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Q&A: Wind River's Rick Anderson on hypervisor, open source, extending life of ATMs

In this first in a series on the next-gen ATM, we spoke to Rick Anderson, delivery director at Wind River Systems, to learn more about his company's contribution to the initiative.

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October 29, 2019

In late 2018, the ATM Industry Association launched the next-gen API app model for ATMs. A consortium of more than 180 global ATM companies participated in the development of the next-gen model. In this article, which marks the first in a series on the next-generation ATM, we spoke to Rick Anderson, delivery director at Wind River Systems, to learn more about his company's contribution to the initiative.

Q: What does Wind River do? 

A: We specialize in embedded software for planes, trains, mobile phones, medical equipment and the oil and gas industry. And more and more we're looking at the financial industry to see how we can help with things like ATMs and point-of-sale equipment.

Q: When did you start getting involved with the ATM industry? 

A: About two years ago we were approached by the ATM Industry Association. They wanted to bring in some fresh ideas for their next-gen ATM push. We have been consulting with them and trying to see how we can take lessons from other industries and apply them to this industry.

Q: You've mentioned hypervisor in the past. How does that fit in?

Wind River brought the hypervisor concept to the ATMIA as a potential solution to extend the life of Windows 7-based ATMs. We believe it's a good solution. Although, if you go back two years, it was almost a little too late. A lot of banks had already started the process of migrating to Windows 10 and certainly, the ATM manufacturers had all already started engineering work on a next-gen solution. 

I think if we had gotten involved a little bit earlier, there could've been a real opportunity to deploy that solution at the manufacturing level. As of right now, it's a technology that we might be able to use in the future, but I'm not sure how much it's going to help with the current migration.

Q: Isn't KAL Software also doing something with hypervisor?

A: KAL was one of the early companies that we spoke to about that, and subsequently they developed their own hypervisor solution based on our discussions. 

Q: How does open-source benefit the next-gen ATM? 

A: The minute you start creating solutions that are open, not just open source but open, you spur innovation in the industry. What that will mean for ATM end users is they will see new features in ATMs beyond just financial transactions. They'll potentially be able to buy movie tickets, pay for parking or pay bills via the ATM.

There'll be a whole set of new features for ATM deployer as well, things like better inventory management, the ability to download software over the air to update their ATMs, better alerting around errors and security threats, and so on.  

All that innovation will create a whole new set of software that could be deployed by something that will look a lot like Google Play or Apple Play, where you go to grab apps for your mobile phone. So hopefully the ATM appliance will become more useful, and that should create value and make the ATM more important.

Q: So, your company works mainly with Linux?

A: Our primary product is actually a real-time operating system called VxWorks. This is a hard real-time operating system, which means if you're in an airplane and you need to increase the speed, it's guaranteed to work. It's not like your PC at home that gets around to it when it feels like it.

Our VxWorks product is appropriate for systems that have to react immediately, and the ATM really isn't that way. That's where our other operating system, Wind River Linux, comes into play.

Wind River Linux is a open source version of Linux. Anybody can download it from our website. And it is a long-term supported version. So Wind River will support that for 10 to 15 years, which is absolutely perfect for the ATM industry, because you won't have to upgrade your OS again in six years like you have to do with Windows.

Q: In a nutshell, can you describe Linux?

For the lay person, it is just another OS. And different operating systems are tailored for different things. Linux is a general purpose OS, but it has very much embraced the open source movement, and that has allowed for a lot of creativity. There are literally thousands of software applications, library, drivers, security packages and just about everything you can think of out there in the marketplace built with Linux.

That's one of the reasons hardware stays supported a lot longer under Linux. Because sometimes, even if there is just one guy out there who has hardware that is 30 years old, he is maintaining the software in open source, so everyone else can use it.