How is the Express Logic acquisition benefit both Microsoft & its Internet of Things ecosystem?

On 18th of April 2019, Microsoft revealed the acquisition of a software company based at San Diego, Express Logic. Ever since the software giant made its way into the Internet of Things industry with its Windows 10 IoT Core, and Azure, it has been making significant investments in the sphere of IoT technology.

The CVP who oversees Azure, Julia White reportedly announced an investment of $5 billion in the Internet of Things for the foreseeable four years. And Microsoft's recent acquisition on the Express Logic is indicating the commitment of the company for building an end to end Internet of Things platform.

As of now some of the people are wondering as to why did Microsoft acquire the San Diego based Express Logic. The latter has made a name to build and at the same time deploy the robust RTOS also known as Real-Time Operating System since 1996.

By the looks of it, RTOS is quite a specialized, niche, a purpose-built OS which is exclusively designed for the conventional self-conscious devices like that of the microcontrollers. Other than the general operating systems such as Windows as well Linux, the RTOS is specially curated to manage the OS along with the code which is written in the device in real-time. The OS acts like a firmware which can quickly get into flash to the device.

Express Logic comes with a Real-Time Operating System, ThreadX. By the looks of it, ThreadX has been so far deployed across 6.2 billion devices. The OS has a footprint of 2KB, and it can be easily deployed in self-conscious devices such as microcontrollers. It runs on the acclaimed 32/64-bit microprocessors which are explicitly tested before release. ThreadX supports FileX, GUIX, TCP/IP, NetX/NetX Duo as well as USBX.

ThreadX is available for Intel, ARM, TI, NXP, and Xilinx. On the other hand, ThreadX also supports FPGA platform. NASA even utilised the ThreadX by putting it into the Sensor Data Acquisition component for Deep Impact.

Microsoft acquired Express Logic to help it to connect millions of devices to the Azure cloud platform.

**This post was published on https://www.forbes.com