This move further extends Kontron's in-house design services for customer applications by offering enhanced, complex software support, helping OEMs reduce time-to-market and improve application quality.

"Our software support does not stop at the hardware level. We see software design as a vital part of our portfolio that must be handled in a unified way by a global team that offers comprehensive software services to our customers," explains Kontron CTO Dirk Finstel. While continuing to offer local software support, the Kontron Global Software Design Center becomes the company's central service point for the handling of the increasingly complex software functionalities of customers' embedded computing solutions. "Purely as an example, in the future, virtualization will play a major role for our customers' applications. To fully benefit from these often multi-core-based architectures, it is vital to have vast expertise in this field for all relevant operating systems," says Finstel. With customers continually seeking a reduced time-to-market, the team will also offer application-ready solution bundles and an extended variety of dedicated platforms for multiple vertical market segments. The Software Design Center will also provide services such as, the porting of drivers and middleware, the porting, adoption and validation of target software applications and the validation of the entire hardware and software solution.