There is the viewpoint that use of special parts will lead to an ideal and most efficient design. However, I chose to use materials that were out in the market in large quantities rather than designing ideal, special parts since I felt it would be a quicker route when creating something so unclear in the period of uncertainty. When a product is released, opening a new market, there will be competition of developing special parts for the product and results in cutback of material cost. In other words, the possibility of creating in large quantities increases when decrease in material cost can be expected. Then, material cost decreases even further and enters a positive cycle. In such way, I first decided to use common parts and hoped for a positive cycle.

Use of materials that can be found in large quantities also works to an advantage when procuring materials. Since there is high possibility that materials can be found even when there is an increase in production volume, production lead time can be shortened. In addition, there is also the advantage of stable reliability since materials already with results in the market are used and quality of hardware can be maintained to a certain level.

Problem is conversion of hardware to software

Although everything seemed to work at our advantage, there is a major problem in the development of products using such common materials. It is the relocation of function assignment. When structuring a product using common materials, the function assignment will not always be ideal. For this reason, the pattern of function assignment structured by used materials must be relocated. For example, there may be the need to use software processing for something that was processed using hardware. This means using software to realize what was being achieved with hardware codec in terms of voice quality.

Normally, hardware engineers and software engineers have different roles. In order to create what was being achieved with hardware using software requires filling of a huge gap both technically and consciously. Creating something that was achieved by hardware up to then with software is more difficult than one might assume.

Key to success is to create all elemental technologies yourself

Despite the difficulty of turning hardware into software, we were able to accomplish the task. We believe there are two reasons for the success.

The first is that we had created all VoIP elemental technologies ourselves. Hence, we were fully aware of the systems and functions that were to be realized. In other words, there was no black box. For the required functions, we used technologies capable of creating the solution using hardware or software, enabling a smooth conversion of functions, using software instead of hardware. From signal process of VoIP to system development, we believed that our honest efforts had paid off.

The second is that the development organization of the project consisted of both hardware and software engineers. It was at the time when the concept of technical integration was being adopted within the company. As a result, we were able to flexibly assign roles for the project without being particular about the role assignment of the organization.

The development of "VA14" was completed in October 2001. It was an incredibly fast development of three months since launch.