Rational Software Corp this week announced a joint technology and marketing alliance with real-time embedded systems vendor Wind River Systems Inc whereby the two companies will work together to integrate their technologies to make it easier for developers to write applications for embedded systems. Under the partnership, Rational said it has developed a new version of its Rose visual modeling development tool, called Rose RealTime, and integrated it with Wind River’s real time operating system and development environment, Tornado. Steve Rabuchin, director of marketing for Rational said that the standard version of Rose couldn’t handle the complexity of real time systems – distributed development, time critical aspects and so on – so the company took the original software and worked with ObjecTime Ltd, in which Rational holds a 19.9% stake, to add a series of enhancements. Full application code generation enables the Rose RealTime to automatically generate the software code whereas the older version requires it to be programmed by hand. Visual debugging allows developers to run the software on the host environment and check for bugs before integrating it on the real time OS. Rabuchin said Rational and Wind River had worked closely together at the engineering level, unlike other partnerships where Rational just releases its APIs for general use. This isn’t just a case of throwing APIs over the wall and hoping they do it right, he explained, our engineers are sitting together in the same room working on tight integration. This isn’t our usual kind of alliance. Rabuchin added that Rational chose to partner with Wind River because it had the market lead in real time OS and there was a clear need for two vendors to get together to simplify the tool chain required to develop embedded software applications. Customers will still need to buy the two products separately, he said, but now Rational’s Rose RealTime will come complete with the necessary hooks required to plug straight into the Tornado development environment. The product will be available within the next sixty days and will be marketed at the telecoms, datacoms, military and aerospace markets, Rabuchin said. The two companies will jointly sell and market the product and Rabuchin said there would likely be other joint announcements in time. Both companies view this as an ongoing partnership, he said, we certainly expect to work together on other integration projects in the future.
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