Stephan Dubach, Co-Founder, Toradex and Global CEO, Toradex Group
Toradex offers rugged and compact ARM-based System on Modules (SoMs) and Customized SBCs. Powered by NVIDIA Tegra 2, Tegra 3 and Tegra K1 processors and NXP i.MX 6, i.MX 7 & Vybrid, the pin-compatible SoMs offer scalability in terms of price, performance, power consumption, and I/Os. complemented with direct online sales and long-term product availability. Stephan Dubach, Co-Founder, Toradex and Global CEO, Toradex Group shares his growth and product plans with ELE Times. Excerpts.
ELE Times: What, according to you, is the key USP of Toradex?ELE Times: What, according to you, is the key USP of Toradex?
Stephan Dubach: Toradex is offering the lowest total cost of ownership (TOC) to its customers. This includes, but is not limited to:
Pin-compatible product families allowing for scalable application in multiple products.
In-house software development and robust BSPs validated in countless 24/7 industrial applications.
All Toradex products come with professional free support by our local teams allowing fastest time to market.- Complimentary lifetime product maintenance for hardware and software.
ELE Times: How does Toradex compare to the likes of RaspberryPi?
Stephan Dubach: Toradex’s SoMs are ideally suited for industrial application, i.e. built from embedded components, ruggedized for harsh environment, and long-term availability for 10+ years. Toradex not only provides free lifetime product maintenance, but also a product change policy suitable for embedded products. Especially for medical application, as this is a substantial factor of the TCO.
ELE Times: What are your plans for your product portfolio? Any specific product launches?
Stephan Dubach: Toradex is both a customer and technology driven company. Our direct sales model provides us with highly valuable direct customer feedback which we combine with our proven technical and market expertise to develop future offerings for the embedded industry.
Our goal is to provide off-the-shelf products to a broad and global customer base in order to allow our customers in fragmented embedded markets to benefit from economies of scale.
ELE Times: As you stated at Embedded World 2017 that Toradex is a great place to work. Could you elaborate?
Stephan Dubach: Toradex is built upon cross-functional and, at the same time, multicultural industry experts. This composition provides a large pool of ideas and experiences, but also broadens the viewpoint of individual employees.
Another reason to work at Toradex is the startup-spirit which we have preserved even after being 14 years in the business.Employees do enjoy the very flat company hierarchy, allowing them to take more responsibility for decision-making and very actively contributing to the success of the company. It makes working at Toradex exciting and diverse.
ELE Times: What would you say is your prime expertise area in Software?
Stephan Dubach: Since Toradex develops both the Hardware and the Operating Systems (Linux and Windows Embedded) in-house, our customers can build their product upon a computing platform with premium performance and true industrial robustness.
Optimized boot times of less than half a second, Toradex‘s main line contribution or Early Access to upcoming SoCs and/or Operating Systems are just a few examples of our expertise. Ultimately, the customer has one single trusted contact for all his embedded computing needs.
ELE Times: What is your take on Android for embedded systems?
Stephan Dubach: I assume you are talking about Android Things: This is certainly an interesting approach. We are monitoring the situation and are in contact with our major suppliers about this. However, we haven’t decided on any concrete action at the moment as we want to see how it develops over the next months.
ELE Times: What are your key growth markets across the world?
Stephan Dubach: Toradex has been building up a global presence in all key markets. From a growth perspective, we see strong markets in US and Europe, both regions driving IoT and Industry 4.0. There are other geographical areas which either have a lower adoption rate of SoM yet or where the embedded market does not have a significant share of the economy. Looking at the potential of such countries like China, India, and Brazil we do estimate their future growth potential to be even larger when compared to the US or Europe, for example.
ELE Times: What is your planned roadmap until 2018?
Stephan Dubach: Some of our new products to come are a Colibri iMX6 ULL (optionally with Wi-Fi and BT), furthermore, we are partnering again with NXP to bring their latest i.MX 8-based SoCs to our system on modules. We will bring the i.MX 8QuadMax onto our Apalis form factor and plan samples in Q1 2018. We will also have a Colibri module based on i.MX8X which will be available probably mid of 2018. All new products are fully pin-compatible with our other modules of the respective module family.
