RTC Magazine

When VDC Research Group surveyed 50 medical/healthcare OEMs for the medical module of its 2010 embedded hardware demand-side research in Q2 of 2010, the medical customers were asked about their current and expected future utilization of outsourced embedded computer platforms. Medical OEMs are certainly big-time users of merchant embedded platforms. Ninety-six percent of the medical customers surveyed were already outsourcing some portion of the embedded computers used in the medical equipment they were building. And the majority of these OEMs expected that in five years time they would be outsourcing a greater percentage of their embedded computers to merchant third-party embedded suppliers.

The main reasons that the medical customers cited for outsourcing their embedded compute platforms rather than building them in-house were meeting cost reduction and time-to-market acceleration goals. Customers in the medical vertical market are under extreme cost containment pressure and must implement highly efficient product development models to remain competitive, which is driving their adoption of merchant/outsourced embedded computers.