The company will bring its experience in standards bodies and its participation and organisation of interoperability testing events to TCCA initiatives. It will also work to help drive the transition to MCC over LTE and 5G.
"Softil's decision to become a member of TCCA is welcomed. We look forward to the benefits that Softil's expertise can bring to the development of open, interoperable standards for critical broadband to enhance public safety," said Tony Gray, TCCA's chief executive.
"Any revolutionary technology such as MCC over LTE/5G combining a variety of products from various vendors can only advance through open standards, interoperability of market solutions and wholescale industry education," added Pierre Hagendorf, Softil's CEO. "This explains why Softil sees joining leading critical communications organisations such as TCCA as critical."
Open standards for technology are named as such because they are openly published and available to all and provide a foundation for products from different companies to work with one another. Interoperability is achieved through an extensive testing process and requires the cooperation of multiple companies and organisations.
"The foundation of open standards can be summarised as practicality and enables developers to have access to best available, interoperable components from different vendors," stressed Hagendorf. "Interoperability is not a destination, but a journey – every new release of a vendor's product and every update in applicable standards requires interoperability with all competing or complementary products to be established."
Softil's history in the development of global industry standards dates back to 1995 when it was first known as RADVISION and contributed to the works of the ITU-T, IETF, 3GPP, ETSI and other standards bodies over the years. It was on the board of IMTC (International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium), an Interoperability testing & recommendation forum, for more than 20 years, and was President of the body for more than 11 years. Softil also chaired multiple IMTC Activity Groups, such as H.323, Conferencing over IP, 3G-324M and IMS.
Softil also held Bboard positions in the SIP Forum, IMS Forum and UC Interoperability Forum and participated in the work of OMA, GSMA, oneM2M, GCF and many other organisations and has also participated in hundreds of interoperability testing events including IMTC SuperOp!, IMS Forum Plugfests, SIP Forum SIPit and SIMPLEit and ETSI Plugtests.
