You’ve almost certainly heard by now that Veritas Capital is to acquire GE’s embedded computing business—and you’ve almost certainly wondered why we haven’t addressed that particular elephant in the room on the Connected Battlefield.

There are two reasons for that. First: the fat lady hasn’t yet sung. While we have every expectation that the acquisition will complete, until such time as it does, we are still part of GE. And the second? The second is that there are still questions to be answered—not least among which is “What will the new company be called?”

But there are questions that we can answer.

The first and perhaps most important question we can answer is, What changes? The answer to that in the short term is: Nothing. Our customers will still be dealing with the same people they always have done (all of our ~700 people will be making the move) with access to the same leading-edge products and services.

Our product strategy won’t change either. Our commitment to delivering to our customers the latest open, industry standard hardware and software technologies remains unwavering. And we’ll be bringing some amazing innovations with us, such as cooling technologies that we think can provide us with ways of delivering previously unthinkable rugged solutions to our customers. Our fundamental value proposition won’t change.

Our focus on the military/aerospace, industrial and other markets won’t change either—we plan to bring our experience and expertise at providing ruggedly robust embedded computing solutions for mission critical applications to all markets that demand them.

Something else that won’t change are the good things we’ll bring with us from GE. High on that list is a total commitment to ethics. We’ll also be bringing a GE-trained team of talented, highly skilled and dedicated people. Robust business processes will also make the transition.

So what will change? Perhaps the most important thing is that we will become a pure-play embedded computing company, with the freedom to do what’s right for our embedded computing customers. We’ll be optimizing all our programs and services to be responsive to their needs. We’ll no longer have to think about whether what we do will fit within the bigger scheme of things. Instead, we’ll be able to take a “no compromise” approach to getting it right for our customers.

Add that to what our customers liked about working with GE—our people, our technologies, our hardware and software products, our support programs and our integrity—and we think we’ll have a pretty compelling proposition that our customers will benefit from.

Going home

What I can tell you is that, collectively, we’re very excited about the future. While it will of course be a wrench to leave the mothership, we know that we have the opportunity to do something new, and that everything we do can and will make a real difference. It’ll be like a fresh start—except that we’ll have 30 years of history and experience and expertise behind us, with an infrastructure that will be the envy of many companies.

It will be fun to be a “small” company (whether you can be a “small” company with around 700 employees is, I guess, open to debate) again. Don’t forget: GE’s embedded computing business was built largely around the acquisition of two “small” companies—Radstone and SBS—so, for many of us, it will be like going home. “Small” companies are typically nimbler, more flexible, more adaptable to changes in technology and changes in the market and, most importantly, more easily able to respond to specific customer needs.

As we find out more—as more of those questions start to find answers—I’ll be sure to share that new information with you. (And if you have any questions, please feel free to comment below and ask us.) In summary, though: we couldn’t be more excited and enthused about what the future holds. We have a real opportunity here to do things differently and better, to the benefit of our customers, and we plan to grasp it with both hands.
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