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Adobe rides the wind Adobe drops own OS to ride Wind River's VxWorks By Terry Costlow, EE Times Alameda, Calif. -- In a move that is expected to make it easier to design printers and the products that work with them, Adobe Systems Inc. is dropping its proprietary real-time operating system (RTOS) and turning to the VxWorks operating system of Wind River Systems Inc. Printers and other imaging products based on Adobe's PostScript document-creation language will now run VxWorks, and developers will use Wind River's Tornado tools environment. "We were [currently] using a customized product based on C Exec," said Stephen Walsh, director of marketing at Adobe's Enterprise Systems group (San Jose, Calif.). "But as we move forward, the printing systems we're building are getting more complex, with more real-time requirements. The old RTOS didn't have the structure to deal with preemptive multitasking, [and] it did not have robust-enough tools for us and our customers to build over 500 products per year." Those products are mainly printers connected to networks or otherwise used as departmental printers. The RTOS connects the printer to these networks and handles commands coming from a variety of users. By dropping its proprietary operating system, Adobe will be able to focus on its strength in "imaging, document printing in particular," said David Larrimore, marketing vice president at Wind River. Adobe picked Wind River for reasons beyond VxWorks and its Tornado tool sets. It is looking to gain access to a broader range of companies. "We want to focus on two areas: imaging and integrating solutions from third parties with core competencies outside of ours," Walsh said. "Wind River offers not just tools, but they also have a comprehensive set of third-party partners, with a number who do drivers and other network technologies that we need." Large printers increasingly use real-time software to juggle multiple tasks. Over the past several years, a number of leading printer manufacturers have converted from proprietary operating systems and have adopted commercial RTOS. Among the printers that currently use VxWorks are those of Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, Canon and Tektronix. Though Wind River already has a strong presence in the office-automation market, it sees a number of benefits from the linkup with Adobe. "Every time Adobe ships a product to the companies that used to take whatever operating software they shipped, we gain," Larrimore said. "Adobe is also looking at the broader imaging market; they feel that multimedia applications will be a key growth area. There are a number of areas there where each of us can grow." One of those areas involves digital cameras and the Internet. Larrimore said the companies are looking to merge those technologies to make it possible for someone to download images from a digital camera over the Internet and print them on a remote set-top box's printer. (Next article.)
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