I am sitting in my living room with the Christmas tree lights around me. At home, everyone else is sleeping, even my dogs, who are laying just beside me. I am awake, listening to the TOOL, as I like to do in my late night thinking and working sessions. In less than 24 hours there will be a new year, it will be 2023. This is the occasion for me to sit down and review, as in slow motion, the key highlights of the year that just passed and project myself into the new year and review our goals.
But getting back to this 2022, I can say that it was definitely eventful.
The year started with the frenetic activities to finalize the investment and industrial partnership with TTTech-Auto. This eventually led to the birth of ZettaScale, precisely six (6) months ago.
We had decided to spin-off ZettaScale to accelerate the growth of our team. It would also serve our users and establish ZettaScale as the leader in communication software for Robotics and Automotive applications. I know that this sounds bold, but this is our ambition and the goal that every single Zettler is working extremely hard at achieving. Some of our competitors have a head start on the market and are bigger today. But we have far better products. We are leading with extremely cool new technologies. It is an undeniable fact that we are by far the most innovative company in this domain. Besides, our team has a track record of providing unparalleled support to customers in some of the most challenging applications — our users know that they can always count on us, especially in hard times.
Once again, ADLINK and TTTech-Auto made the spin-off possible by putting their support and trust in our team. At the end of the year, my thoughts and gratitude go to our investors, shareholders, business, and technological partners.
2022 highlights for Cyclone DDS and Zenoh
We decided to rewrite Cyclone, a DDS implementation, from scratch a few years ago. We wanted to capitalize on the experience we gathered in over 20 years of working with DDS. Cyclone is the most modern, performant, and secure DDS implementation on the market. This past year was rather important for Cyclone DDS since:
- We made very good progress toward ISO-26262 ASIL D certification. This will certify Cyclone DDS as the first European DDS implementation. It’ll prepare to be embedded in the most critical components of an automotive system.
- We continued to grow Cyclone’s adoption in Robotics. The main drive being that, as many users have reported – when other DDS implementations struggle, Cyclone simply works!
- We launched the first commercially supported edition of Cyclone. Our users can leverage some productivity tools and be supported by a strong SLA
Let’s move to Zenoh – a protocol that is set to disrupt the world of connectivity. Zenoh is the only protocol on the market that unifies abstractions for data in motion and data at rest from the data center down to the microcontroller. It has a wire-overhead of only 5 bytes and an extremely efficient discovery protocol. It has incredible performance on high-end as well as extremely constrained hardware and networks. This past year was extremely eventful for Zenoh:
- We ran an extremely successful User Meeting in June. We had presentations from users, including Zenoh’s use in autonomous trains!
- Zenoh imposed itself as the protocol for swarming, teleoperation and in general R2X (Robot-to-Anything) communication in the ROS2 ecosystem.
- As a result of an extremely positive evaluation of Zenoh from Open Robotics, Zenoh was proposed as an alternative to DDS for RMW implementation. In other terms, Zenoh was recommended as an alternative to DDS. It solves the problem faced by the latter when running on wireless networks or trying to scale communication across multiple robots.
- Zenoh saw several commercial deployments in 2022, in Robotics and beyond. To name a few, companies deployed Zenoh on AGVs, Agricultural Robots, PLCs, and Distributed Analytics Applications.
- We have started working to certify Zenoh-Pico for ISO-26262 ASIL D certification.
Finally, 2022 brought a year of organic growth for ZettaScale. We were glad to hire so many talented individuals from across the globe. It is extremely inspiring to see a team of highly talented and committed people working together to make a difference. We are set for further growth in 2023 and look forward to welcoming even more talents to our team – so if you are interested, reach out!
I want to conclude this 2022 memorandum by wishing all of you a 2023 full of health, joy, and success. The coming year will be extremely important for us, and we look forward to playing at the highest level.
Take Care,
Angelo
P.S.
But how many of you know that the year didn’t always begin in January? The names of some months tell the story of a different past. It’s a story that should be easily visible to those of you who studied Latin or speak a Latin language. In case you haven’t realized it yet, September, October, November, and December literally mean the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th month. As a result, the year once began in March. Julius Caesar introduced January as the first month in 46 BC with the Julian Calendar — a system that lasted until the 16th century when the Gregorian calendar replaced it.