Thanks for your question Michael.

And, it let me say first, congratulations to you and all your colleagues in the OpenVPX Industry Working Group for your completion of the OpenVPX specification last Friday.

I very much enjoyed being at the press event at Milcom in Boston on Tuesday when the OpenVPX spec was officially turned over to the VITA 65 working group for quick ratification. The folks crammed into that room were a real "Who's Who" of the military embedded computing industry, so it was great seeing everyone there and interacting with them.

Even though the original announcement of the Open VPX plan had a rocky start, I really am impressed to that the industry worked out those kinks early and moved forward. This week in particular, I talked to many players in the OpenVPX effort and it was fascinating to me how "democratic" those efforts ended up being. All that said, in some ways it's still early days for OpenVPX. And what I mean by that is, as you know, the military is always cautious about new platforms, new computing architectures and so on. But at least now, those obstacles that keep VPX from interoperability have now been broken down. And that means VPX can now be looked at in the context of long-term development cycles, and customers can feel more confident about future roadmaps based on VPX.

To address your question, yes, I do think the VPX side-efforts that energized by the corporate and media focus on OpenVPX are significant. But I think, some of that has been overshadowed by the core effort to develop the OpenVPX spec. Would activities such as VITA 66, VITA 67, VITA 46.11 and so on have occurred anyway without the OpenVPX movement stirring thins up? Maybe. But OpenVPX brought a sense of urgency to work of all-things-VPX that I think will ultimately be beneficial to the defense industry.

Submitted by Jeff Child, Editor-in-Chief on October 22, 2009