Wind River acquires middleware provider

Wind River paid approximately $20 million in cash and restricted stock for Interpeak. The company expects the acquisition will be mildly accretive in its fiscal 2007 year, ending January 31, 2007, and is not changing its guidance.

"As the explosive growth of connected devices continues, device manufacturers will require a high-quality, secure networking stack that can run universally on both our RTOS and Linux based platforms," said Ken Klein, Wind River CEO, in a statement. "Interpeak’s secure, certifiable, networking expertise will enhance Wind River’s DSO [device software optimization] strategy for delivering a standardized device software development approach."

Interpeak’s products include TCP/IP stacks and modules, such as IPNET, a virtual routing stack that supports both IPv4 and IPv6; wireless security software; mobile IP protocols based on IPv4 and IPv6; security protocols; VPN solutions; networking protocols; and libraries and utilities. Interpeak products claim to run on all major embedded operating systems, including Linux and Wind River’s VxWorks.

The acquisition appears to be a good buy, said Chris Lanfear, director of embedded systems at Venture Development Corp. "They get total control of these [Interpeak] protocol stacks," Lanfear said. "Where they were kind of weak was in middleware and components other than the operating systems."

Now, said Lanfear, Wind River can tightly integrate Interpeak’s products with its own offerings. "This is not a life changing acquisition, but this is part of [Wind River] delivering on the vision they’ve laid out, which is that ’You can get everything you need from us,’ pre-integrated, and tightly wrapped into a single product offering."

Also significant, said Lanfear, is Interpeak’s support for MILS (multiple independent layers of safety/security) architectures. This will help Wind River gain accounts in the military/aerospace market, Lanfear said.