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MontaVista Accelerates Growth and Continues Market Leadership in Linux Solutions for Intelligent Devices and Communications Infrastructure

Posted on: Tuesday, 27 February 2007, 09:00 CST

MontaVista® Software, the leading provider of Linux® for intelligent devices and communications infrastructure, ended 2006 with accelerated growth across all of its market segments including industrial automation, consumer electronics, mobile, medical and telephony. To support this rapid growth MontaVista appointed key new executives, secured additional funding and enhanced the company's service offerings.

In June 2006, MontaVista announced the appointment of Thomas F. Kelly as president, chief executive officer and chairman of the board of directors. Kelly succeeded founder and CEO James Ready, who remains with MontaVista as a member of the board of directors and as chief technology officer. Under Kelly's leadership, the company closed $21 million in new funding and achieved multiple quarters of sequential revenue growth -- ending the year with Q4 revenues up 40 percent over Q4 2005. MontaVista also added more than 200 logos to its customer and partner portfolio. The company's software is now used in more than 40 million end-user devices, and during the year, MontaVista widened its range of support for silicon and hardware to more than 70 processors and 230 boards -- greater than any other Linux provider.

"The Linux market for intelligent devices is growing exponentially each year as companies demand more flexibility and faster time to market than proprietary RTOSs and customized build-your-own Linux distributions can offer," said Tom Kelly, president and CEO of MontaVista. "Customers are turning to MontaVista because we provide not only a world-class Linux platform, but an entire Linux solution offering based on our intellectual capital: a commercial quality OS, development tools, maintenance and support, an ecosystem of over 400 partners, design services, migration support, and access to MontaVista's complete board farm for the testing of Linux solutions -- even if you don't buy MontaVista Linux."

"Avnet's customers are demanding a version of Linux that has industrial strength and comes with warranty and support, because the cost of building their own Linux platform is prohibitive," said Jeff Ittel, senior vice president, semiconductor business group, Avnet Electronics Marketing. "As the leader in Linux for intelligent devices, MontaVista delivers a complete solution for our customers so that developers can focus less on developing a platform, and more on building the cutting-edge applications that end-users and infrastructure operators want and need."

Management Team Enhancement

In 2006, MontaVista strengthened its leadership team with the addition of four new executives, bringing more than 100 years worth of experience to the company:

Russell "Rusty" Harris was appointed executive vice president, worldwide field operations. Prior to joining MontaVista Software, Harris was executive vice president and corporate officer of sales and marketing at BlueStar Solutions. Prior to BlueStar, he held the position of executive vice president and corporate officer at Documentum, and was one of the founding members of EDS Hi-Tech Unit where he led a broad range of sales and consulting engagements.

Bill Seawick was appointed as chief marketing officer. Seawick has more than 20 years of executive experience with leading technology companies including Interwoven, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Apple, TRADOS/SDL, Blue Pumpkin and Blaze Software.

Larry Slotnick was appointed as vice president, engineering. Slotnick has more than 26 years of experience leading software and systems development at companies including PalmSource, Pixo, Apple, Octel Communications, Claris, Convergent Technologies and Hewlett Packard.

Sanjay Uppal was appointed chief financial officer. Uppal is a senior finance executive with 26 years of experience. He has worked at companies including KSR, Trident Capital portfolio companies, Bluestar Solutions, Amdahl Corporation, Coopers & Lybrand, A. F. Ferguson & Co/KPMG.

Customer Acquisition and Partner Expansion

MontaVista continued its strong global customer momentum during 2006 by adding more than 200 customer logos to its customer and partner family that include: Agere, ENEA Embedded Technology, ETRI, ITT, Matsushita, Motorola, NEC, Oce Technologies, OKI, Philips Semiconductors, Pioneer Corporation, Sony, Sun Microsystems and Toshiba.

One example of industry leadership through partnership in 2006 is the joint development with Enea, the world leader in advanced device software, to create the industry's most comprehensive, highly integrated software platform for distributed telecom applications. The new high-availability, fault tolerant platform, known as the Network Application Services Platform (NASP), provides a telecom-in-a-box solution for developing, deploying and managing distributed telecom applications spanning multiple operating systems, CPUs, DSPs, interconnects, and shelf architectures. MontaVista also strengthened its relationship with Texas Instruments with support for the OMAP2430 and processors based on DaVinci™ technology, and announced a distribution partnership with global electronics distributor Avnet.

MontaVista Technology Innovation

During 2006, MontaVista continued to innovate and extend its Linux technology leadership, including:

The announcement of an updated Linux OS, and new developer tools, which went into beta use during the fourth quarter of 2006. The final version of MontaVista Linux Professional Edition version 5.0 and DevRocket 5.0 will be released in the first half of 2007.

The creation of a new open source project to provide full SDIO functionality to Linux, using an extensive code base developed by Atheros. The collaborative effort will provide an open source and architecture independent solution that offers high performance throughput while maintaining the flexibility to support various SDIO host controllers and devices. MontaVista will apply its broad open source expertise and hardware experience to the Atheros SDIO code in order to support the latest community standards.

Support for more than 200 Linux Support Packages (LSP) from leading companies worldwide, including AMD, AMCC, Freescale Semiconductor, Intel, Motorola, NEC, Texas Instruments and many others.

A new release of Mobilinux, a product built to address key areas of development for mobile and wireless devices. Mobilinux includes tools to help reduce footprint, saving on RAM and Flash. Mobilinux incorporates technologies such as uClibc, squashfs and DirectFB and developer tools focused on memory analysis, which allow for a significantly reduced total memory footprint.

The availability of MontaVista Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) for Emerson Network Power, Embedded Computing's KatanaQp AdvancedTCA blades and PmPPC7448 ProcessorPMC modules.

The support for Freescale Semiconductor's MPC8641D Dual Core Processor, built on Power Architecture™ technology. The collaborative effort by MontaVista and Freescale provides developers with higher compute density, enhanced system performance, reduced cost and accelerated time-to-market. MontaVista has provided support for many different Freescale processor platforms in 2006, helping to remove the complexity associated with developing a software solution on multicore silicon systems, and enhancing performance benefits of multicore hardware components, while allowing customers to significantly reduce development cost and time-to-market.

About MontaVista Software

MontaVista Software is the leading provider of Linux for intelligent devices and telecommunications infrastructure. MontaVista delivers a commercial-quality Linux operating system, easy-to-use development tools, expert support, design and migration services and a complete ecosystem of more than 400 partners. Headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., MontaVista has operations in 15 countries. For more information, please visit www.mvista.com.

Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. MontaVista is a registered trademark of MontaVista Software Inc. All other names mentioned are trademarks, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.

Source: Business Wire

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