I am sitting in my living room, the only lights around me are those of the Christmas tree and further away those of the nativity that we have setup over our piano. 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 that 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, to better 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, and, it is an undeniable fact, we are by far the most innovative company in this domain. Beside, our team has a track record in 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, the spin-off could have not been possible without the support and trust that was put in our team by ADLINK and TTTech-Auto – thus, at the end of the year my thoughts and gratitude goes to our investors, shareholders, business and technological partners.
From a product perspective, 2022 has some important highlights for Cyclone DDS and Zenoh.
Cyclone is a DDS implementation we decided to rewrite from scratch a few years ago to capitalize the experience 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 make Cyclone DDS the first European DDS implementation to be certified and ready 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, to make sure that 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 provides unified 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, an extremely efficient discovery protocol and 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, where we had some extremely powerful 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 to solve the problem faced by the latter when running on wireless networks or trying to scale communication across multiple robots.
- Zenoh had several commercial deployments in 2022, in Robotics and beyond. To name a few, Zenoh has been deployed on AGV, Agricultural Robots, PLCs, Distributed Analytics Applications.
- We have started the work to certify Zenoh-Pico toward ISO-26262 ASIL D certification.
Finally, 2022 was a year of organic growth for ZettaScale. We were glad to be able to hire so many talents coming from across the globe to join our team. It is extremely inspiring to see a team of extremely talented and committed people working together to make the difference. We are set for further growth in 2023 and look forward to seeing many more talents joining our team – thus 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. It will be an extremely important year for us, and we are looking forward to playing at the highest level.
Take Care,
Angelo
P.S.
But how many of you know that the beginning of the year wasn’t always in January? The names of some the months are telltales of a different past. Telltales that should be easily visible to those of you that studied Latin or speak a Latin language. In case you’ve not realized it yet, September, October, November and December literally means the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th month. As a consequence, at some point in time, the year used to begin on Mars. January became the first month in 46 AC when the Julius Caesar Calendar was introduced — a system that lasted until the XVI century when the Gregorian calendar was adopted.
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