To build successful services in today's market, you need broad capabilities beyond one technology discipline.
With today's mobile phones and tablet computers having the capability to play and record video, offer high speed connectivity, provide modern web browsing and apps for games and productivity, it is clear how important technology convergence is to both disrupting the technology industry's platforms (such as the desktop) and impacting the lives of millions of people in order to get more out of network-based services.
While advances towards net-centric systems have been steady for decades, we continue to see the world moving toward IP-based systems and replacing analog or proprietary protocols. For example, we have been designing telecommunication systems that provide Voice-over-IP (VoIP) services for large-scale customer deployments and fall-back to analog systems in cases where the pure VoIP client-to-provider IP networks experience failures.
The interesting aspect of the convergence toward IP is while standard protocols such as IP lower costs, they also have new considerations and trade-offs such as security, performance and information quality. Before, end customers were not necessarily directly exposed to worldwide potential threats with a phone.
With VoIP phones having an IP address, the concerns that we have with the data networks are now the concerns for the voice networks as well. Additionally, since the PSTN network was built for a more unified purpose, letting one person speak to another, not multiple competing purposes, call quality was easier to control since fewer resources were competing for the same bandwidth.
As modern network, software and hardware platforms subsume the old models of communication and previous types of systems, we believe that the need to engineer systems that transform old systems into new ones will require the type of broad capabilities and knowledge we offer our customers. It will take those able to solve these complex and transformative problems to change the services we rely on today into the ones we will rely on tomorrow.
