Rajesh Subramaniam is Founder and CEO of embedUR systems.
Over the past couple of decades, the networking industry faced a choice: Companies could keep writing their own proprietary operating systems from scratch, or they could adopt an open-source, free platform that everybody could build on together.
Linux won that argument, since it gave engineers all the tools they needed without asking them to reinvent an entire operating system just to ship a product. Linux became the dominant substrate for networking hardware, and both R&D and customer licensing costs dropped significantly across the industry.
We are watching that same story play out again today, this time in real-time operating systems.
Why RTOS Consolidation Is Happening Now
A real-time operating system (RTOS) is the software that runs inside small electronic devices and controls how they respond to events. It has to respond fast enough when timing is critical, such as in a car’s airbag controller or a pacemaker. These systems typically run on small, low-power chips built for resource-constrained devices: sensors, wearables, industrial controllers, medical equipment and the broader universe of connected gadgets we call the intelligent edge.
As IoT deployments scale into billions of devices, the industry is coalescing around a smaller number of standard platforms, instead of the fragmented landscape of proprietary, one-off systems that once defined this space. Software complexity keeps climbing, and managing that complexity is only realistic when teams unify around a shared system instead of maintaining dozens of incompatible ones.
Even the smallest embedded devices are getting pulled into this shift, and many are picking up AI models that now run directly at the edge. That means these devices need model security and memory optimization built in because power and memory are scarce on hardware this small.
Open platforms like FreeRTOS and Zephyr have emerged as the leading contenders in this shift, with Zephyr in particular gaining momentum against long-established proprietary systems like VxWorks. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, this software is open-source, free and vendor-neutral. As a result, it is becoming for connected devices what Linux became for servers and the cloud, and companies are already using it in things like smart sensors, industrial gateways, battery-powered trackers and connected medical devices.
Navigating The Shift
So, how can a business actually position itself to benefit from this shift? It starts by paying close attention to the software platform. People often assume that if they choose the right high-performing hardware, the software will sort itself out. But the software is actually the real long-term asset in any connected product, and it can become either a liability or an advantage depending on the choices you make early.
Proprietary software is hard and expensive to maintain over time, and that cost shows up later as delayed innovation and less flexibility. A software choice that doesn’t fit the broader ecosystem forces constant retooling. Get the software choice right early, and you get to build on everyone else’s progress while keeping your own products safe to grow for years to come.
It’s also important to remember that consolidation doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice innovation. Engineering leaders worry that consolidating around one platform limits their choices, but in reality, the opposite often happens. When an industry consolidates, it gains faster access to new technology because everyone building on that same shared foundation is contributing to it. Instead of every company independently reinventing networking stacks and security patches, that work gets pooled and shared across the whole ecosystem.
Your differentiation was never really sitting in that foundational plumbing anyway. It lives in what you build on top of it. Two companies can use the exact same RTOS kernel and still ship completely different products. Put Zephyr underneath whatever you’re building, and your differentiation lives on top of it, while the application layer becomes silicon-agnostic. A team can move quickly and reuse the same tooling across multiple hardware platforms instead of starting over every time it switches chips.
That portability is important, since once a model gets deployed onto a device, someone has to manage its life cycle and secure it against tampering. Building custom software around all of that from scratch makes everything harder. A shared foundation like Zephyr gives teams the ecosystem they need to build and ship products securely without reinventing the wheel every generation.
The companies that stand to win the most in this consolidation are building multiple connected products across different hardware platforms because they can reuse what they’ve already built on one platform when they move to the next. That reuse translates into faster development cycles and lower maintenance costs. Companies locked into proprietary software risk being left behind, since proprietary code has to be carried forward and reworked with every new generation of hardware.
The choice comes down to one question worth asking consciously: Can this software run across every generation of your product, from the smallest device to the largest? If yes, stick with the ecosystem that is converging around shared foundations like Zephyr. If no, it may be time to rethink the software strategy. Businesses that overlook their software choices today will pay for it later in delayed launches and expensive retooling.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
