Opening the lid on hardware advances

“Can’t Fail”, how one company is changing digital transformation forever

We’ve had the opportunity to meet Paul Miller, the Chief Technology Officer at Wind River. In a world increasingly driven by software innovation, Wind River is a company pioneering the technologies to accelerate digital transformation across the most important modern infrastructure and is advancing mission-critical intelligent systems at the edge with the highest standards for safety, security, performance, and reliability.

With nearly three decades of telecommunications and advanced technology leadership at both large companies and successful startups, Paul is dedicated to creating and implementing technology strategies that drive business success for customers.

Here’s a glimpse into our engaging conversation with this inspirational leader who shares insights on digital transformation, the new intelligent machine economy, and the software-defined era.

HOW DO YOU SEE YOUR COMPANY DIFFERENTIATING ITSELF FROM THE COMPETITION? WHAT MAKES IT STAND OUT?

Wind River is a leading provider of software for mission-critical intelligent systems at the edge, and our technology has been helping the world’s leading technology companies power billions of the safest, most secure devices in the world. In fact, our company mission is to enable our customers to solve the world’s most complex technology challenges and realize the digital future of the planet with software-defined missioncritical intelligent systems where security, safety, and reliability are paramount.

Wind River works with customers across a wide range of industries, such as aerospace and defense, automotive, medical, industrial,

and telecommunications, to accelerate their digital transformation journey. For more than 40 years, the company has been an industry innovator, playing key roles on the NASA Mars rovers, the world’s first successful 5G data session with Verizon, and working with Vodafone in building one of the largest Open RAN networks in the world.

Unique to the industry, we have introduced our Wind River Studio offering, which is a cloud-native platform for the development, deployment, operations, and servicing of mission-critical intelligent systems from edge to cloud. It enables dramatic improvements in productivity, agility, and time-to-market, with seamless technology integration that includes far edge cloud computing, data analytics, security, 5G, and AI/ML.

With Studio, we’re enabling the new intelligent machine economy together with our customers. Now that we have some perspective on the pandemic, what do you see as the major and potentially long-lasting impacts on the Computer Software industry? The pandemic has had an impact on the way companies work in terms of increasing the number of remote workers and how to successfully support software development in frequently globally dispersed teams.

Fortunately, modern tools are helping to bridge some of the gaps in this type of work. However, not being able to physically work together to solve particularly complex problems or architecture work still has an impact.

At the same time, across sectors, there is an increased cost due to the pandemic. Industries are looking at the effect on customers and whether they are willing to buy and deploy goods and software at a time when the process has become more difficult. When looking at the global supply chain, we also need to consider the impact of things like the availability of silicon chips, which ultimately support our software.

If customers have problems getting hardware systems, it can affect the adoption of software products. There is a complicated interplay of many factors: the changing nature of work, software development in a pandemic environment, and the global supply chain. On top of that, we have to look at the customer and see if they are willing or able to adopt new software and deploy it in the face of the pandemic. With all these elements, the current environment is complex.

This environment is also driving the need for the machine economy, where smart, connected, autonomous, and economically independent systems/machines