Wind River opens Israel R&D center

An R&D center has been opened in Ra'anana, Israel, by embedded OS provider Wind River Systems Inc. The center has six employees and is intended to expand to around 20 software developers by April 2009, according to Yuval Tsuk, Middle East regional director at Wind River. "The staff in Israel will focus on developing device management solutions, which are a big money generator for Wind River. The company preferred Israel over other locations because of the local talent in areas such as software testing," he said.

R&D focus
Wind River's software and development tools are used to optimize the functionality of devices such as digital imaging products, STBs, automobile braking and navigation systems; avionics control panels, factory automation equipment, Internet routers, mobile handsets, and coronary pacemakers. The team in Israel will develop test tools for applications that run on Wind River's proprietary real-time OS, VxWorks.

For the quarter ended Jan. 31, Wind River posted a loss of $2 million on revenue of $84.3 million, up 11 percent from $76.1 million a year earlier. For the full year the company posted a loss of $2.4 million on revenue of $328.6 million, up 15 percent from $285.3 million. Billionaire investor George Soros holds a 6.67 percent stake in Wind River.

- Amir Ben-Artzi
EE Times Europe