Shaking up forty years of debug at IAR
Cecilia Wachtmeister is fundamentally changing its business model in a huge change as she takes over as CEO of IAR Systems.
“For forty years we haven’t changed our business model,” she tells eNews Europe. “We ship a perpetual licenses, starting with floppy disks, for specific devices, and support that. We want to change that.”
That change is a move to subscription-based cloud service with a range of subscription levels, as well as more focus on microprocessors in embedded systems alongside its traditional market of microcontrollers. This is also opening up easier ways to add new AI services.
“These changes are based on another trend we see more modern ways of working, moving to the cloud, using continuous integration (CI) and containerised technology and we want to be able to work smoothly in those environments. Our platform is enabling this.”
Previously a member of the board at IAR, Wachtmeister took over as CEO from Richard Lind in October 2024. This gave her visibility of the business and existing contact with staff.
“The business was not completely unfamiliar but from a board perspective you take a holistic view. I joined in mid august and we hit it off quite fast. They felt like I was not completely unfamiliar with the business,” she said.
A clearer mission
“The first thing we did was to make a clearer mission. We really came up with a clear view where we wanted to head. The timing was good for resource and capital allocations as any plans need this, and we started a reorganisation to benefit what we wanted to achieve.”
“I’m very pleased where we are right now, kicking off 2025 with a good view on our mission and a good organisation.”
“One of the reflections I had in joining IAR is that we have a very deep and long knowledge and competence in compiler technology that we should be extremely proud of and is not found everywhere, and that’s a very good foundation to build on. We also need to make sure we embrace the new technologies such as AI and make sure that we have that competency in house,” she said.
IAR is building the strategy on three pillars, she says.
“We want to expand our addressable market, develop support for more languages and also be relevant in the MPU market, not being limited to the MCU market. “We do see trends in the industry with the edge, and that leads to the devices being more advanced and we see a shift to MPU based devices. Support for RISC-V is a step in that direction.”
“We also want to broaden our market reach. We have 13 offices but we are not covering the entire world with those so we want to invest in our own sales force but also more actively where suitable to build on distributors for parts of the market where we are not present
The third is to increase market share by providing customers with much higher value and that’s where the new platform comes in.
“One of the questions I asked was why do we not enable our customers to use our full toolchain, the full toolbox, so we can now give access to this through the the cloud enabled environment,” she said.
“Changing to a subscription based model, we will be charging to the both the number of named users and the build capacity they foresee needing in.”
This allows teams to scale up and down quickly and easily depending on their requirements, and adding parallel builds and parallel processes. “We include all our tools, AVR, ARM, RISC-V, Renesas, static analysis, runtime analysis, functional safety builds, all of that is included up front. Then you can scale up from that depending on what you need, “ says Thomas Andersson, Chief Product Officer (CPO).
“With a CI pipeline you can pay for parallel builds and parallel processes. If you want to scale 1000 processors in parallel for code analysis, you can pay for capacity, but we can also support multiple boards and multicore devices. But if you only have a single user there’s a named user seat.”
“This is huge value for customers as they can easily scale up and down, bring in other developers or consultants and scale up capacity. The focus is to shorten the time to market,” said Wachtmeister.
This also opens up the use of software containers where applications, including edge AI models, have their own self-contained environments.
“We had a lot of feedback on the old licensing model that is a poor fit for containers so we have moved to a cloud server license,” said Andersson. “One thing that often pops up is the access to on premise from the cloud, and there’s always questions on security, so its’s had a lot of requests for support. Now we have all the tools available in an automated CI way with scripts and they can spin up a cloud environment.”
“What we have seen from Embedded World is that all our silicon partners are doing cloud evaluations, even hosting hardware on the cloud, and this platform makes it much easier to fit into those ecosystems,” he said. “It makes it much easier to collaborate on architectures that we already support, not for new architectures, that’s where we have to worry about making it work.”
Like the rest of the industry, IAR is also looking at how to adopt AI
“The most immediate AI technology is the co-pilot that helps you write code,” said Andersson. “For us that’s hard to address with something new, as we access Visual Studio and they have a co-pilot.”
“So the main upside with AI is on the debugging, fault detection, language standards, vulnerability detection. So far we don’t have an AI service included but this is a focus area for us and re realise the potential and something we are working with partners on.
“CI opens up faster feedback loops and error correction, finding violations and immediately getting suggestions on how to fix it, that’s where we see the value,” he said.
Another area of development is software agents that report back from devices in the field.
“With all the regulations coming in that’s an obvious trend, and there are companies in that area. It’s a very interesting area as we want to support the customer through the whole lifecycle in a secure way, with secure boot and updates, a natural complement to that is infield vulnerability checking, we definitely have our eyes on that area,” he said.
IAR is also looking at supporting the Rust language for safety critical applications and the Zephyr real time operating system (RTOS).
“We don’t have official Rust support but that’s a clear trend. We get a surprisingly small number of requests, and the smaller the embedded system, the more doubts about Rust pop up,” he said. “But that’s something we need to address in some way or another in the short term.”
“Zephyr is also popping up everywhere and that’s a gateway to move up in the ecosystem to microprocessors and they [Zephyr] are introducing an optional Rust module so the journey is clear.”
However all this change is not simple, says Wachtmeister, especially as IAR is a public company.
“This is a balancing act as the transition we are embarking on has a short term effect on the top line as you recognise revenue in different ways so of course we are planning to grow both in size, in revenues, and in people,” she said
“I don’t think we will double in the number of people. When we talk about new technologies we need to be working in a modern way. We are modelling with our figures to see what we can do, as it’s a little challenging, as I also have a chairman and a board to report to.”
“We would perhaps act differently if we were private. But we are confident in the plans going forward. We just need to take it at a speed the market can accept.
“This will take two or three years, and if we do that successfully we will have a much brighter future and that will give us more freedom,” she said.
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