It gives me great pleasure to announce today that Symbio Group, a leading Web and enterprise software outsourced product development company, Flander, a leading mobile and embedded software development company, and Ardites, a leading expert in user experience technologies, have entered into a definitive agreement to merge the three companies to create Symbio.

Together, we are creating a company the world has never seen before.  A truly globally-integrated, outsourced product development and R&D services company that enables companies to access both high-value, cutting-edge technology domain expertise, and ultra scalable, cost-efficient production capabilities.  We are bringing together some of the world’s best talent across Finland, Sweden, United States, mainland China and Taiwan, and we’re creating new capabilities that didn’t exist before in our companies, including product development and strategy for converged technology solutions and design of rich user experiences across platforms.

It’s clear that as we emerge from the global recession of 2008-2009, the world is going to be a different place.  From a market perspective, we are all interconnected and what happens in one country clearly affects every other country in the world.  Competition is also globalized, and the competitor who eats your lunch tomorrow may be coming from a country you have never visited before.  Symbio is being formed to help companies leverage our global advantages – global expertise, best practices, product development processes, talent pool – and engage with them locally.  For our clients across the United States, Europe and Asia, we now have unmatched capabilities to service them and engage them locally across 22 offices, including seven R&D centers in Finland and Sweden, and five offshore development centers in mainland China, Taiwan and Bangladesh.

The technology industry is also changing and moving onto its next great evolution.  The era of the PC as the dominant computing form factor is coming to an end, and we are seeing a proliferation of new kinds of computing devices, such as smartphones like the popular Apple iPhone, to netbooks like Nokia’s Booklet 3G, to everything in between such as Fugoo’s blocks.  My personal prediction is that five years from now what we’ll be using as our primary computing device is going to be something completely different from what’s on the market today.  I’m particularly interested in how new ways of interacting with your computing device – gestures, facial/voice recognition, even eye movement tracking – is going to change the way we interact with our devices.  The point is that we are entering a world when our definition of computer is going to expand.

From a software perspective, it’s clear that software is becoming ubiquitous.  There will be software embedded into more and more things, and we will find software becoming the fabric of our interconnected lives.  From a product engineering perspective, this also means that the traditional boundaries between hardware, software, and services are going to combine, as are the traditional lines separating web services, enterprise software, and mobile & embedded products.  This is the true definition of “convergence”.  In the near future, we will be doing our computing from more and more devices, with our applications and services delivered wirelessly and location-independent through the Web.  The days of “platform compatibility” is going away as everything gets connected and becomes “smart”.

While this may be a simple vision, it’s actually very difficult for most technology companies – especially established ones such as Microsoft and Nokia – to produce products for this new world of converged technology.  It’s not just about resources, but rather about converged expertise and converged processes in the form of new product design and development processes.

Symbio is clearly positioned well to help our clients meet the global challenges of this new converged world of product design and engineering.  With our core business lines of Mobile & Embedded, Web Services & Internet, Enterprise Software, coupled with world-leading expertise in QA/Testing and Test Systems, we are the go-to partner for creating tomorrow’s most cutting edge and successful technology products.

About Symbio TechBlog

The Symbio TechBlog discusses topics related to convergence, software product development and user experience technologies as we see them evolve in the market and our daily lives. Our goal is to provide you with insights on demanding software challenges in different industries and establish an interactive forum for exchanging ideas and experiences.

Symbio has deep domain expertise in multiple industries ranging from IT, Telecommunication, Life Sciences, Automotive, and Industrial, all of which need to come to terms with the increased technological complexity in products and services. Driven by complex customers and end user demands, our experts aim to share their knowledge on a wide range of topics.

We welcome you to contribute and join our discussions!