[yocto-ab] YP Advisory Board: VOTE ExpEmb for YP Participant

[Jeff Osier-Mixon]

Hi folks - this vote is for ExpEmb, a group of three French embedded
companies comprising Tokhatec (hardware), Sysmic (software), and
Axupteam (prof svcs). One of their employees, Gilles Blanc, will be
speaking at YP Developer Day in October.

Please vote yes/no for YP Participant for ExpEmb.

Their website is minimal, but here is the explanation from Gilles:

our website is still a mess...  :)
(This is how you recognize real embedded guys in France: the more
awful their website, the better they are... Actually, we never really
talk of our activities: secrecy is a kind of religion in industry.)

ExpEmb is a group of three companies:

_ Tokhatec (with a new website: http://www.tokhatec.com/): reseller of
Computer on Modules (COM), mainly Congatec (x86 and ARM) and Engicam
(ARM Freescale), and designer of base boards (for instance for
avionics calculator). As we only design base boards for the COM we
sell with very strong partnership, our hardware market is France (BTW,
a former 15-year-Intel FAE is working for us since last year, Laurent
Hennequin).

_ Sysmic : our software/embedded Linux team, with very strong
expertise (we also are professional trainers and professors in
engineering schools/universities). We are agnostic about the material,
it can be Tokhatec's or the client's one. We have designed last year a
product named Armonie, based on Buildroot (and Eclipse), as one of us
(Jérôme Pouiller) is a Buidroot committer (it is aimed at simple
projects, with a out-of-the-box philosophy: you plug, it's working).

_ Axupteam : this one is very French, as we provide engineers working
at the client's office, mainly focusing on embedded expertise,
whatever the software (Linux, Windows CE, VxWorks).

We are also launching several internal products, but I can't tell
anything about it right now, except that they are or will be all Yocto
based. :)  Actually, one of them is used for my talk.
On our side, we support several clients' Yocto based projects
(intercom, home automation, calculators, drones, and so on).
Currently, we only are users, not yet committers, but we hope that
hardware vendors will soon trust us to support their Yocto layers
(I've begun Engicam's boards support, for instance, but I don't know
if they will be willing to disclose it, as their own current LTIB BSP
is not public —as always, these kind of things are really delicate in
industry). By the way, we have been a Freescale partner for a few
months, looking for and sharing opportunities on software expertise
worldwide.


All in all, we are about twenty peoples, 4 million dollars total
revenue. We are quite young, around five years (it depends on the
companies of the group, which only exists for one year), but we are
still growing. Our international exposure is very new, so we don't
have yet English communication material about our company (but I can
provide you with French ones if you wish :)  ). Appart from using
frequently, our commitment for Yocto project by itself is not (yet)
quite public, but:
_ We have a Yocto training session (four days, 115 slides).
_ We promote the Lean Software Factory (LSF) concept which is Yocto
based (maybe I'll give a talk about it in English some day).
_ We have given several talks on French events about Yocto.
_ We push Yocto on engineering school students' projects (BTW, I
talked with Belen about making my students working on Toaster, as I
have to give them a Python exam and I also teach them Embedded Linux
:)  —I will soon present this idea to the school where I teach both
matters).


-- 
Jeff Osier-Mixon @Intel
Yocto Project Community Manager http://yoctoproject.org