaling from 32-bit MCUs to 64-bit CPUs.

Wind River Rocket and Wind River Pulsar Linux are platform-independent, and in addition to support for Intel and ARM architectures, will support a range of mainstream commercial boards. This will provide application portability across devices for customers and foster an open collaborative ecosystem.

Wind River Helix Cloud, Wind River Rocket, and Wind River Pulsar Linux are part of the Wind River Helix portfolio of products advancing IoT, from the secure and managed intelligent sensors and devices at the edge, through gateways, across the network, and up into the cloud.

IoT Ecosystem and Developer Enablement: To further enable a collaborative IoT ecosystem, Wind River is working closely with leading companies that share a common vision for IoT. Wind River ecosystem launch partners include: ADLINK, Advantech, Autodesk, Avnet, BeagleBoard.org, Cypress Semiconductor Corp, Datalight, Freescale, HCL Technologies, HPE, Kontron, NimbeLink, Microsoft, Oracle, Polarian, Predixion, PTC/Thingworx, Salesforce, Tata Consultancy Services, Texas Instruments, TQ Systems, UbiquiOS, Wibu Systems, and Xilinx.

The company has also formed the Wind River Helix Developer Program to support and advance the IoT developer community. The world-class program comprises a robust ecosystem of technology partners, including silicon, independent software vendor (ISV), original equipment manufacturer (OEM), original design manufacturer (ODM), system integrator, cloud, and operator partners.