Xerox Credits Substantial Cost-Savings to Lynx Real-Time Systems LynxOS lays ground for Xerox's future applications in its innovative Document Centre Systems family

WHO ELSE USES A LynuxWorks EMBEDDED OS?

SAN JOSÉ, Calif., Feb. 26, 1996—Xerox Corporation credits the LynxOS real-time operating system for delivering substantial cost-savings in developing its highly acclaimed Document Centre System products, the company announced today.

"LynxOS saved us substantially in our initial development costs for the Xerox Document Centre System 20 and 35 machines," said Hugo Buitano, program manager at Xerox. "The key driver to that cost savings was LynxOS' adherence to industry standards like POSIX and UNIX®, which reduced the effort and amount of time we needed to invest in porting code to multiple hardware platforms."

Buitano added, "What's perhaps equally valuable is that due to LynxOS' compliance to POSIX and UNIX, the programs we created—in addition to third-party software programs on the market—are portable and reusable in future applications and should improve time to market for follow-on products in this category."

The Xerox Document Centre System is a strategic product-line for Xerox. The family of digital document systems are designed to exploit the potential of the network, simplify business processes and set a fresh course in the quest for office productivity. Managed from the desktop, the system was built to simultaneously and interactively deliver document services, and is the first to seamlessly integrate the entire document cycle, from document input, to management and output.

"Creating sophisticated, embedded, real-time applications in highly complex machines requires enormous efforts by our engineers," said Buitano. "By using an industry-standard, off-the-shelf real-time operating system like LynxOS, we were able to focus our development energy on our technical expertise—information processing."

Key features of LynxOS that enabled Xerox to deliver robust, sophisticated digital office systems like the Document Centre System include:

• POSIX compliance for code portability and reusability
• Robust and reliable "hard" real-time multi-tasking capabilities through multi-threaded and multi-processing support
• UNIX-like development environment to speed application development and provide seamless porting of existing Xerox application code
• ROM-ability: the ability to write applications into ROM, thereby eliminating the need for disk drives.

"The high volume network and parallel job processing functionality required for the sophisticated Xerox systems hasn't been available in the embedded market until LynxOS," added Buitano. "Other operating systems offer either multithreaded or multitasking, and they often don't support UNIX. LynxOS gave us all three, delivering the flavor of UNIX in a robust embedded environment, plus a critical feature that enabled us to write applications directly in ROM."

Hard real-time demands

With several machines handling multiple documents simultaneously through parallel job processing, the Xerox machines required deterministic—or hard real-time—execution of data processing. A failure to meet these hard real-time demands would have resulted in lower service level support to Document Centre users.

LynxOS is the only commercial operating system that delivers hard real-time performance while complying with POSIX and UNIX standards. To support complex applications, LynxOS fully supports the microprocessor's Memory Management Unit (MMU). This enables programmers to partition computing programs, thereby safeguarding processes in one area from defects in another.

"As more companies move into 32-bit environments, their embedded applications—and thus operating systems needs—are becoming more robust and complex, giving them compelling reasons to outsource their operating systems," said Sheila B. Ennis, technology analyst for Hambrecht & Quist. "We're forecasting that the market for 32-bit microprocessors will double annually until 1998, giving off-the-shelf real-time operating systems companies like Lynx Real-Time Systems excellent growth potential."

POSIX, an enabling standard for sophisticated applications

No other operating system matches the degree of LynxOS' compliance to POSIX. IEEE's POSIX standard plays a key role in leading the embedded, real-time world toward open systems. It defines the industry's standard application programming interface (API) for UNIX and provides the first standard API for real-time embedded applications.

"Standards such as POSIX/UNIX are becoming very important for emerging complex embedded applications because they make it possible to preserve software investment and get away from implementing each new embedded application from scratch," said Inder M. Singh, president and CEO of Lynx Real-Time Systems Inc. "LynxOS customers can tap a huge base of existing UNIX software from third parties, such as networking protocols for example, to speed the time-to-market for their embedded products."

Xerox Corporation is a global company in the document processing market. It designs, engineers, develops, manufactures, markets, and services the widest array of document processing products and systems in the industry.

LynuxWorks press contacts

Kirsten Long Director, Marketing Communications LynuxWorks, Inc. USA +1 408-979-4404	Barbara Stewart Patterson & Associates USA 480-488-6909
Hamid Mirab Managing Director EMEA LynuxWorks Ltd. United Kingdom +44 208-906-9506	Peter van der Sluijs Neesham Public Relations Europe +44 1442-879222