| ROB MCKEEL, VICE PRESIDENT EMBEDDED SYSTEMS
Looking Forward to 2010
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Another relationship we established in 2009 is with TTTech, which provides access to technologies that complement our avionics suite. Time Triggered Ethernet (TTEthernet) is a response to the growing demand for reliable, fault tolerant, safety critical solutions that are both high bandwidth and scalable. Products based on TTEthernet (designed to allow DO-178 and DO-254 certification) are used to connect systems on safety critical platforms. The determinism – the ability to guarantee that an information packet is sent/received in a finite time – helps to prevent unintended behavior or interruption in complex systems.
New products, new partners and over 90 new design wins gave us a great deal of satisfaction in 2009. These design wins drive our business and are a testament to the strength of our products and our teams.
As I interface with many of our employees and customers, I remind them of our focus of being a trusted partner through cutting edge technology and a premier service experience. While our customers purchase and we deliver products, the expectation is a service. We are there to help make technology trade-offs; we are there to provide a simple purchasing transaction; we are there to mitigate life-cycle risks; and we are there to support the program through its life cycle. I have focused the business on the top service metrics from customer feedback and set stretch goals for improvements. In 2009, we reduced lead times on over 1,000 products while improving our quality and reducing products and RMA cycle times. We are never satisfied and have set new stretch goals for 2010 in these areas.
On top of the 40+ new products in 2009, we have 50+ new products on our roadmaps for 2010. We are working especially hard to ensure that we are among the leaders when it comes to bringing out new technologies – like we did with the Intel Core i7 single board computers last month, launching our offering in line with Intel’s announcement.
As far as the bigger picture is concerned, we expect 2010 to continue to present us with challenges, as defense budgets continue to be constrained and economies begin a long recovery. That said, we think we have the people, partners, products and processes to succeed.
Let me take this opportunity of wishing you and your business every success in the coming year. We’re looking forward to working with you to help you achieve your goals, because we view that we can only be successful if you are successful. |
 We are looking forward to 2010 with a renewed confidence and enthusiasm. Our fourth quarter provided cause for optimism, and we expect those positive indications to continue throughout 2010.
It’s been well documented that defense budgets around the world have been reprioritized and high profile programs have experienced cancellations, cut-backs and delays. One of our strengths is our diversity of defense programs, our diversity of market segments and our broad offering of products and technologies. This breadth of coverage and capability allows us access to more opportunities than many of our competitors.
In fact, 2009 was an exciting year in terms of how we managed to continue to both broaden and strengthen our product offering. We announced over 40 new products – nearly one a week for the entire year – and reinforced our position in the segments we serve. We are particularly proud of our expanding VPX offering which will bring new levels of performance to mission critical applications. We took a leadership position in helping develop the OpenVPX standard that will have a substantial positive impact in the coming years. Recognizing the ever increasing need for connectivity, we launched several new offerings in our NETernity Ethernet switch line, which enable the network that is the backbone of many military applications. Additionally, we launched new packet processor technologies to meet the military’s growing focus on high bandwidth and secure communications. Finally, given the growing demand for gathering and processing information from the battlefield, we launched several sensor and image processing solutions.
As well as adding new products, we added new strategic relationships that enhance our capability and that we expect will provide unmatched benefits to our customers. The most exciting relationship is our partnership with NVIDIA. In 2010, we will launch our general purpose graphic processing engine, providing a step-change in processing performance vs power consumption. One of our customers, for example, ported a radar application and saw a 15x improvement in performance. Not only will the product performance be game-changing, but our solution will also provide significant development time savings as well. Using NVIDIA’s CUDA toolset our customers will be able to eliminate complex FPGA programming in favor of high level language support. This will reduce first pass design times and increase portability of applications.
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