June 2015
38
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MBEDDED
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OMPUTING
n
Adlink is a rapidly growing international
provider of application-ready intelligent plat-
forms and embedded computing products for
enabling the Internet of ings. e company
supplies system engineers and architects with
embedded computing solutions, high-speed
data acquisition cards/modules, ruggedized
mobile computers, and a variety of measure-
ment and automation technologies. It also
provides design and manufacturing services
that enable end users and partners to meet
customized requirements for several di erent
industries.
e company has operations in China (Bei-
jing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen), Germany,
Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the United
States. Growing at a strong compound annual
growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 18%
through the past decade, it generated rev-
enues of $218M in 2013. e company sup-
ports a variety of vertical applications within
defense, factory automation, medical, trans-
portation, energy/power, telecommunications,
and test and measurement sectors.
Adlink provides embedded computing plat-
forms and building blocks for the creation
of modular and scalable IoT product designs
spanning end devices, data collection and
processing systems, intelligent gateways, and
more. e company’s growing OEM/ODM
design and manufacturing services will fur-
ther facilitate engineering e orts across a
variety of industry applications. It plans to
continue building on its intelligent platforms
and integrated solutions with more so ware
and services – which will also include support
for more cloud-based services in accordance
with the continued proliferation of cloud
computing and so ware-as-a-service busi-
ness models.
e products have earned their stripes in the
eld over the past decade with their close
partner, Intel. e company also has close ties
to Microso , as a Silver Windows Embed-
ded partner, and Wind River. As one of only
ve Premier Partners within Intel Internet
of ings Solutions Alliance, formerly the
Embedded Solutions Alliance, it is well posi-
tioned to remain at the front of new embed-
ded technologies with a faster time-to-market
for new designs than most competitors.
While it has a long-standing history within
the telecommunication and networking
industries supplying ATCA-based solutions
equipped with the latest Intel platforms, the
company is far from being a typical board
supplier from the Asia-Paci c region. e
company continues to build support for more
of the IoT solution stack (which includes
connected hardware, application so ware,
middleware, and cloud services), particularly
around so ware/middleware, to serve as a
one-stop-shop for most end users. e tradi-
tional data acquisition hardware and so ware
products (and expertise) facilitate one of the
major pain points for deploying IoT-driven
big data applications – collecting and manag-
ing progressively more data from a growing
continuum of devices. Further, its so ware
solutions, which at the moment principally
enable monitoring control and active man-
agement applications, are a starting point to
which OEMs can add their own big data ana-
lytics or application so ware on top. e com-
pany will o er progressively more exibility
and variety with its embedded so ware o er-
ings as it plans to integrate and partner with
more third-party solutions, with cloud man-
agement being a major point of focus.
e Smart Embedded Management Agent
(SEMA), which comes supported by the
majority of board and system products
equipped with a board management con-
troller, enables monitoring and collection of
systems performance and status information
from the embedded hardware. e SEMA-
cloud solution pushes system data to the data
center server through any kind of TCP/IP
On the way to significantly
boost market share
The long-term company goal
of ADLINK is to become one of
the two global leading vendors in
each relevant embedded computing
market. To achieve this, the company
is investing heavily in Germany
and Europe. This article explores
the growth potential.
Figure 1. e new COM Express Compact
Type 6 module cExpress-BL based on
the 5th generation Intel Core processors
is suitable for fanless edge device solutions
that demand intense graphics performance
and multitasking capabilities in
a space-constrained environment.
Availability of the SEMA Cloud Management Systems
Freescale i.MX6
Intel Atom E3800
Intel Core-i3/5/7
SMARC
Yes
Yes
QSeven
Yes
COM Express
Yes
Yes
Mini-ITX
Yes
Yes
ADLINK is establishing the SEMA cloud
connection as a standard.
