Green Hills Software announces end of embedded industry recession

Green Hills Software's Q4 2009 sales increased by nearly 40% over the prior quarter. “The market for embedded software has rebounded strongly from its slumber between Q3 2008 and Q3 2009,” commented Dan O’Dowd, chief executive officer, Green Hills Software. “Many of our customers and partners share this observation based on their own improved business prospects. There is no doubt that the embedded recession is over.”

Wind River’s Exit Strategy

Q4 2009 was the first full quarter in which Green Hills became the independent embedded software solutions market leader following Wind River’s absorption by Intel Corporation. Industry expert Jack Ganssle opined in June, “I find it inconceivable that Intel would want to support other vendors' chips, so suspect that over time VxWorks support will be pruned to just the x86.” (URL: http://embedded.com/columns/technicalinsights/217702204). Similar sentiment abounds throughout the industry. O’Dowd says, “Customers require support for heterogeneous processors across classes and generations of designs, and developers value our ability to support their hardware choices with an open and consistent software ecosystem. With the termination of its independence, Wind River has lost credibility as a viable supplier on non-Intel architectures.”

Continued Technology Leadership

Driving sales for 2009 were significant design wins for Green Hills Software's INTEGRITY® RTOS and related services and solutions, including virtualization and networking software. 2009 was also the first year following Green Hills Software’s unprecedented achievement: the world’s first Common Criteria EAL6+ software security certification, for the INTEGRITY-178B RTOS. Only an EAL6+ High Robustness operating system is certified to protect classified information and other high value resources at risk of attack from hostile and well-funded attackers. The highest security standard to which any other operating system is certified only protects against “inadvertent or casual attempts to breach the system security.”

Also contributing to Green Hills Software’s financial results is the company’s strong entrance into the enterprise market through its subsidiary INTEGRITY Global Security (IGS), which recently signed a global alliance with Dell to sell and support INTEGRITY-178B in government enterprises. Dell will offer government customers a secure, simplified desktop consolidation solution leveraging the INTEGRITY separation kernel technology. Michael Liacko, executive vice president of IGS states, “This alliance provides INTEGRITY Global Security the ability to support customers of any size on a global basis. This solution will save customers money, simplify their operations and deliver the highest level of security.” View the Dell announcement at: http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/press-releases/2010-02-02-dell-alliance-integrity.aspx

Strong earnings are enabling Green Hills to extend its leadership through investments in R&D and its workforce. “Demand and interest in our INTEGRITY RTOS is at an all-time high, and we see extraordinary opportunities helping customers manage the complexity and challenge of building high reliability and top-performing electronic products in the least amount of time and lowest possible cost,” said David Chandler, senior vice president of sales for Green Hills. “We’re looking for good people to help us capitalize on the economic recovery and emerging applications in networking, mobile, medical, industrial, automotive, smart grid, enterprise IT security, and other markets that benefit from our technology, customer service, and corporate stability.”