Real-time operating systems vendor Wind River Systems Inc now faces a $13.7m charge in its fiscal 1998 fourth quarter, following its second acquisition this year. On Monday, the Alameda, California-based firm announced an agreement to buy Scottish software house Objective Software Technology Ltd. It will take 100% of the Livingston-based company’s stock, and incur a one time charge in the quarter ending January 31st of approximately $3.7m. The move follows the company’s acquisition of technologies from Oracle Corp’s Network Computer Inc division and its Navio engineering organization (now merged within NCI) for which it announced a charge of $10m earlier in the month. Both acquisitions seek to address what has been a noticeable chink in Wind River’s armory for some time – graphics. Objective brings with it the WindNavigator and Look browsers, runtime C++ programming visualization tools which Wind River has already been selling, and which will now become an integrated part of its product line. Look provides visual displays for understanding and debugging the runtime behavior of application code and objects. The Network Computer Inc technology comes as part of a strategic partnership between Wind River and NCI, under which the two will concentrate on bringing robust graphics to a range of embedded devices, from standalones with low-resolution liquid crystal displays to networked information appliances with more sophisticated embedded graphics displays. Navio, of course, was originally a unit of Netscape Communications Corp until Oracle took over responsibility for it last May, taking on around $60m in charges over the following quarters. It’s unclear what technologies Wind Rivers has taken on, but Navio’s original focus was on extending the Navigator browser to run on consumer and non-PC devices. At the end of last year, Wind River also invested $4m in Israeli virtual prototyping software tools company Emultek Inc. Wind River, which got its cash from a successful $140m convertible debenture offering last July (CI No 3,209), says that excluding the charges it expects revenues and profits for the quarter to continue the fine performance we have experienced over the past 15 quarters.
