Alpharetta, GA, October 4, 2007 – Provaré Technology today announced that it has signed a contract with Scientific Atlanta, a Cisco company (NASDAQ: CSCO) to analyze and recommend improvements to the IPTV embedded software build environment. The effort will be performed as a fixed-price service for an undisclosed price.
“We are very pleased that Scientific Atlanta came to Provare for help in this case,” said Bill Tepper, CEO of Provaré Technology. “Although this task is small relative to some of our larger software testing and process improvement efforts, it will challenge us to put our reputation on the line in the critical area of software configuration management. We welcome the challenge and look forward to demonstrating to Scientific Atlanta – and others – that we are not merely competent, but in fact have unequaled CM knowledge and skill.”
Scientific Atlanta has decades of experience in the development of cable television hardware and applications and established itself as the gold standard in these and related technologies many years ago. It maintains that reputation in 2008.
One of the great advantages of having so much experience in cable television is that the Scientific Atlanta IPTV engineering team has the designs and implementation details of dozens of previous products – both hardware and software – to build upon when they apply their innovative excellence to this exciting new product line. In the case of IPTV, this fact has allowed new prototypes to be implemented, tested, and demonstrated very quickly.
The other side of this double-edged sword is that the software (and therefore the build system) for the IPTV product line has been assembled from a variety of sources, old and new. And while the resulting build system is perfectly functional, it may not be as seamless or maintainable as it will need to be in order to take the IPTV product into large-scale production – or to meet Scientific-Atlanta’s industry-leading standards for reliability, maintainability, and cutting-edge development techniques.
The objective of this first task will be to analyze the current build environment, first to determine whether any changes are required, and then to make recommendations as to how best to retool it to meet the current and future needs of the IPTV product line. Provaré CM specialists will be considering not only the tools used and their current configuration but also the opportunities for the adoption of new tools and techniques that have only recently become reliable enough to be used in a commercial application of this size.
“I suspect that our new friends at Scientific Atlanta is going to be blown away by the tools and techniques that are available today,” says Tepper. “If any of the constituent parts of the IPTV software are older than a handful of years, then there are going to be some truly exciting opportunities here. Once the IPTV team sees how relatively straightforward and inexpensive it is in 2007 to add such capabilities as test-driven development and continuous integration, the question as to whether it is worthwhile to make the investment will be settled.”
The new contract has no expiration date and allows Scientific Atlanta to take advantage of any combination of Provaré services.
About Provaré Technology
Founded in 2004, Provaré Technology is a provider of a variety of services crucial to the development and productive deployment of technology products. Provaré’s offerings include software test engineering, software configuration management (CM), process improvement, and product qualification services. Provaré staff members have decades of experience spanning all aspects of technology product development for space, defense, intelligence, telecom, wireless, point-of-sale, data warehousing, cable video, and internet access industries. For more information about products and services offered by Provaré Technology, please visit
https://www.provare.com/.
About Cisco
Cisco, (NASDAQ: CSCO), is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.
About Scientific Atlanta
Scientific Atlanta, a Cisco company, is a strategic supplier of digital content contribution and distribution systems, transmission networks for broadband access to the home, digital interactive set-tops and subscriber systems designed for video, high-speed Internet and voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) networks, and worldwide customer service and support. Scientific Atlanta, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Cisco Systems, Inc. More information about Scientific Atlanta is available at: http://www.scientificatlanta.com.
Contacts:
Bill Tepper, CEO
Provaré Technology
Phone: +1 (770) 814-4169
Jeremy Pullen
Manager, Embedded Development, IPTV
Scientific Atlanta
Phone: +1 (770) 236-1827