Interview I Noritake Itron UK
A new operating system supports enhanced business model
Andy Stubbings, the UK Director of Noritake Itron, has spent the past few years developing a new display module system that combines communication, operating and application languages. Talking to Neil Tyler he explains how this operating system has helped customers bring new designs to market quicker than ever before
had to invest in a new one - which could take time and cost a lot of money. Today upgrades to software mean that equipment and machinery can be changed overnight. Itron UK specialises in the production of VFD and TFT display modules with related control systems and has its own engineering, production, sales and warehouse facilities in Great Yarmouth. It is part of the larger Noritake group, headquartered in Japan. Four years ago the company’s UK
Andy Stubbings T
his time last year commentators on the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas were wondering whether
its relevance was in decline. They saw the show’s focus on hardware as somewhat old fashioned at a time when the drivers of innovation were shifting rapidly to software and the services running devices and they argued that, for those people interested in keeping track of the latest developments in the consumer technology market they should look to attend events that focused on software in future. There is no doubting that the rate of innovation in technology has been increasing for years and recently has accelerated further as software has taken precedence over hardware. In the past, if a new feature was added to a machine you
26 February 2014
Director, Andy Stubbings, sought to address the issue of software and its growing impact on the development of new devices. He worked on a concept for a new type of display module system that combined communication and operating languages into a single object-oriented language.
What he ended up creating was a new operating system. According to Stubbings, “We’ve
created a unique operating system that looks to address some of the problems confronting our customers today. Primarily it was all about reducing development times for design engineers who are under growing pressure to come up with new innovations and new designs but who need to get to market quicker than their competitors.
“Using traditional display operating systems meant that our customers had to not only deal with new firmware but often with external software expertise which had the tendency to slow down the development process and add weeks, if not months, to evaluating a new product concept.”
Components in Electronics
The decision to invest time and money in developing software support for their products mirrors a growing trend amongst manufacturers who are looking to transform their hardware into more "intelligent devices“. However, research conducted by Flexera Software has found that a majority of manufacturers still do not understand the new revenue opportunities available to them by leveraging the power of smarter devices and the software that runs on top of them.
As their research found ‘too many companies are leaving money on the table‘. Itron appears to be ahead of the curve; one of the key drivers for developing software is the ability to reduce time to market when creating new products and reacting quickly to changing market requirements.
Indeed the initial decision by Stubbings to develop an operating system was driven by market trends and less by the specific needs of customers. However, the response from customers, now that they’ve seen the system in operation, has been impressive - they are seeing working products in a matter of days, according to Stubbings. “Customers using traditional display
operating systems had to confront technical problems and extended development times. This is a unique offering from Itron and our customers are already seeing the benefits.”
Developing the necessary software has been a costly exercise - over £400,000 has been spent at the Great Yarmouth operation in developing it - and the company has recruited a number of new people to support the programme. “Everything we’ve done has been about getting product to market quicker. Upgrading hardware can be costly and
time consuming, especially when you’re dealing with multiple suppliers and the interests of the software developer may not always be those of the customer and we were finding that the software element wasn’t working effectively. “By developing our own operating system we’ve effectively shrunk the risks traditionally associated with software development. Today we can present a product solution to a customer and in response to their feedback make changes in a few hours. In addition, and this is the key difference, our customers can make changes too without specialist software knowledge or expensive tools. We wanted to provide a product that was adaptable and gave them the design flexibility that had been lacking up until now.” The software is simple to use as it’s not a complex language at it’s core making it easy to get started but has depth for specific requirements. Application changes or bug fixes can be made in real-time and distributed online while protecting IPR but allowing local user implementations.
According to Stubbings the key challenge was getting customers to buy-in to the approach but as of today over 100 customers have been using this new operating system - many have now moved on to second or third product iterations.
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