1. This time last year, it seemed Vita was being torn apart by the row over VPX. By the end of the year, everything was all smiles. How much behind the scenes work did you do personally to achieve that?

I did some work to get people to come together. I have connections with the management of the top companies. It made sense for them to let everyone be involved with this. I just held a mirror up on what they were doing and let them get on with it. I have to make sure that everyone is treated fairly and sometimes that can get in the way. That is why things were taken outside of Vita to speed things up and then came back into Vita, which is what happened. It is now nearly ready to go to Ansi for ballot. We got it done.

2. Once Vita was all about buses and boards but you changed that to put the emphasis on critical embedded systems. Why?

If you look at the boards business, a number of markets have become commoditised, notably in telecoms where everything has ended up being low volume and low margins. The industrial market has also become commoditised. The medical market used to use backplanes and boards but now they just use motherboards.

I wanted Vita to concentrate on the very high quality and high reliability segment, where there is true engineering value being added. That is why we are now about critical embedded systems. I am looking at things like the military market or well drilling, where the equipment has to work in extreme conditions. We are now focused on critical applications that require a lot of engineering and reliability.

We are focused on equipment with a lifetime of at least 15 years. There is no margin in the commodity stuff. There is very little engineering value added in telecoms and other areas. We avoid those segments like the plague.

We have tremendous engineering talent in Vita, people that can tackle difficult problems and make equipment run forever. That’s where the market is, that’s where the self esteem is.

3. The VME bus has been around for more than 25 years. How much longer can it last?

It is a long-tail market. There are a lot of legacy systems out there. The military are not going to rip out chassis and do upgrades every 18 months. The chassis will stay in the tank or helicopter and they’ll just put in the latest processor. That’s what keeps VME strong. There are hundreds and hundreds of projects just in the military where VME will stay for a very long time. VME is stable. It will continue for at least another ten to 15 years.

4. You claim to be a general irritant to the technology industry. In what way?

I challenge people. I am never happy about where we are. Things may be good now but that doesn’t mean they will be good enough for the next three years.

I also upset people over the patents issue. We would design stuff and develop specifications and then have patents served against us. I kept having to fight this so I went to the Ministry of Justice and got them to make it mandatory for companies to tell us about any patents if they sat in a VME meeting. So there is now mandatory patent disclosure. That happened four years ago and since then we have had eight patents disclosed.

I gripe about lots of things in the market. Things like PCI Express, which is the worst interconnect in the market today. It is an IO channel and people are trying to make it a multi-channel architecture. It is terrible.

5. What will be the next big thing in standards?

That will start this year, this month in fact. There are a lot of connectors for 10G Ethernet and people say how many of them will actually run at 10G and I say all of them, for about three inches [7.6cm] but they won’t propagate on a 19in backplane. There will be serious problems with copper at 10G. So we are going to start the process of developing an optical backplane standard. We have to go to optical. There is no other way round it.

We are also going to see a plug-and-play satellite bus. It takes forever to build a satellite, test it and launch it. So we need a standard to make this easier, and I think that will be optical. The same will happen with an avionics bus. These aren’t real buses, but glorified standard wiring harnesses. The US Navy and Honeywell are doing this. They want totally plug-and-play components for aircraft.

This will happen in all military systems. The military tell us they want the electronics in military systems to be capable of being repaired in 30 minutes using no tools and with no more than ten minutes training with everything capable of being carried by two people. That is what the military is asking from us. They want to pull a 1U chassis out and slot a new one in and that’s it.

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