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Today almost every product – be it a vehicle or high-tech medical equipment – works on embedded systems. Embedded systems are made up of tightly coupled hardware and software. So, if we take an example of a train with an automatic door, the software controls when the door opens and closes. Trends such as the Internet of Things (IoT), connected devices, and self-driving vehicles have further increased the demand for embedded systems. Almost 90% of processors are a part of embedded systems. The market size of embedded systems is expected to reach $116.2 billion by 2025. Given how critical embedded systems are in today’s world, companies need to invest in embedded testing. Embedded testing enables companies to test the software and hardware of embedded solutions. It helps companies identify and fix bugs in the hardware and software of critical systems and increases their chances of receiving the required certifications. Most importantly, considering that embedded systems are used for life-saving and mission-critical purposes, testing has to be done carefully. A single miss could pose a threat to someone’s life too. Hence, companies must remember that it’s very different from software testing and approach it accordingly. How are Embedded Testing and Software Testing Different? Embedded testing is quite different from software testing. Types of testing To begin with, software testing is limited to the software only. In embedded testing, the testing team needs to test both the software and the hardware of the system. Software testing mainly happens on client-server, web, and mobile-based applications. In software testing, companies do different types of tests such as accessibility, acceptance, integration, automated, black-box, and many more. Embedded testing goes beyond the software. In fact, it is done mainly on hardware. Software testing tests the functionalities of the applications, while embedded testing is focused on the hardware’s behavior. This doesn’t mean that software testing is sidelined or deprioritized in embedded testing. What it means is that the dependency on hardware is more. Product launch In the modern software development model, software testing is done along with development. So, the bugs are identified and fixed at an early stage. It helps the developers to build a better quality and secure product by design. This also helps the companies to launch the product quickly as development and testing happen simultaneously. In some cases of embedded testing, the software cannot be tested until the hardware is ready. Sometimes the custom tools are unavailable. The testers are compelled to wait till the late stages to test the product. The tight coupling of software and hardware might also lead to product launch delays. Bug fixing Another difference is that the bugs can be easily reproduced in software testing to allow testers to identify them and fix them confidently. However, the same method cannot be followed in embedded testing as the events have to be reproduced on the software and hardware level. The testers need to test every defect at a deeper level to find out the exact source. They have to collect more data to analyze the defects and may also have to alter the systems intentionally to fix the bugs. Testing method Unlike software testing, embedded testing relies mainly on manual testing. Considering that in embedded testing, both hardware and software are tested, automation testing could become complicated. However, it does not mean that the testing process cannot be automated. Testers could use modular and extensible testing environments to prevent any changes in the common hardware and software interface. In fact, testers could use specific automated testing tools that support the unique use case of embedded testing. This can help them perform embedded testing more efficiently and reduce the chances of errors that could potentially lead to life-threatening situations         Conclusion It’s clear that embedded testing has to be done differently to ensure that it is secure and functional. The skill sets would differ. Hence, companies need to work with a testing team that has expertise in testing embedded systems and ensuring that they are safe and compliant with the safety guidelines. It’s important to partner with a company that has specialized tools to test embedded systems. They must also follow the protocols and policies strictly. At Intellore, we help companies in designing, developing, and testing embedded products. We also offer independent testing services that are tailor-made to the company’s business needs to ensure their compliance and safety. To know more, contact us.

Intelligent Buildings are quickly becoming the norm. By combining the latest advances in cloud, connectivity, analytics, and physical design, they enable better visibility, greater energy efficiency, as well as improved safety for owners, operators, and occupants. Quick and easy access to real-time actionable insights delivers additional control over day-to-day operations while enhancing long-term outcomes. But, establishing Intelligent Buildings is not just about integrating cloud and IoT; organizations need to be able to devise intelligent business models, to be able to drive maximum value and returns from their investments. The Rise of Intelligent Buildings The growing focus on sustainable architecture and green design is the main driver that is driving the rapid growth of Intelligent Buildings. As concerns around global warming and climate change escalate, Intelligent Buildings pave the way for reduced energy consumption while allowing organizations to seamlessly integrate various building subsystems, which typically operate in silos, as they are supplied and installed by different vendors. Through sustainable design approaches, these buildings help preserve energy while offering new levels of insight and control. In addition, they also offer much-needed space flexibility along with high levels of safety and cost-effectiveness. In the long run, these features translate into highly efficient operations, optimized resource management, better space utilization, and greater occupant productivity. The Need for Intelligent Business Models Transforming urban buildings into Intelligent Buildings that pave the way for a sustainable and productive future is no longer just about fancy real estate. Today, the focus has shifted from cutting-edge smart building products towards offering unmatched intelligent experiences. In a green era, Intelligent Buildings need to enable companies to launch innovative business models where, instead of just the real estate, companies can charge for experience and lifestyles as well. Let’s look at some of the different business models building owners and operators can adopt to set Intelligent Buildings in motion: The shift towards intelligent models is quickly picking steam, as building owners and operators attempt to introduce an array of intelligent capabilities to keep up green energy requirements while also ensuring future revenue growth. This is increasingly imminent in the post-pandemic era, where most businesses are re-evaluating their strategies and seeking ways to enable on-demand, customized, and scalable access to space, amenities, and services. Instead of having “location” at the focus of every business strategy, operators now need to connect users with services, so location becomes deprioritized, and service becomes prioritized.

Rapidly changing market conditions often force businesses to think out of the box and come up with innovative solutions. Today, this innovation is mostly centered around digital transformation initiatives wherein businesses leverage technology to stay competitive in the market. Irrespective of the domain, every business now needs to think and act like a tech company to fulfill the desires of customers in a thriving digital economy. Businesses are not new to software. But the reality today is that enterprises need to ideate, build, and deploy digital applications faster into the market and with zero scopes for quality compromise. Every enterprise software today needs to be treated as a product that is continuously upgraded or evolved to suit the dynamic needs of the business. While moving into continuous product development or engineering paradigm of technology use, enterprises primarily must synchronize activities between development teams and the operations team who manage the technology ecosystem including infrastructure. The best methodology that promotes a seamless blend of product development and IT operations is DevOps. In fact, DevOps may be perceived less as a methodology and more as a cultural change that empowers collaboration and unification of objectives between different teams engaged in building software and taking it to the market. It is predicted that the global DevOps market size will witness a growth of over What are the benefits of DevOps in Product Development? DevOps is a game-changing factor in modern-day product development initiatives for enterprise software. In addition to being the core unification strategy that encourages cross-functional collaboration between IT operations and the application development teams, here are a few key benefits that businesses leveraging DevOps in their software product development journey can realize: What are the best practices for DevOps implementation in a product development scenario? DevOps, as we know, is a philosophy that promotes faster software development without compromise in quality. To ensure success it is important for enterprises to take the right roadmap to bring DevOps into their technology landscape. Here are some best practices: DevOps is at the heart of modern product innovations and software-defined business operations. Enterprises that thrive to leverage the several benefits that DevOps offers can stay ahead of the competition. These new business models can help building owners and operators enhance bottom line benefits, shifting the focus from offering just physical space to offering unmatched smart digital services. Irrespective of what model you choose, integrating and leveraging emerging technology to create unmatched Intelligent Building experiences is the way forward.

Today, a lot of research and development happens in the field of embedded products and their design. It is no wonder that the global embedded systems market is expected to be worth over USD 116.2 billion by 2025. The rising demand for new digital experiences that blur the line between software and hardware is the key factor behind the growth of embedded systems. As more businesses explore the possibilities of leveraging embedded product capabilities, the number of organizations offering embedded product design and development services has also increased exponentially. But then comes the challenge – how to evaluate an embedded product design and development company? From the vast number of providers available, it is important to partner and invest in the right candidate. But most businesses face difficulties in qualifying an option for their product development. Here are 5 criteria that businesses can use to pick the right embedded product design and development company for building their ambitious offering: Knowledgeable Domain Expertise Embedded systems find use cases in most domains. Your business needs to first finalize on the area or target customer domain where your embedded offering will be put to use. Then the next step is to evaluate the expertise level of service providers in that particular niche or domain. For example, if you are on the journey to build an embedded healthcare product, it is highly advisable to pick a partner that has built similar products for companies in the healthcare space or has expertise in building embedded solutions for a different niche in healthcare. This will ensure that the final product being built is compliant with unique demands from regulators and empowers successful customer experience metrics in your domain. Integrated Hardware and Software Experience Embedded product design and development is successful when there is the right balance of software and hardware intelligence that collaborates well within the operational ecosystem to deliver amazing customer experiences. When evaluating a partner company for building your ambitious embedded offering, there should be a clear understanding of how equipped they are from a hardware and software perspective. The partnering company needs to have specialized software tools for designing functionality, reliable and quality certified hardware components with handling and management expertise, trained or certified professionals to build the collaborative experience, follow recognized protocols and policies in embedded architecture, and so on. Proven Track Record One of the best and most important facets of evaluating a partner for embedded product design and development is to verify their credentials through proven past engagements. Request for references and portfolio of their work, research and seek recommendations from their past customers especially those operating in similar or related domains, and verify their work schedules, processes, and policies through comparing with internationally recognized standards. Innovative Outreach Not all businesses may have an end-to-end vision about their embedded offering. This results in gaps in product journeys wherein competitors with more forward-thinking approaches can win customers. To counter this, businesses can turn to partners who have established credentials for innovation. An example could be a dedicated R&D practice or COE from the partner that helps identify more use cases, recommends new features, and leverages more innovative hardware or software tools and architecture, etc., to build more appealing end-user experiences. A partner that can bring innovation to the heart of your embedded product design and development initiative is always a higher priority than those that lag in innovation capabilities. Sustainable Development Approach The key to the longevity of your embedded offering in the market doesn’t always lie in the celebrated feature list, but in how well it is able to sustain in dynamic market conditions. There is a need to constantly adapt to changing consumer demands, integrate newer technology in both hardware and software as they evolve, and accommodate newer use cases for as long as possible with minimal investment. This requires designing and building a product that has a sustainable architecture that can be flexibly extended or enhanced to meet new demands in the future. To achieve this, the partner you choose needs to have experience in architecting embedded products from scratch, envision their progression journey, and build a roadmap that can easily accommodate changes over time. Designing and developing an embedded product for today’s digital economy requires talent, technology, and the right vision. Bringing together these facets on their own will be a daunting task for businesses but they can always partner with vendors who excel in these areas. By evaluating their credibility using the five criteria we have outlined, businesses can kickstart their ambitious move into the embedded product development space, and can guarantee results in the fastest time frame possible.

Recently, Intellore was invited to speak to the audience of sales & marketing professionals of a leading and well-established Pune-based company that manufactures products in dimensional metrology mainly for the automotive and other engineering industries. While the company’s sales staff had heard about Industrie 4.0 and Industrial IOT, they were curious to understand the terminology, gauge its impact on their industry and brainstorm its relevance in future-proofing their product roadmaps.   Narayan Gokhale – Head of Sales & Marketing at Intellore Systems delivered the key note address.   He started off by highlighting the big picture – How over the past 5 to 10 years conventional companies (industry participants) have been disrupted – by highlighting the staggering market capitalization of “network brands” such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, Uber, Airbnb etc. and comparing them with “traditional brands” such as Hertz, AT&T, Starwood and Walmart, emphasizing that “Network Orchestrators” deliver value through connectivity. Digital networks and platforms are eating the world by changing all the rules of business, including the sources of value, the ways that organizations deliver it, and the mental models or beliefs that guide organizations and their leaders. This transformation is creating problems for existing firms with established, non-digital, non-network business models.   By using this pitch and mixing with day-to-day examples, the digital transformation of the Mfg. Industry -namely, Industrie 4.0 and Smart Service World topics were introduced. The world as we know and experience it today has been shaped by three major technological revolutions. The fourth industrial revolution promises to marry the worlds of production and network connectivity in an “Internet of Things” making “INDUSTRIE 4.0” a reality.  TWO of 10 “Future Projects” identified by the German government as part of its High-Tech Strategy 2020, the “INDUSTRIE 4.0” project and its successor “SMART SERVICE WORLD – Internet-based services for the economy” project, represents a major opportunity for Germany to establish itself as an integrated industry lead market and provider. Both these put together is also called as “The Internet of Things and Services”  Germany’s position as an embedded systems technology leader gives birth to enabling cyber-physical system (CPS) technologies which ingeniously marry the digital virtual world with the real world. Cyber-physical production systems (CPPS) made up of smart machines, logistics systems and production facilities allow peerless ICT-based integration for vertically integrated and networked manufacturing.   Narayan went on to give an example based on the project that Intellore is doing for a customer (OEM), by highlighting various stages of their digital transformation journey –  “product or an embedded-system” to “networked-embedded-system” to “cyber-physical system (CPS)” and finally to what Industrie 4.0 calls “Internet of Things, Data and Services”, culminating in to OEM’s new offering of “Product-as-a-Service (PaaS)”. Many North American companies call this concept as “Product-Service Hybrids”. He referred to another project that Intellore is executing by highlighting how their customers’ “offerings” evolved from “Product or Equipment” to “Equipment Services” to “Information Services” and simultaneously   their “Go-to-Market (GTM) Approach” evolving from “pre-digital product line” to “digital product line” to “new market segment” again leading to a new business model of “Product-as-a-Service (PaaS)”  As the company is yet to embark on its Industrie 4.0 (digital transformation) journey, Narayan advised them to refer to “Guideline Industrie 4.0: Guiding principles for the implementation of Industrie 4.0 in small and medium sized businesses” from the VDMA (German Engineering Federation) that is regarded as a practical tool for the identification and implementation of company-specific approaches to Industrie 4.0.   He specifically advised them to look at “The Toolbox Industrie 4.0” that is a key element of this guideline as it combines the different application levels of Industrie 4.0 in reference to product innovations and production-related technical applications. The application levels are each broken down into five technological and sequential development stages. The Toolbox Industrie 4.0 becomes the starting point for classifying the fields of expertise offered by the company and thus serves as a basis for new ideas during an Industrie 4.0 implementation process.  Narayan concluded by saying that tomorrow’s business economy would undoubtedly be dominated by “network orchestrators” and reiterated not to take anything for granted, as their competition might come from unexpected quarters and disrupt their industry’s conventional business model. He challenged the audience to rethink how value is created for their customers – can their products can be sold as “Gauging-as-a-Service” or “Metrology-as-a-Service”?  The Managing Director proposed a vote of thanks and assured the audience that the transformation will start from the top leadership team and announced that henceforth Industrie 4.0 to be topmost on their agenda of all internal meetings, especially for R & D, product management and marketing functions.