Case Studies - Natural Convergence

The Client

Natural Convergence was the first company to release hosted Voice over IP (VoIP) software that enables service providers to deliver call handling and voice messaging functionality designed expressly for small business users. Their ‘silhouette’ hosted key system application opens the door for a complete suite of services to be delivered over a single broadband connection without the need for on-site equipment. The award-winning Natural Convergence silhouette application offers attractive cost and performance advantages as a replacement for the 32 million aging key systems in use today.

With service providers now delivering silhouette-enabled VoIP services to over 10,000 users globally, Natural Convergence is well positioned to continue its aggressive growth and leadership position in this large new market.

Design and Development of Silhouette 1.0

Project Description:

Natural Convergence’s founders recognized the huge opportunity to provide a VoIP software solution that was focused on both the needs of business users with fewer than 50 lines and the needs of the service provider channels that could provide hosted services to those businesses. “We saw the opportunity and had the blueprint for a winning business model,” states co-founder and CEO David Cork. “As with most start-ups, however, we faced the classic chicken or egg dilemma: we needed funding to build the product, but investors wanted to see real customer commitment and customers couldn’t commit until we could demonstrate a product. There were a number of potential competitors sniffing around this market each with a different business model, so the race was on.”

To beat competitors to this potentially explosive market, Natural Convergence needed to rapidly and economically develop a prototype, secure those all-important first customer commitments and raise financing. Once those hurdles were passed, they needed to deliver a commercial solution as quickly as possible. The company was committed to building a world-class R&D capability in-house but needed a way to accelerate the delivery of its first product while ramping up that in-house team.

“For this type of carrier-grade product, we need to satisfy stringent vendor qualification requirements covering technology, management and process. It typically takes at least 18-24 months to build a productive R&D group with the maturity of process required to meet those requirements,” continues Cork.

The bitHeads Solution:

Facing an 18 month R&D ramp-up period, Cork and his management team turned to bitHeads and their ProductStream™ product development partnership approach. This partnership shared 2 pragmatic goals : to accelerate the delivery of a robust product by using an iterative development model and in parallel to speed up the process of establishing an in-house R&D organization.

“bitHeads had highly relevant experience in helping two of the pioneers of the VoIP PBX industry when they were building their first product. That expertise plus their reputation for reliable delivery made them the best choice for this type of assignment,” says Cork.

One of bitHeads’ executive team was engaged almost immediately to act as Natural Convergence’s virtual CTO for the first six months. He was instrumental in advising on product architecture and played an integral part in early efforts to secure initial customers and investors. With seed funding in hand, a bitHeads team was rapidly deployed to develop the first working prototype.

In the second phase, the bitHeads team was given full responsibility to evolve the prototype into the first commercial version of the silhouette product. bitHeads provided a complete team to manage all aspects of the development cycle, including architecture, project management, software development and quality assurance. The project tapped bitHeads expertise in a broad range of software technologies including Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), on which bitHeads is a recognized authority.

During the project, bitHeads helped build the in-house Natural Convergence team by assisting in the selection of key managers and providing the training and mentoring necessary to successfully transfer knowledge related to the product, technologies and development methodology.

Results:

With the virtual CTO from bitHeads providing R&D leadership, Natural Convergence was able to successfully engage seed investors and prospective early customers.

“In less than 3 months, the bitHeads ProductStream team successfully delivered a working prototype of our product that directly resulted in our first customer letter of intent, which in turn enabled us to close our series A financing round,” states Cork. “It was an incredibly rapid turn-around that laid the foundation for our success. There’s no way we could have achieved that with an off-shore supplier or other outsource provider. Only bitHeads had the technical expertise, methodology and team-based approach that made it possible.”

Following the successful prototype, the bitHeads team went on to deliver an award-winning product that was ready for customer market trials on time and on budget. “bitHeads saved us 18 months in our time to market and gave us the momentum we needed to attract early investors, customers and staff,” says Cork. “With their ProductStream service, bitHeads engaged with us as a true partner and contributed many of the key ingredients to our success.”

“Along with providing us the benefit of very rapid delivery of our first product and carrying the bulk of our R&D load for the first two years, bitHeads helped us ramp our in-house team by assisting us with key staff hires and effectively transitioning technical knowledge and methodology know-how to our new team,” adds Cork. “By mentoring us every step of the way, we never skipped a beat as we built the world-class in-house R&D capability that continues to drive us forward.”