The following article was excerpted in its entirety from the Incisor Wireless in California Special Issue
A7 Profiled by Incisor for "Wireless in California"
A7 Engineering designs smart solutions for smart devices
A7 Engineering (A7) is a company that found its way to market through a group of engineers deciding to pool their expertise in embedded engineering and education. A7 is privately held and was incorporated in early 2002 with a focus on Windows Embedded professional engineering services and training. “From the beginning our philosophy has been to help our customers to help themselves. Out of this basic idea has grown a suite of highly interconnected offerings including training to get customer staff up to speed on new technology, engineering services to assist with implementation, and OEM products to simplify the development process so that new designs can be brought to market more quickly.” said A7’s CEO Randy W. Moore.
Incisor visited the company’s offices in Poway (just North of San Diego), and met with Chief Executive Officer Randy W. Moore, Chief Technical Officer Bryan Hall (ex-Widcomm) and Director of Engineering Larry Mittag.
A7 is highly focused on Windows Embedded as evidenced by its engineering services and training offerings. Software engineers are trained from a global customer base with the majority of training focused on Windows CE, including Pocket PC and Smartphone. Microsoft, Intel and Qualcomm number amongst its clients. This training activity provides A7 with unique insight to the thinking and goals of its customers, enabling the creation of innovative solutions to their problems.
Since its inception the business has grown quickly allowing A7 to develop a broad vision for its OEM products. “A7 is a Microsoft Windows Embedded Partner and we are deeply involved in the Windows Mobile world,” said Moore. “We have extensive knowledge of Microsoft’s .Net strategy and it has become a core theme for us.” A7 firmly believes that most long-term advances will be in the area of web services. “The convergence of three areas – web services, embedded systems, and desktop/mobile computing – is unquestionably one of the most important sectors, and it is happening now. With our extensive Windows Embedded experience, A7 is in a unique position to take full advantage of the opportunities that this technology shift presents” said Moore.
With its core philosophy in mind A7’s OEM products are focused on solving real world problems for its customers. “While the full power of the Microsoft .Net strategy will not be realized until the release of Longhorn (the next version of Windows), with EmbeddedBlue we have already begun to release products centred on connectivity to low cost devices”, said Hall. The first few Bluetooth products released by A7 are designed to interface seamlessly with low cost microcontrollers such as the Microchip PIC, ZWorld Rabbit, and Parallax Basic Stamp. Hall went on to say, “The current generation of EmbeddedBlue designs are just the tip of the iceberg for A7, but they illustrate the basic goal of solving complex problems for our customers. By fully embedding the Bluetooth stack into our modules and providing detailed connectivity samples for PCs, PDAs, and cell phones, our customers are able to get their designs up and running in hours rather than weeks or months.”
When asked about the initial choice of Bluetooth technology to solve these connectivity issues, Moore said “The U.S. has been lagging behind the rest of the world in adopting Bluetooth, but from our early-market experience we knew that Bluetooth would be big. We were servicing customers outside of the U.S. that were working with Bluetooth and could see clear solutions to their problems.” He went on to say, “Bluetooth provides plenty of scope for A7 to add value for clients due to its complexity. Other standards, such as ZigBee and RFID are by their nature simpler, with less scope for us. We are more interested in the prospects for Wireless USB, 802.11, and - later - UWB. As co-existence between wireless technologies becomes more commonplace, we have plenty of scope to work on interoperability.”
Because it offers OEM solutions that can be integrated with minimal engineering costs, A7 often deals with customers shipping products in the hundreds or low thousands of units. These types of products operate on a very different economic scale than high volume Bluetooth devices and therefore present unique challenges. One problem singled out by Moore is the expense of certification. “The costs are the same for a small company designing a low volume product as for a major manufacturer creating a cell phone. We have customers that will develop niche products with a total development budget of less than $200,000. At current levels Bluetooth certification will use up 10 – 15% of that pretty easily and can drive customers to proprietary RF solutions even though Bluetooth technically is a better choice.”
As is often the case, A7’s physical location was determined as much by the roots of its founders as any other factor. That said, the company feels that California still has plenty to offer IT companies, and singles out its own, Southern-Californian base as being at the heart of a wireless centre of excellence. Moore commented, “With companies such as Broadcom, Qualcomm, and Silicon Wave operating out of San Diego, there is a very valuable pool of wireless engineering excellence in this area.” That said, Moore feels that traditional factors relating to location are changing. “The electronic age means that 90% or more of our business is done online. Those customers that don’t come to us from partner recommendations have normally found us on the web.”
A7 was founded by a team of talented people working towards a common goal and that philosophy has stuck with the business. This was confirmed by Moore, who concluded ‘When I look at A7 I believe that Neil Simon was describing our team with his definition of talent - "Talent is the gift plus the passion - a desire to succeed so intense that no force on earth can stop it."’
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For further information:
A7 Engineering - http://www.a7eng.com
