John Hartley, UltraSoC’s new VP of Global Sales, looks at opportunities for 2019, new customer Seagate, and the Embedded World exhibition and conference
Having joined the UltraSoC team late in 2018, I’m excited to see the developments happening in the industry and the significant opportunities ahead for the company in 2019.
As a ‘new boy’ coming in with fresh eyes, it is clear to me that UltraSoC is bringing something special to the table: benefits that are well established and very tangible for UltraSoC’s existing and impressive customer and partner list. The cost savings, as succinctly expressed recently by Rich Wawrzyniak, Principal Analyst for ASIC & SoC at Semico Research Corp: “…Tools that can view the SoC as a whole…can have significant impact on engineering productivity and, in turn, on time-to-market and engineering cost.”
So it was no surprise to me that the embedded engineering teams we talk to really ‘get it’: by that, I mean that they understand the value and cost benefits of UltraSoC’s embedded intelligent analytics and monitoring, within the scope of the SoC design, at least.
But it’s a little more surprising to discover how readily systems designers, the wider industry and higher-level engineering teams across our growing customer base are aware of the bigger picture and know the value of engaging with us. These are forward-looking systems- and product-development teams, particularly in high-reliability and critical applications such as storage, automotive and at-scale / high-performance computing.
Don’t get me wrong, there is still some way to go in terms of explaining the benefits we bring.
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But most of our customers (as well as our technology partners and our customers’ customers) have already realized that embedded analytics offers them distinct competitive advantages in terms of development costs and time-to-revenue. They have also realized that UltraSoC technology simplifies their own efforts to ensure compliance to critical safety standards such as the ISO26262 standard for automotive safety.
The same is true in the competitive world of storage, where the value of embedded intelligence and monitoring capabilities are being realized: Seagate has just licensed UltraSoC’s embedded analytics for use in its SSD storage controllers. Seagate “selected UltraSoC’s monitoring and analytics to assist with system optimization and to provide insights to refine performance and ensure that real world performance continually matches or exceeds expectations of the designer”. We’re incredibly proud to have Seagate added to our customer list and what a great start to 2019!
Immediately after joining UltraSoC in December, I was in San Jose, California, attending the RISC-V Summit. I knew that UltraSoC had significant involvement and had long-since had an essential role in the ecosystem’s development. But I was impressed at just how much support there was for the open architecture across the systems and device industries; not only from the software and SoC developer community. Really encouraging signs and exciting to be so closely involved with customers developing such a wide range of applications using RISC-V, even alongside existing processor architectures, which is exactly where UltraSoC technology really comes into its own, by ensuring smooth development of heterogeneous architectures; a term I’m already accustomed to hearing from our customer base.
I’m interested to see similar signs of engagement with RISC-V in Europe when we get to Embedded World in Nürnberg from 26-28 February 2019. We will be exhibiting at the event as usual, as part of the RISC-V Foundation booth 3A-536. I look forward to meeting some of you there.
If you’re attending the show and would like to book an appointment to find out more about UltraSoC and how we can help your product development, please email jo.windel@ultrasoc.com.