Case Studies - Internetworking

A major communication equipment manufacturer in the United States saw a need to enter the emerging router segment as an extension of their WAN products and their enterprise networking solution offerings. Since the manufacturer did not have prior in-house experience in this area, it outsourced to us the task of conducting a market survey, identifying available routers and their features and to recommend the feature set to be developed for its routers. We were responsible for the software development and the porting of certain protocol source code baselines licensed from third-party vendors and from us. We also undertook integration, performance engineering, interoperability with other market products and reliability engineering. The customer simultaneously developed the router hardware based on Intel I960 processor and a VxWorks operating system. The Router supported various LAN protocols, and WAN interfaces and was manageable through SNMP. Several of these routers have been installed within the customer's existing customer base, representing a substantial additional revenue source for the customer.

The customer also developed various versions of the router in terms of hardware interface to cater to different segment of its client base. In all these instances we worked with the customer from a software development perspective - for instance, the Company developed a device with SNA connectivity options in the router. In 1995, the Tolly Group Industry Benchmark Report rated the product as "the best branch office solution for integrating SNA and IP traffic on networks that support mission critical applications", ahead of comparable products by other industry leaders.

A German network integrator involved in designing and installing narrowband and broadband networking solutions for customers in Europe and rest of the world had identified the need for a device with Multiple Protocol Switching capability, interfacing with networks and devices supporting a combination of X25, SDLC, PAD, etc. Since there was no equivalent product available in the market, the customer developed the hardware and low-level kernel for the equipment. We licensed, ported and customized its X25, SDLC products and then developed the remaining software to provide the required features.

The development process was tightly integrated, with several versions of the product built and released by the customer in Europe. The customer was extremely satisfied with the work done by us and subsequently set up a Dedicated Facility with us to handle its communications software development needs.

A major communication equipment manufacturer in Europe planned to provide Internet Protocol (IP) support in several of their existing and new telecommunications equipment. Having found our IP protocols suite appropriate for their requirements and being impressed with the our commitment to keep our products current, the customer licensed our IP products and also started a Dedicated Facility with us for the IP porting efforts. These development and porting efforts involve almost all the IP related products and also a host of upgrades as per the latest IETF standards.