Motorola Inc has joined the growing crowd jumping into the NT embedded controls market. It has signed a deal with VenturCom Inc that will see VenturCom’s software ported to the PowerPC and Motorola adopt VenturCom’s VMEbus HAL Extender, due to beta in December. Motorola’s jealously eyeing the market for the PowerPC- based VME boards sold by its Tempe, Arizona Computer Group. As part of the deal it’s signed up as a VenturCom reseller, and will hawk VenturCom embedded controls development software to its VME bus board customers. Until now, the rush to NT-based embedded controls has been Intel-based, with VenturCom being the first in a growing group of companies entering the market. VenturCom chief executive officer Michael Dexter-Smith called the Motorola deal a watershed event for VenturCom, whose software lets users pick and choose just the bits of NT they need for an embedded operation, resulting in a kernel a fraction of the size of the full NT. Microsoft’s been co-operating with VenturCom, and indeed any embedded control player who wants NT. The only catch is that even though an end user may just use a fraction of NT he has to buy a license for the full operating system.
