Scannex conducted an extensive market search and evaluations prior to selecting an RTOS. Factors involved in the decision process included debugging capabilities, core size, cost and company pedigree. The Green Hills toolchain provided immediate productivity gains and significantly accelerated the development process.
“The integration of MULTI, Probe and INTEGRITY enabled us to debug and develop much more efficiently, and with the confidence that the end product would be stable,” said Scannex technical director, Matthew Page. “The remote Ethernet debugging capability of INTEGRITY became an indispensable part of our development cycle. This incredible level of debugging has enabled us to produce a very mature, stable product in a much shorter timeframe.”
“The INTEGRITY RTOS has been proven to meet the highest levels of safety and security in mission-critical applications,” observed Christopher Smith, vice president marketing, Green Hills Software, “and the same benefits are available in business-critical applications, where interruption of operation can impact directly on revenue.”
Scannex designs and manufactures data collection products that are primarily used in the telephone call accounting, alarm and secure remote administration markets. There is a wide range of PBX types that output their data either by a standard serial connection or across the network using TCP/IP protocols. The Scannex buffers make it easy to collect the data reliably from these PBXs.
Many companies employ call accounting software to charge out telephone calls made on their exchange – and loss of data means loss of revenue. In addition, many have quality of service (QoS) requirements for telephony. Consequently, the buffers must work reliably over a long period of time with little, or no, user intervention. In some cases Scannex’ products are installed in wide area networks where many of the nodes are inaccessible or unmanned, perhaps a drive of several hours apart.