Qualphone’s tech to be embedded in Qualcomm

Sufia Tippu
Tuesday, 22 August 2006 19:29

IT Industry - Market

Isaac Eteminan, is frazzled and tired but a happy man. In his Bangalore visit, the president and CEO of Qualphone Inc, which was recently acquired by CDMA giant, Qualcomm for $18 million, has been talking to his development center employees and tying up all the loose ends of the latest Qualcomm acquisition.
In an exclusive interview with iTWire, the Azerbijan-born Eteminan, who has been living in the US for the past 28 years, says that his company has been working with Qualcomm since early 2006 and that this acquisition is the logical outcome of Qualphone's and Qualcomm’s common goal of simplifying the deployment of 3G services around the world.

Working on IP multimedia subsystems, the San-Diego-based Qualphone has a development center in Bangalore with 35 skilled engineers working on the cutting edge of technology in the core protocol and middleware software space. The development center in Rome has 65 engineers.

The company which clocked revenue of $7 million last year will be touching $10 million this year. It has operations in Spain, France, UK and Germany too.

Simply put, IP multimedia subsystem works this way: Imagine you walk into your office and your mobile phone starts behaving exactly the way your PC does – locking onto the same IP network, able to deliver the same applications -- combining voice and media.

“There are some applications which run on laptops and PC, say like video streaming or multiplayer gaming. Our IP multimedia stack as well as our middleware software allows us the flexibility to move from the cellular network (of the mobile phone) to the IP network (of the office or home environment) effortlessly,” explains Eteminan.

The company has two divisions - one, a product team which works on protocol stacks and middleware and the other being a chipset/handset Interoperability testing and services business. It has had a unique business model - it is able to take up an entire project – right from product design and take it to the deployment stage – with field handset field testing thrown in too.

With a strong foothold in the EU market, the company has been working with handset vendors and operators. The 3G/IP multimedia embedded client framework is customized to suit individual needs of the operators in the EU. “Today, the European market has matured to a great extent and looking for innovative (read convenient) ways to access rich/media content on mobile devices,” he adds.

Talking about the evolution of CDMA and GSM, he says that when compared to the GSM, the CDMA evolution has been much faster with CDMA1x/EVDO deployment. The WCDMA deployment is perhaps the evolution for the GSM operators going to be the future. This is richer than GSM technologies and we will be seeing more of this being deployed by the GSM service providers,” he added.