Solution: Industrial

Solution: Industrial

Higher-end devices provides a perfect space for OSGi technology. Industry segments such as the multi-functional printer (MFP) market were among the first to fully adapt to the OSGi specifications and there are unquestionably several reasons for this development. First of all, the trade-off between Bill-of-Material (BOM) costs and development costs that can be seen in the consumer electronics business is not valid for higher-end devices. A couple of years ago when consumer electronics where wrestling to cut memory-sizes to save another dollar, the MFP manufacturers took the strategic decision to use OSGi. It was a no-brainer to absorb an extra cost of two dollars to meet the requirement for Java/OSGi when your BOM were starting at 10 000 USD. Another reason is that the value chain for an MFP manufacturer is straight forward; they control the value chain from device via reseller to software and they have remote management capability.

Nowadays close to 5 Million MFPs are produced annually, which makes up quite a large fleet to maintain. With hardware cost at comparable level between the manufacturers, the battle is being fought with software. Higher-end device manufacturers have come to realize that they too are playing by the same game-rules as other software manufacturers; i.e. cost cut-down for maintenance and time-to-market for new functions. It comes as no surprise that since higher-end device manufacturers often are supplying globally, they struggle to create and distribute software that covers all needs and areas. As a solution, world-leading manufactureres recently have turned towards benchmarking the mobile industry companies' successful strategy of building software communities that look after the local markets needs.

Needless to say, higher-end device manufacturers need a stable and reliable platform that enables them to trust their community to develop software that can be deployed upon the hardware without a lengthy and costly certification process.
The need of reassurances and stability is one of the main reasons why leading MFP manufacturers choose to use Knopflerfish Pro in the commercial products.

Contact sales@makewave.com for more information.