According to A. J. Gupta, Accenture's managing director for Product Innovation and Product Lifecycle Management within the company's Embedded Software Solutions practice, an increasing number of products are migrating their features to software. "We are seeing it in everything from phones to cars," says A. J. "Software is becoming the product differentiator."

An electrical engineer by training, A. J. is based in Washington, U.S. His background was in control systems for jet engines and he contrasts that starkly with today's embedded software industry. "When I talk to my colleagues in the aerospace industry, they are astonished when I tell them that a typical embedded software project has ten times the code they are used to dealing with, but has to be delivered in a tenth of the product lifecycle," says A. J. "As such we cannot underestimate the challenges facing those creating embedded software platforms or devices based on them."

In the recent report "The Embedded Software Industry: Challenges and Successes," Accenture reviewed some of the issues faced by the companies relying on embedded software for their products. In candid responses, Accenture found that 88% believed their testing was poor, 81% work poorly with their suppliers, and over half admitted they shipped products late.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, according to A. J., manufacturers building devices on Symbian OS face the same challenges as any company in the embedded software space. "When I talk to our teams working with Symbian OS, the issues discussed tend to be the same as those pre-occupying other Accenture teams and our clients across the entire embedded software sector."

These issues are diverse, from the architecture of software components through to how to manage the diversity of component suppliers involved in creating software components for a device.

If there is one core element to these issues, A. J. believes it is industrialization. "There is still too much software created in an environment where the work is seen as craftsmanship or artistic in nature," says A. J. "The increasing complexity of embedded software means it needs to be industrialized to make the process predictable and reduce rework."

Industrialization also becomes more important in light of two trends within the embedded software industry; the increasing number of suppliers contributing software to projects and the use of development shops in low cost countries.

A. J. believes that Accenture's track record in systems integration can benefit its customers when it comes to the technical challenges created by multi-vendor projects. At the same time, Accenture's management consulting experience helps with the business challenges. A. J. also sees the fact that Accenture counts many of the major telcos among it clients as a big advantage, allowing the company to offering insight into the requirements demanded by the phone manufacturers' customers.

Industrialization is also key to realizing the benefits of moving software development to low cost countries. "We see many companies looking to low cost countries to reduce their software costs. When they do they often find that the contact cost is only part of the picture," says A. J. "It's not uncommon to find multi- billion dollar companies using small, off-shore shops to reduce costs, only to find that low cost also means their supplier does not have the project management and quality assurance skills necessary to realize the cost savings. More often than not, these companies spend the saving on ferrying their staff to and fro to keep deliveries to time and quality."

Using low cost development not only requires robust management practices to realize the benefits; it also needs the right approach to software design. A. J. points to a recent project where Accenture was asked to help a company that is building software on Symbian OS.

"We were originally approached to help this company find the best approach to moving software development off-shore," says A. J. "At first it appeared to be a classic management consulting gig, but eventually it became more about software architecture as our work highlighted the fact that this company's software needed architectural upgrading. There was no modularity, an essential feature to enable our client to efficiently move parts of its development to a low cost center."

A. J. also highlights a fascinating conundrum for the embedded software industry. "Most manufacturers are taking a platform approach to embedded software," says A. J. "However a platform approach also builds in certain costs. This creates a challenge for manufacturers: how to make this approach work when addressing the global market. On the one hand they have high volume, price sensitive markets in emerging markets, such as India and China; on the other hand they have to address feature sensitive markets in the US and Europe."

A. J. believes the skills offered by Accenture can help companies working with Symbian OS address many of these challenges. "Symbian OS is a critical component in enabling phone manufacturers to deliver quality products in a timely fashion," says A. J. "It provides the essential standard platform on which to build products. However, effectively using Symbian OS requires a range of skills: product engineering, project and supplier management, integration, and user interface design, to name a few. At Accenture we have these skills and expect to be applying them to an increasing number of Symbian OS based projects in the future."

Accenture will be taking this message to the wider Symbian community at next week's Smartphone Show. For more information see www.accenture.com and Www.symbiansmartphoneshow.com.