This Easter Friday, I was surprised to see the message that Express Logic has been acquired by Microsoft. The announcements on the websites of both companies do not disclose too much information on how exactly things will continue to operate, but it seems that Microsoft has bought Express Logic because they want the software as an easy on-ramp for their cloud services.
ThreadX and the other products will serve as the operating system for small devices to access Azure, Microsoft’s cloud services. This is a bit like Amazon, acquiring FreeRTOS.
The goal for both of these large companies seems to be to make access to their cloud services easier for small devices, in order to make their own cloud services more popular.
Cloud services are already big money, and they continue to grow. Microsoft say they want to invest $5 billion into their Azure cloud:
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When editing or debugging source code, you have some help from the header. But as this header is in a standard format, mandated by the SEGGER coding standard, it is amenable to extraction by a tool. In fact, the headers were not designed to be extracted by machine, but because every piece of SEGGER source conforms to these rules, extraction by machine is made possible with appropriate tooling.
That’s what emDoc does: it extracts all the header material so that it can be placed into the manual. This means that the documentation is edited in one place, in the code, and the manual follows along for the ride. Because you don’t need to fire up FrameMaker to write documentation, there’s a much higher chance that the documentation is correct, and you are 100% sure that the documentation in the manual mirrors what’s in the source code! And it’s not seen as a chore, it’s just efficient, so adding the documentation as you go becomes a natural, flowing part of the software development process and can almost be pleasurable!
Other documentation tools do similar, such as Doxygen, but you tend to write the whole of the manual in your source code and your source code is a casualty as it becomes littered with “backslash markup.”
SEGGER’s solution is clean, tidy, beautiful, and…entirely efficient.
Marking up
Inserting function, strmicrosoft.com/iot/2018/04/04/microsoft-will-invest-5-billion-in-iot-heres-why/”>Microsoft will invest $5 billion in IoT. Here’s why.
Clearly, acquiring Express Logic is part of that strategy. And clearly, it will help to make it easier to use Azure, using the Express Logic software, especially on smaller devices (They claim that that can happen all the way down to devices with just 64kB flash, but that seems challenging.) The business model (will this be open source? Will the use to access Azure be free?) is not clear to me. What is clear is that while it will be easier to access the Microsoft cloud, it will be harder to access any other cloud, such as Amazon’s web services (AWS) with the same solution. Maybe even not possible or prohibited by the licensing. It seems unlikely that Microsoft spends a lot of money to help companies connect to their competitors cloud services. Or help them to connect to services hosted on servers they operate themselves, which for a lot of companies will make sense to do.
The fog should settle in a few month or so. There are more questions than answers:
- Will Express Logic software still be available for non-IoT devices?
- Will current Express Logic customers continue to get support and updates in the future?
- Will Express Logic as a company even continue to exist?
- Will it be possible for small companies to engage with the ubiquitous desktop operating system vendor in order to negotiate a licensing deal for middleware?
It seems unlikely that it will become any easier to use other (non-Microsoft) cloud services with ThreadX and NetX.
Conclusion
We will have to wait and see how this plays out, but it shows that there are advantages to working with an independent vendor (of which there are not that many left…) such as SEGGER.
SEGGER’s IoT software can talk to anybody’s cloud service, be it Google, Amazon, Microsoft or somebody else’s. And SEGGER is also there if a customer needs to run his own server and does not want to use Cloud infrastructure providers, be it for flexibility, security, data protection or simply cost reduction reasons.
So this acquisition makes SEGGER’s IoT solutions even more attractive.
For more information on SEGGER’s IoT offerings, visit
https://www.segger.com/products/security-iot/iot-solutions/
or contact us via email at info@segger.com