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Before the Dawn of IP Telephony - Part 26
Avoiding the pitfall of material selection (spring 2002)
These contents translated a serialization article carried by ITPro IP telephony ONLINE published by Nikkei Business Publications, Inc. Jump to the original (Japanese).
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However, developing products using only your company's technologies is extremely inefficient in terms of expanding product lineup. How do you make parts that are procured from the outside "controllable?"
As a result, part vendors that we still do business with are vendors that are willing to disclose the weaknesses and tendencies of their products. In other words, they are partners that together with OKI, aim for higher quality products by reinforcing their weaknesses. There is no way to reproduce an event that rarely occurs and to clarify the faulty location without the cooperation of both parties.
Doing business with part vendors that are not willing to provide immediate help unless hard evidence is thrown at them, do not last long. When creating services that use a new concept such as VoIP, the relationship of being open to one another and providing support by directly facing the facts is very important. And not just between device vendors and part vendors, I believe this is also true for the relationship between telecommunication carriers and device vendors.
(3) Use your company's original technologies for key elements, especially parts related to voice quality and signal processing
Photo 2 : Yoshihiro Ariyama, a specialist in fax and modem signals on IP networks
I believe this is the most important point. At that time, many products were expected to be released, and we examined the implementation of not only our own technologies but technologies of other companies as well. With the addition of requests from the Procurement Department, we examined many technologies of other companies. However, I came to the decision that there is one technology that we need on our own. It was the technology related to voice packet processing.
Unfortunately, a technology that meets all of the conditions required for narrowband and broadband, voice quality that is not dependent on signal attributes such as faxes and modems, simply did not exist. There were some technologies that were partially superior. However, they simply ignored other necessary functions. Although we had products using other companies' technologies to expand OKI's product lineup in around 2000, more and more parts had to be modified or recreated ourselves.
This summer marks the 10th year since the development of the first VoIP product. Integration of fixed telephones and cellular phones, and application of IP in telephone networks have become the trend of telecommunication carriers. And we were slowly starting to hear a demand for a stable, rich communication on IP networks. It was then that we decided to commercialize the advanced voice quality technology we have accumulated into a product called "eSound." I feel that this is the result of our commitment to develop our own technology.
In the next episode, I will introduce an example of development in 2002 after such lessons were learned. It is the development of a full indoor device for telecommunication carriers. It was another hot summer that I will never forget.
... To be continued
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