Indira Gandhi International Airport at New Delhi is abuzz with activity. Somewhere in a corner a laptop beeps. The user clicks onto the screen, fixes his microphone and BINGO!

He’s on a business call with his team at California, awaiting a connecting flight to his client’s destination. While he’s in conversation across borders, with his calls routed through his mobile number onto his laptop, Tatara’s team of experienced communication experts are busy working behind the scenes, partnering closely with leading mobile service providers to deliver solutions over Wi-Fi enabled laptops for subscribers of wireless network operators.

The idée fixe of Asa Kalavade, Tatara Systems sprouted in the spring of 2001 with a seed funding of $250,000, and $23 million funding in 2004 from Highland Capital Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners. “A single service provider can never own all the networks or devices a customer would like to access. So we embarked on converging the cellular world with the IP world,” says Kalavade, Chief Technical Officer of Tatara Systems. She placed the bet and decided to leverage on mobile services convergence platform. Extending services beyond traditional connectivity, her team started defining, developing and deploying converged mobile offerings to innovative mobile service providers world-over. These solutions are also offered to fixed line operators and content providers to enable services on subscribers’ PC laptops, PDAs and emerging high-performance smart phones.

There is an increasing popularity of softphone-based VoIP services. But that would mean the user holds different brands, providers, accounts, numbers and several customer-care sources. Many a time, it so happens that customers do not identify the caller when the call is routed through a different identity over VoIP. This is where Tatara’s solutions buoy up. Tatara’s converged mobile VoIP service enables mobile service providers to offer voice and data services seamlessly over a consistent user experience while being parked with a single converged identity.

This enables the end user to make and receive phone calls through a softphone on a laptop or PDA over diverse IP networks, be it Wi-Fi or Ethernet, Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) or Evolution Data Optimized (EVDO). “With no additional VoIP identity or phone number, users can choose to receive calls on their laptop over a softphone, routed through the mobile number that is registered as contact information,” explains Kalavade.