We were pleased to see the news about the approval of the Ada 2012 Standard. This shows that there is ongoing interest in the use of this important language. Here at Rapita, we're big fans of Ada - with the exception of the UI (written in Java), our tools are written in Ada using AdaCore's excellent compiler. Our experience of using Ada has been overwhelmingly positive - as illustrated by one of my favourite anecdotes: after two years of working on the development of our tools, one of our developers had to ask how to use the debugger - he hadn't needed it before that point!
It was interesting to see that the one industry referenced (albeit indirectly) in the press release is aerospace: the release explicitly talked about how the new contract-based programming features work with the Object-Oriented supplement for DO-178C (DO-332). Ada isn't widely used in general embedded development (in the UBM Electronics Embedded Market Study it doesn't even appear in the list of programming languages), but we frequently come into contact with customers using Ada in aerospace - roughly half of our aerospace customers use Ada.
One more interesting point (especially for us) is that the Ravenscar profile (efficient and predictable tasking subset for high-integrity real-time systems), which was standardized in Ada 2005, is being extended to multiprocessor and multicore environments. This shows how Ada is moving forward to meet market needs as high-profile EU research projects into multiprocessor and multicore environments, such as parMERASA, gather pace in 2013.