Overhauling the R&D and Product Design for a Telecom Equipment Manufacturer’s Core Product

One of the company’s core products is a generic hardware and infrastructure server platform designed to host one or more telecom applications and provide reliable and scalable services. Unfortunately, the products had a number of prior software-related problems, which undermined their quality.

To address this, the company decided to overhaul the R&D for their switching and routing mechanisms, starting with a consolidation of the number of suppliers and production sites. 

The client came to Orion for this overhaul. Orion was already providing the customer with development and maintenance services, with a track record of being reliable partners. With the successful collaboration, the customer assigned Orion as an end-to-end partner for all the R&D activities.

Orion began by performing a complete knowledge transfer from the prior suppliers at short notice. In as little as two months, Orion concluded the knowledge transfer and took over full responsibility for the product design. Our team showed the client prompt and significant progress in terms of both product quality and new functionality, and then quickly embarked on an ambitious improvement program aimed at:

• Architecture analysis and deployment of systemized technical improvements such as a single-thread SNMP handler;
• Introduction of static analysis tools as part of the nightly build procedures;
• Improvement of the test coverage and automated test cases stability, including the implementation of a Continuous Integration framework.