TSY, or the Telephony Server is an essential component of any smartphone as it provides the link between the telephony hardware and the device's operating system. Taproot Systems Inc. is one of two independent companies (the other is the French company Atelier) who have TSY technology for the Symbian OS. And while the fact that TapRoot is working with TSY's is no accident the fact that they are Symbian OS focused owes as much to opportunity as it does to planning.

TapRoot was formed in 2000 by Blane Rockafellow, Andy Smoak, John Greene and Leo Ang, a group of veteran embedded systems software engineers. The company had a mission to serve the wireless and embedded market, and one of their early contracts involved work with the Symbian OS. The area of North Carolina where TapRoot is based is also home to Sony Ericsson's US headquarters, where a team had been working on a couple of Symbian OS projects, none of which were commercialized. Working in the same business space the two teams were known to one another and when the Sony Ericsson projects finished several key team members joined TapRoot giving Taproot a significant body of expertise in Symbian OS TSY's.

"We view ourselves very much as a Symbian partner and we have evolved much of our business around the telephony and networking components required to create a Symbian OS smartphone," says Hugh Thomas, TapRoot's CEO. "And while TSY's and other communication components are our key product and service focus, we also perform other low level service such a base porting and do get involved in application customization."

In addition to TSY, TapRoot is also seeing increased interest in its 802.11b products. "We see the US as leading in the development of WLAN, while cell phone innovation is very much the domain of the Europeans," says Hugh. "Our perception is that WLAN has the potential to be a disruptive technology, and as a result some see it as a threat to cellular, while others believe it offers the opportunity for new services." Hugh believes that adding WLAN to a handset opens up new possibilities in what a handset can do for its owner, he draws parallels with taking a laptop from a 9600 baud dial-up modem to Ethernet at 10 megabits per second, it changes the user's experience and what they do on their laptop. So switching from GPRS to WLAN, which gives the user a hundred fold increase in data throughput, opens up significant new opportunities for the way in which the handset can be used. "Two years ago, when we first demonstrated our 802.11b products the handset manufacturers clearly saw it as a threat. Eighteen months to a year ago we started to see some interest, as a possible replacement for Bluetooth or as a way to provide opportunities to do more through connections to a PC or network," says Hugh. "But in the last six months it has clearly become a doorway to being able to deliver new services to the handset."

Beyond GSM and 802.11b TapRoot also has a roadmap for addressing the 3G market but has not yet made any public announcements.

It may seem strange that handset manufactures are relying on a company like TapRoot to build the interface between phone hardware and the Symbian OS, but it comes down to time to market. A TSY is an abstraction layer between the phone hardware and the ETel API in Symbian OS. Each semiconductor manufacturer build their chips using their own proprietary communications stacks, so a chip from Texas Instruments needs a different interface from one made by Infineon. "Here at TapRoot we have already created products that run on a range of base band chips," says Hugh. "The handset manufactures therefore have a choice of spending a year or more building and verifying the interface from scratch, or they can come to us and maybe take a working solution or for new products get us to do the work in less than three months." Hugh points out that building a TSY is a specialist job and the fact that Taproot have done it many times already helps execute the job quickly. TapRoot often has 5 or 6 hardware reference boards in their lab at any one time. The ability to do the job efficiently is not only in understanding how to build the TSY but also how to verify it works correctly. Here the TapRoot Verification Suite (TRVS), which defines over eight hundred functional test plus unit tests, provides a thorough, formal mechanism to guarantee test coverage (as far as possible, given that each base band modem is unique). Another quirk of geography gives TapRoot access to live public services for GSM/GPRS, CDMA and wideband CDMA, which means, once the base band has been approved, TapRoot can do much of their testing over live networks.

While TapRoot's skills and expertise are servicing a very specialized market they are showing considerable growth. "In the last 12 months we have doubled headcount and revenue," says Hugh. "And our business plan for this year will see us double again to a staff of around 100." Hugh attributes this growth to three factors, the first being the increase in Symbian OS licensees. This has been coupled with an increase in the number of smartphone projects the manufacturers are undertaking using a wider range of semiconductor manufactures base band modems. Additionally Taproot are also expanding their service offering, both in terms of communications technologies such as 802.11b but also into base porting, getting the Symbian OS running on new microprocessors, and onwards into application customization. This means that projects are expanding as TapRoot are able to address more of the development requirements. The final factor is that TapRoot has recently received additional venture capital funding which is being invested into engineering.

To cope with this growth, given that embedded engineers with Symbian OS skills are not that common, TapRoot actually employ a full time recruiter who has collected the resumes of Symbian experts from around the world.

Rapid growth often creates challenges for small companies. Drawing on his prior experience Hugh is confident that TapRoot will grow with minimal disruption. "We have some growing pains naturally," says Hugh. "There are always challenges as you move from a pure engineering company and start to add the business development, sales and internal support you need to grow and support a company. But I believe we are preserving the feel of a small start up. A recent interviewee commented that we were like a bunch of college kids in our enthusiasm for getting the technology to work." Hugh believes that this attitude coupled with a flat management structure, and the fact that all employees are shareholders in TapRoot, makes for a positive working environment.

Hugh describes the work done by TapRoot as the unglamorous side of the smartphone, and certainly when compared with the wow factor of games or multimedia that is probably true. However the work done by TapRoot is essential to the Symbian market, without the TSY there would be no smartphone. Equally for those with a passion for the really fundamental development work, developing TSY's holds a unique and compelling fascination.

The other interesting aspect of TapRoot is that it is something of a barometer for the Symbian OS. While the company's growth is not necessarily matched percentage point to percentage point with the overall growth in Symbian OS devices it is indicative of a still expanding market. With the development lead time the growth that TapRoot are seeing today will be reflected in consumer devices seen in the market in twelve months to eighteen months time.

TapRoot is actively recruiting at the moment. If you are interested in working in this unique environment they are looking for outstanding embedded software engineers preferably with knowledge of Symbian OS. You can find out more about TapRoot's current employment opportunities in the Careers section of its web site.

Web: www.taprootsystems.com