A new VDC Research report entitled The Global Market for IoT & Embedded Operating Systems 2017 revealed the harsh competitive environment facing the IoT and embedded operating system (OS) market in 2018 and beyond.
Global unit shipments of IoT and embedded OSs, including free or non-commercial OSs, will grow to reach 11.1 billion units by 2021, driven primarily by ECU-targeted RTOS shipments in the automotive market, and free Linux installs on higher-resource systems.
After accounting for systems with no OS, a bare-metal OS, or an in-house developed OS, the total yearly units shipped will grow beyond 17 billion units in 2021.
VDC’s findings indicate that unit growth will be driven primarily by free and low-cost operating systems such as Amazon FreeRTOS, Express Logic ThreadX, and Mentor Graphics Nucleus on constrained devices, along with free, open source Linux distributions for resource-rich embedded systems.
By taking stewardship of the popular FreeRTOS operating system, Amazon continues its tradition of moving aggressively into mature, low-margin markets, including IoT and microcontroller market.
“By offering a free, robust OS for the billions of MCUs (microcontroller units) that ship yearly, AWS is lowering the barrier to entry substantially for low-level embedded developers to take advantage of cloud storage, sync, analytics and control,” said Roy Murdock, IoT & embedded technology analyst at VDC Research.
“AWS will now control a substantial portion of RTOS/MCU-level developer attention and mindshare, assets which resource-rich engineering companies will need to control in order to ensure long term success,” explained Murdock.
Engineers expect to move away from traditional commercial OSs slowly, with commercially or consortia obtained open source also expected to see a slight uptick in adoption but not as fast as free, open source OSs.
“Commercial vendors are slowly being squeezed by free offerings from both the hardware and software side, and will now need to contend with an Amazon-funded FreeRTOS,” Murdock added.
In the short term vendors with strong footholds in safety-critical verticals will be somewhat sheltered from the migration. But Murdock believes the trend is towards free and open source.