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Cavium Networks to acquire MontaVista Software
Cavium Networks has a press release announcing that it has reached agreement to acquire embedded Linux vendor MontaVista Software. The deal is for $50 million in combined cash and stock.
"After the acquisition, MontaVista Software will run as a separate operating unit and will retain the MontaVista brand name. In addition, Cavium Networks will continue the MontaVista business model and support embedded Linux on multiple architectures from multiple processor vendors. MontaVista will maintain its own dedicated and focused engineering, sales and product management staff. MontaVista's customers and partners will see no change in customer facing field operations and the web-based support and product download sites will be maintained." (thanks to Sven-Thorsten Dietrich.)
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Cavium Networks to acquire MontaVista Software Posted Nov 11, 2009 12:52 UTC (Wed) by troglobit (subscriber, #39178) [Link]
Wow, that was completely unexpected. We had a meeting just last week with Cavium representatives where I questioned the level of Linux support for their new, very exciting, ECONA series of CPU:s.
After the meeting I was more confident they could deliver. But now I can even sell my manager on the idea! :-)
Cavium Networks to acquire MontaVista Software Posted Nov 11, 2009 18:47 UTC (Wed) by tbm (subscriber, #7049) [Link]
Out of interest, can you elaborate what you find exciting about ECONA? I only found out about it today and haven't looked at it closely yet.
Cavium Networks to acquire MontaVista Software Posted Nov 11, 2009 21:19 UTC (Wed) by mtaht (subscriber, #11087) [Link]
Econa chips are very low power implementations of Arm that fit into the same niche the now discontinued cirrus logic ep series did.
See, for example, the 400mw http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/board-detail.php?prod...
Cavium Networks to acquire MontaVista Software Posted Nov 12, 2009 2:03 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
Hmmmm, it contains an FPGA. What would that be used for out in the field in a product like this?
Cavium Networks to acquire MontaVista Software Posted Nov 12, 2009 2:16 UTC (Thu) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link] Replacing glue logic. If it's big enough, performing optimized computation.
Cavium Networks to acquire MontaVista Software Posted Nov 12, 2009 4:48 UTC (Thu) by mtaht (subscriber, #11087) [Link]
The TS7500 board doesn't have a very big FPGA, but it is sufficient to support a bunch of relays and a bunch of serial ports (see the enclosure and expansion board in the previous url).
I only mentioned it because it was a leading contender for my "pocobelle project" and it was an impressive successor to the ep9302 I was using before.
The price is what gets me... a totally customizable 400mw board with 64MB of ram with a complete distro that fits on a flash card for under 100 bucks. I remember running an entire ISP on hardware with basically the same specs, back in 95....
The only thing that compares are the sheeva plugs (also cool) and those have a less industrial design (and way more ram and way more power consumption and they aren't cavium, so I digress)
Cavium Networks to acquire MontaVista Software Posted Nov 12, 2009 4:55 UTC (Thu) by mtaht (subscriber, #11087) [Link]
"The price is what gets me... a totally customizable 400mw board with 64MB of ram with a complete distro that fits on a flash card for under 100 bucks. I remember running an entire ISP on hardware with basically the same specs, back in 95...."
Except power consumption, disk space, and price, I meant to say.
Cavium Networks to acquire MontaVista Software Posted Nov 12, 2009 2:17 UTC (Thu) by eskild (subscriber, #1556) [Link]
Honestly, I'm somewhat surprised at the price. It was my impression that MontaVista is the major embedded Linux house, and I would have thought that such a thing was worth more. I mean, WindRiver went for over an order of magnitude more (with a bigger and more diverse business, granted, but still).
What am I missing?
Cavium Networks to acquire MontaVista Software Posted Nov 12, 2009 2:23 UTC (Thu) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link] Yes, this is every bit as bad as the Nokia purchase of Troll Tech for a song. What went wrong?
Cavium Networks to acquire MontaVista Software Posted Nov 12, 2009 4:35 UTC (Thu) by mtaht (subscriber, #11087) [Link]
Well, once upon a time, MontaVista employed a lot more of Linux's heavy hitters than they do now - most have moved on to greener pastures. Many made it over to Embedded Alley, for example, which sold to Mentor Graphics a few months back.
There are still good people at Montavista but the list of ex-Montavistan luminaries is even more impressive.
I suspect the price is more due to cashflow issues than anything else, in today's economy. Their financials have been less than stellar, with investment after investment (I don't know what round they hit but it was well above "C") barely being enough to cover a given new project.
Their price of innovation was a series of financial arrows in their back.
Mvista also suffered from a business model that rarely included recurring revenue, a schizophrenic disconnect between marketing and engineering, and a software delivery mechanism that precluded leveraging new developments in packaging and cross development (yum or apt as one example, bitbake as another, qemu or vmware as a third). There were marketing driven distractions like trying to add windows support, or a graphical installer, rather than a package base...
Mvista - at least until recently - also ignored the potential contributions of the entire open source movement by erecting paywalls everywhere. It wasn't like that in the beginning. "Hard Hat Linux 1.0" proved that embedded Linux was feasible to consumer hardware manufacturers... (well, I point to as being the true start of serious embedded Linux to be the long defunct linux router project (archive.org link: http://web.archive.org/web/19990125090628/http://linuxrou... , oh! the nostalgia!)
The day the Hard Hat Penguin came off the walls was a sad one.
I still vividly remember ESR's visit and talk in 2001 and the sense that we really, really were, going to change the world.
While Android got all the press, Mvista had 40 million cell phones already in the field... their OS was in televisions and all sorts of consumer electronics... and Linux became pervasive in just about every device that wasn't a PC.
and still very few outside of the semiconductor industry had heard of Mvista...
The outside, more open, development process eventually yielded openwrt and the slug, openembedded, and emdebian, and hardware-wise, the gumstix and more recently the very cool sheeva plugs, both of which basically come with an out of the box fully functional distro for free.
While I think there still is a role for an embedded development house, it's a much smaller market now. I think that the move of all the formerly independent houses inside of the semi-conductor firms - moblin (formerly openedhand), embeddedalley (now mentor graphics), windriver, and now montavista - is a good one, short term.
The development process for basic support of new hardware will speed up, rather than slow down, and I'm glad of that. Linux-heads will be part of the actual design process of new chips!
Disclaimer: I am a Montavista stockholder, probably disenfranchised by the 2006 "employee retention agreement" that I only just learned about today. I'm not a happy guy right now.
I'm also pretty darn happy with emdebian.
Cavium Networks to acquire MontaVista Software Posted Sep 13, 2010 17:29 UTC (Mon) by eskild (subscriber, #1556) [Link]
Sorry about the late comment, but: Thank you for your insights. Really interesting, if a bit sad.
(As an aside: I once helped found a company in the networking business with a heavy focus on developing FPGA-based "chips"; I wrote some of the Linux-based software for the FPGAs. We also would up in the yay-we-got-funding-but-oh-it-wasn't-quite-enough treadmill. Long story short: I'll never be part of another venture-backed startup. Those people are monsters.).
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