Northern Telecom Ltd has signed a preferred supplier licensing agreement with Wind River Systems Inc that will enable its product developers to use Wind River’s development tools at any of its sites worldwide. The deal covers WindRiver’s VxWorks real time operating system, the Tornado software development environment and the WindPower tools series. Nortel has previously used Wind River tools to develop real-time applications for use in products such as its web phone. Nortel currently uses VxWorks in its Magellan Passport ATM Asynchronous Transfer Mode switch and a range of its wireless products, and says the deal will help cut costs and time to market for new products and enable the company to keep track of what would otherwise be complex licensing arrangements for multiple sites. The move looks like bad news for rivals such as Integrated Systems Inc with its pSOS offering (CI No 3,120) which has previously worked on projects with Nortel. A spokesperson for Wind River says although it does not expect Nortel to abandon projects using rival tools immediately it expects to become the dominant religion at Nortel and envisages that all other religions will eventually wither and die. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
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