Virtutech Announces Initiative to Further Advance Standards for Virtualized Software Development

Industry Leader to Propose, Promote and Support Best Practices, Conventions and Standards for Disruptive New Industry

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- March 10, 2008 -- Virtutech, Inc., the leader in Virtualized Software Development (VSD), today announced an initiative to accelerate the creation of standards for the VSD industry and to drive mainstream acceptance of VSD throughout the electronic systems business. While continuing its long-standing involvement with Power.org at both the Technical Sub Committees and Marketing Programs level, Virtutech has also joined organizations in its domain—Eclipse.org, OSCI and Spirit Consortium—with the aim of fostering standards and best practices. Virtutech further announced collaboration with GreenSocs to promote Open Standards and community development. Virtutech intends to leverage its expertise with more than 1,000 successful users accumulated over the course of deploying its Simics platform since 2001 to propose, promote and support best practices, conventions and standards for VSD.

“Virtualized Software Development has the potential to make the same dramatic impact on software development that virtualization has already brought to the data center and business applications. However, the industry needs to stand up and define, promote and drive adoption of virtualization throughout the development community,” said Michel Genard, vice president of marketing at Virtutech. “Virtutech intends to be an agent of change and to actively precipitate the next big virtualization wave.”

VSD acceptance is constrained by solutions that are vertically integrated by vendors and offer little to no opportunity for horizontal integration among different solutions, which is the essence of mainstream usage of any technology. As a result, VSD has yet to become a pervasive industry practice. For this situation to change, the industry must sanction standards that promote interoperability among different tools and models throughout the complete electronic systems supply chain from semiconductor and IP providers to tools vendors and system integrators.

As an active participant in standards organizations, Virtutech will contribute its know-how and best practices that have proven to be successful for its customers in order to further the creation of industry standards. Virtutech has established the following industry goals for its initiative:

• Establishment of virtual platforms and simulation as the standard software development process for electronic systems,
• Definition of APIs (application programming interfaces) and ABIs (application binary interfaces) to support interoperability of models from multiple vendors,
• Creation of libraries and methodologies to support reuse across system development tasks,
• Adoption and extension of existing standards and best practices.

“Virtual Software Development standards and the subsequent mainstreaming of VSD among software developers can potentially have a tremendous impact on the semiconductor industry,” said John Barber, analyst at Gartner, Inc. “By providing parallel development of both embedded software and hardware, VSD can enable faster time-to-market and reduced development costs, while helping to improve end-product quality.”

“We are pleased to welcome Virtutech as a member of the Eclipse Foundation and welcome their expertise within the virtualized software development industry,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “We look forward to Virtutech's participation in the rapidly growing modeling ecosystem at Eclipse.”

“The industry has plenty of innovative products, but adoption of those products is hampered by a lack of standards. GreenSocs is pleased to see Virtutech take the initiative and help us all fix the problem,” said Mark Burton, founder of GreenSocs. “I would especially like to welcome Virtutech's involvement with GreenSocs in effort to build de-facto standards for specific interfaces and infrastructure for the benefits of the community.”

“OSCI is very pleased to have Virtutech as a new corporate member,” said Mike Meredith, OSCI president. “We welcome their ongoing commitment to advancing standards and look forward to their participation in fostering the worldwide OSCI community and increasing its vitality and productivity in the years to come.”

In addition to Virtutech becoming a corporate member of OSCI, the company’s Michel Genard has been named a member of the OSCI Board of Directors.

“Advances in simulation technology promise to fulfill the industry’s need for a fundamental new approach to software development that can optimize increasingly complex electronic system designs, meet ever-shorter development cycles and deliver time-to-market advantages,” said Kaveh Massoudian, program director, System Architecture and Design, IBM Systems & Technology Group and technical chair for Platforms Design at Power.org. “However, for customers to realize the true value of this technology, there needs to be interoperability and flexibility among various levels of abstraction and offerings from different vendors. Therefore, standardization becomes of utmost importance. Power.org, with help from members such as Virtutech, is leading the charge to integrate the various standards bodies’ efforts for the benefit of all customers and ecosystem partners along Power Architecture solutions.”

About Virtutech

Virtutech, Inc. delivers product development process improvement through virtualized software development. Virtutech’s Simics is the only commercial solution that delivers the four most important criteria for successful deployment of hardware virtualization in the electronics equipment development process: speed, scalability, model availability, and control. Simics allows for a revolutionary change in the product development process at a full system level rather than a component level. Simics customers report reduced time to market, better project risk management, and lower capital expenditure, product development cost and maintenance. They have also experienced increased quality and individual productivity. Virtutech serves the needs of the world’s leading OEMs in the high-performance computing, aerospace and defense, telecommunications, and networking industries. Their customers include Cisco, Ericsson, Honeywell, IBM, MontaVista, GE Avionics, and Wind River. Virtutech is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. For more information, visit www.virtutech.com.