Market and Vision

The Connected World

The world is becoming more connected. Communications and mobile technologies are connecting people, societies, companies, brands, and ideas together in ways never before possible. These technologies are spreading far beyond their conventional uses in telecommunications - beyond mobile phones, networking equipment, or communications services from carriers.

Four major trends are driving the growth of the connected world:

User experience trumps functionality

Customers are demanding more intuitive, personalized, seamless, and meaningful experiences from all types of products and services.

More and smarter devices

The number of personal devices is growing, and the “Internet of Things” is becoming a reality. An increasing number of devices get connected to devices, and more devices get connected to the grid. More powerful and capable devices go hand-in-hand with sophisticated applications that create rich user experiences and new business opportunities.

Sophisticated and data-rich applications

More sophisticated and data-rich applications are spawning new product categories and placing new demands on networks.

Need for robust network and infrastructure

Communication networks must support an increasingly diverse array of uses, including rapidly growing trends such as machine-to-machine (M2M), which is expected to far surpass conventional phones in quantity of connected devices. In addition, Mobile IP traffic is growing at over 90% each year, and overall global IP traffic is growing at 4x.

Our Mission

To imagine, humanize, and build the connected world.

Innovation Services for the Connected World

The Aricent Group provides a unique portfolio of services for innovators that are poised to capitalize on the historic market opportunity presented by the connected world. We:

• Envision what's possible, translating emerging trends and technologies into viable product and service concepts as well as business models
• Prototype, create, and commercialize new products and services
• Test, support, and sustain products and entire product lines
• Optimize back-end systems and service operations

We offer the following capabilities

• Consumer Insights
• Innovation Strategy
• Product and Experience Design
• Product Development
• Systems Integration
• Software Frameworks
• Testing
• Maintenance & Support

As the connected world is becoming more integral to consumers' everyday lives, the ability to bring innovative connectivity-enabled products and services to market in an expeditious fashion has become a strategic imperative for companies across a variety of industries and geographies. Success is less about lowering costs and more about identifying and delivering feature-rich products and services that create a satisfying user experience.

Healthcare, energy, banking, and automotive are just some of the industries that are increasingly relying on connectivity to create value for customers. These trends are also pushing exponentially larger amounts of data onto networks. Network equipment makers, carriers, and device and software makers are constantly introducing product and service innovations to push the bandwidth envelope and enhance user experiences in order to stay relevant and competitive.

This leads to accelerated innovation cycles, and the need for a more holistic and agile approach to innovation and product development. Companies face intense pressure to innovate more effectively and efficiently to build meaningful relationships with their customers in the connected world. Success for companies is much less defined by lowering costs and increasingly by identifying and acting on strategic benefits across the organization. Moving into new markets, speeding up development cycles, creating brand loyalty, and enabling top-line growth - these are the new imperatives today.

We address the key innovation challenges of the CMO, CTO, and CIO:

• CMO: How do we differentiate and compete? How do we stay relevant to our customers? What should our offering roadmap be?
• CTO: How do we make the right strategic choices and investments in technologies that will keep us relevant and competitive?
• CIO: How do we optimize our internal systems to keep costs down and help our people be most productive?

Our key differentiators are

• Deep engineering, technical, and implementation expertise in communications technologies and related technologies at the nexus of equipment, content, device, and service provider ecosystems
• World-class consulting, design, and engineering services that collectively address the innovation challenges faced by CTOs, CMOs, and CIOs, and span all stages of the product lifecycle
• Integrated global delivery model that seamlessly combines consulting, design, and engineering capabilities in order to bring ideas to market
• Decades of experience in multiple verticals that are relying on connectivity

Integrated Delivery - A Recipe against “Innovation Erosion”

One of the key pain points for companies is the so-called “innovation erosion.” Innovation erosion compromises the integrity of the original design idea and experiential quality of the product. It typically occurs during the hand-offs in the traditional stage-gate product development process. Many things can go wrong, get misunderstood, or be watered down when moving from strategic planning to design to development and delivery. Preventing innovation erosion is what separates game-changing products from mediocre ones.

What distinguishes the Aricent Group is our unique ability to address innovation erosion. We do this with an integrated delivery model that combines strategy, design, and development capabilities in a seamless process covering all stages of the product development lifecycle.

This model treats the core disciplines in the product development process as “connected tracks,” which speeds up time to market and keeps the level of innovation high throughout. The efficiencies of this approach reduce operational costs and maximize R&D spending.

Innovation on a Global Scale

We have more than 10,000 employees at 36 locations worldwide. Besides our corporate offices in New Jersey, we have teams in development centers, design studios, and sales offices on all five continents, both in innovation clusters such as Silicon Valley, Shanghai, London, or Munich, and in low-cost locations. Our strong local presence exposes us to emerging local consumer and technology trends. It also provides us with close proximity to our clients and gives us a high degree of flexibility in deploying designers and engineers to quickly scale projects and assemble local and global project teams based on the client's specific requirements.