Press Releases

2008 was an extremely successful year for SYSGO. The company has confirmed the extraordinary promises of its product portfolio by closing major deals with industry leaders on strategic projects. SYSGO has also expanded its manpower 15% by opening a new office in Rostock, Germany, and by increasing staff in other offices, especially in the Paris and Prague offices. The most significant evidence of success is the 40% growth in total revenue.

SYSGO’s new flagship product PikeOS has met original company expectations in terms of market penetration, name recognition, and contribution to company pipeline. Today, PikeOS product line related business represents 62% of total revenue. Among many key wins, industry leader Airbus chose PikeOS as its avionics reference platform.

"We are delighted by these results but not surprised", said Michael Tiedemann, CEO of SYSGO. "We have built our reputation on never compromising on excellence and commitment. Our technical expertise already allowed us to succeed with the first industrial grade embedded Linux solution. When we decided to target the most demanding applications in the areas of safety-critical and security-critical, we applied the same combination of innovation and knowledge of customer’s needs. This resulted last year in PikeOS acceptance in the very demanding avionics market. We anticipate 2009 as the year of similar achievement in the area of security."

Designed for Growth

PikeOS has established itself as the best layer between hardware platforms and other middleware or applications in many different types of systems, including those requiring virtualization capability, hard real-time response, multi-core support, and safety-critical or security-critical certifiability. Among the strong indicators of SYSGO’s strategic industry acceptance is the participation of SYSGO within four major EC funded projects: SYSGO experienced 100% success in acceptance to all projects where SYSGO submitted its credentials and applied for participation. The total number of industrial or academic partners involved in these four projects is more than 80.

Another important consortium where SYSGO has been involved since 2006 is the project known as VerisoftXT. As one of the 21 members of this consortium, SYSGO’s main activity is to conduct a formal verification of its MILS based PikeOS microkernel, a mandatory requirement for Common Criteria’s EAL 7. Common Criteria is an international standard (documented in ISO/IEC 15408) used to define different security certification levels. MILS (Multiple Independent Levels of Security) is an architecture model based on a commercial offthe-shelf separation kernel that enforces strict communication and partitioned process execution between components having different levels of security on a single platform.

ELinOS, the Embedded Linux solution SYSGO has offered to its customers for almost 10 years, is gaining new customers beyond the traditional industrial automation sector. ELinOS product line related revenue increased by 10% compared to 2007, but most significantly ELinOS proved to be the perfect complement to PikeOS in safety and security oriented domains, while still attracting new users whose key requirement is a proven industrial grade embedded platform.

Well prepared for further Growth in the Security Market

Within the framework of the BMBF project Verisoft, SYSGO has been researching the topic of software security together with 21 partners since 2006. SYSGO's task is the formal verification of the MILS-compliant PikeOS microkernel, a requirement according to Common Criteria EAL 7. Common Criteria (ISO/IEC 15408) is an international standard for security. MILS (Multiple Independent Level of Security) is an architectural model. It is based on a separation kernel that is commercially-off-the-shelf (COTS).

A separation kernel supports precise communication and the strict separation of processes that are executed on one platform despite different security levels.

About the Products

PikeOS is a virtualisation platform for embedded systems, where several virtual machines can be simultaneously combined in a protected environment on one hardware. PikeOS was specially developed for use in safety-critical applications and offers so-called "personalities", i.e. operating system APIs such as POSIX, ARINC-653, Linux, Ada, Java etc. based on a microkernel. The secure virtualisation technology facilitates the integration of different software components, even with different criticality, and enables the combination of even existing applications (legacy code) with new functions, e.g. under Linux. PikeOS is certifiable to safety-critical standards such as DO-178 B, IEC 61508, MILS, CC EAL etc. and can be used in cost-sensitive applications with limited resources as well as in large, complex systems. The clean, robust design delivers the same performance as conventional real-time operating systems. PikeOS is increasingly used in the aerospace & defence sector. The powerful platform for heterogeneous, networked applications is seen as a strategic answer to the challenges in this industry.

More information at www.sysgo.com/pikeos

ELinOS is a Linux-based development environment for the development of software for intelligent devices of all kinds. SYSGO has more than 15 years of market experience in the industrial environment and offers with ELinOS embedded Linux for industrial applications. ELinOS is intensively tested and qualified for a wide range of industrial platforms. Besides the widely used x86 versions, ELinOS also supports PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, XScale and SH platforms. A wide range of sample programs shortens the development process and ensures rapid market access.

More information at www.sysgo.com/elinos