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Compared to alternatives such as implementing proprietary development platforms, or pursuing an assemble-your-own strategy based on open source Linux, MontaVista offers a wide range of benefits in terms of reducing costs, reducing time-to-market requirements, and minimizing risk.
MontaVista Linux reduces:
- Production cost - reduces the memory footprint required for applications, enables more cost-effective hardware
- Software development cost - saves on building development platforms from scratch
- Maintenance costs - saves time finding and fixing bugs and staying current with open source
MontaVista Linux improves:
- Time to market - allows developers to spend time building features, not the platform
- Development risk - lowers development risk with a stable, pre-tested code base
- Legal risk - reduces legal risk by providing indemnification from open source licensing issues
Reducing Costs
Choosing MontaVista Linux as their development platform can help companies reduce costs in a number of areas:
Production (BOM) Cost- Reduce the footprint required for the OS on the device. With revision 5, MontaVista reduced the size of the MontaVista Linux footprint by 75%. Requiring only 3MB flash memory, MontaVista 5 requires significantly less memory than previous versions.
- Select the most cost-effective BOM - Leveraging the more than 130 partners in its ecosystem, MontaVista Linux works with more than 70 processors and 230 boards. A wider range of choice means developers can choose the most cost-effective set of components for their individual application.
- Reduce component requirements to support your application - The optimization tools available with MontaVista Linux enable applications with a smaller footprint, better memory utilization, and better performance, meaning development teams can get the same application performance using more cost-effective components.
Development Cost
- Don't build from scratch - Using MontaVista Vista Linux as a development platform saves companies the development cost and effort associated with building a development platform from scratch. Depending on the application, industry, and project size, this could easily save many calendar months and thousands of developer hours of effort.
- Save on development component integration - Each of MontaVista's offerings are pre-integrated, tested development platforms. Adopting MontaVista Linux as a development platform saves developers the time and effort required to select, integrate, and validate open source components for their development platform.
- Reduce hardware integration and testing time - Hardware integration and testing is another time consuming and expensive exercise. In a carrier environment, for some applications, it can take 6 months to a year or more just to bring up a board. In contrast, with MontaVista's pre-tested and certified board support, developers can select a board and be ready to go in a matter of days.
Maintenance Cost
- Save time finding and fixing bugs - MontaVista's state-of-the-art development platforms provide cutting edge functionality that can save developers a significant amount of time finding and fixing bugs. For example, the Platform Image Builder, available with the PDK 5.0 is the only developer tool on the market today that performs a pre-compile assessment and alerts users of any applications that need to be added, saving developers the wasteful steps of having to perform a compile just to discover that key components are missing.
- Don't spend developers' time staying current with open source - MontaVista developers are constantly monitoring the open source community and evaluating the most valuable components to bring into its development platform. For example, MontaVista offers applications to cross-compile to different architectures, saving development teams the 2-3 months of effort it could otherwise take to develop cross-compile capabilities on their own.
- Don't maintain open source forks - Experienced open source development teams can appreciate the amount of effort required to maintain their technology base when their development platform forks with the state-of-the-art in the open source community. MontaVista's development team maintains a stable, consistent code base, while at the same time constantly monitoring the open source community and bringing the most valuable innovations into future revisions of MontaVista code.
Reducing Time-to-Market
Developing applications on MontaVista can reduce time to market in a variety of ways:
- Spend time building features, not the platform - Depending on the complexity of the environment, it can take many months to build an "assemble-your-own" development platform. With MontaVista, development teams can be up and running in a matter of days or weeks, enabling them to focus on creating value-added applications and not the development platform.
- Reduce time spent sourcing, certifying hardware - With over 130 hardware partners in the MontaVista ecosystem, MontaVista offers support for over 70 processors and 230 boards - the widest range of boards, CPUs, memories, and other hardware supported by any Linux provider.
- Address technical issues fast with service and support - With its end-to-end professional services with its end-to-end professional services and support offerings, MontaVista is ready to assist its customers with practically any type of development issue.
- Reduce development time with state-of-the-art developer tools - MontaVista offers best-of-breed developer tools that can greatly speed application development timelines. The ADK radically simplifies the selection/configuration of best of breed Linux tools and provides interactive and intuitive Eclipse-based interfaces to identify the source of any coding problem. The PDK enables development teams to more quickly create file systems and perform system level analysis, also with highly interactive and intuitive Eclipse-based interfaces.
Reducing Risk
Using the MontaVista development environment can reduce risk in several areas:
- Reduce development risk - With MontaVista, development teams begin with a stable, tested, pre-integrated platform. This reduces development risks which can be found with an assemble-your-own environment.
- Quickly resolve technical issues - MontaVista's professional services and technical support teams have a track record of successfully helping customers pinpoint and resolve technical issues in their applications, ensuring they meet their development goals and timelines.
- Conform to the "Linux Way" - Unlike other vendors, all MontaVista products consist entirely of native Linux technology, not ported non-Linux tools. MontaVista only develops and provides best-of-breed Linux tools.
- Reduce legal risk - MontaVista indemnifies all active subscribers. This means that in the case of a GPL dispute where MontaVista is at fault, then MontaVista and not the MontaVista licensee, will bear the legal and financial burden.
- Reduce security risk - MontaVista monitors security mailings and discussion lists and makes any necessary patches quickly available to its customer base.
