Digital transformation
Digital technologies have vast societal and business potential… offering new ways to conduct business, augment physical products, improve customer experiences and secure additional sources of value. But where to start?
Creating digital products and services through technology innovation, service rollout and business transformation is complex. Making a defensible breakthrough that’s resistant to margin pressures is demanding.
Success means applying just the right combination of business viability, design thinking and technology prowess. Those who prevail will seize new service-based revenues, reach new audiences, build stronger customer relationships and be impervious to competitors and market shocks.
What we do
Cambridge Consultants helps clients create rich and secure digital offerings that respond to user needs and open new revenue streams – by harnessing the transformative potential of deep technology.
We know what it takes to develop successful digital platforms that span the physical and digital worlds. Unlike many companies in the space, we have a proven ability to align our knowledge of developing breakthrough technology with go-to-market strategy and user experience, shaping unique concepts that redefine industries and delight end users.
For us, future digital services will be defined by four emerging areas:
Converged experiences
The momentum behind immersive user experiences is increasing. They engage more of the human senses and bridge digital and physical realms. New immersive, interconnected, persistent digital worlds are being made possible by new spatial computing devices and by the growth of online gaming. A new push is underway to make the metaverse a personal mobile experience via extended reality systems.
We see huge potential, particularly in industrial metaverses. There are technology opportunities for innovators to design and develop for a 3D experience, leveraging semantic computing and generative large language model (LLM) capabilities.
We are conducting engineering research into how to bridge the physical world using VR headsets and use spatial computing and 3D design to locate digital assets into a 3D extended reality for diverse applications – from manufacturing to digital surgery.
Autonomous systems
In society and industry, machines are set to not just be contained or controlled by humans but to operate alongside them, to augment and to elevate the value of human work. To do this, they need to be autonomous. They need not only to sense but anticipate, in real-time; adjusting dynamically to achieve the desired outcomes and react to environmental conditions.
At the heart of these systems are the AI algorithms and simulation models. The systems can be for ground, air or marine-based operations but also for non-physical applications such as self-organising networks and autonomous software. While AI is the core technology, the value will come from the digital services that wrap around these systems and make autonomy useful to human users.
Examples of our client work and experimental research here includes the development of land-based autonomous robots and aerial drones. We’re exploring more effective solutions in areas such as agricultural and infrastructure inspection to lessen the need for humans to take on hazardous tasks.
Trustless platforms
From attitudes to national governments, to the transparency of supply chains and everything in between, trust is always key. Once gained, trust increases value for brands and is the foundation for transparent decision making.
It can now be enabled by technologies from the Web3 and Web5 stable. These provide new software mechanisms for storing data and processing transactions in decentralised systems where there is no reliance on intermediary organisations. The trust gained from systems where security and user privacy are inherent, combined with a more open and equitable ecosystem, will provide new ways to build businesses and develop customer relationships.
There are many nascent technologies. CC’s advantage is knowing how to combine them into new solution patterns for new application areas. We’ve done this in energy management and explored how web content regulators deal with the new approaches.
Securing interconnectivity
We believe that security is not just a problem to be dealt with. It is actually a commercial asset – the right security solutions can be a springboard to business growth. Our teams deliver novel security solutions to meet evolving needs and emerging threats.
This pulls upon our deep understanding of emerging technologies and our own research initiatives, including testing continuous variable quantum key distribution (QKD), applying AI to computer log and other analysis, exploring homomorphic encryption and developing solutions to meet the quantum compute challenge. Elsewhere, we’ve developed covert watermark technology for high-value audio content and a patented anti-counterfeit digital coding scheme.
How we can help you
Digital service strategy
We can help identify new digital concepts to disrupt your market (or stop you being disrupted). Our research will help build a deeper understanding of your users’ needs – matched to the opportunity – and we’ll work in collaboration with you to identify potential propositions and lay out practical roadmaps. We’ll use our hands-on knowhow to inform planning, ideation and design, while developing more viable and valuable concepts.
Digital service development
A viable concept is all very well. But we help you give it life by deploying an agile, scalable service. Our customised implementation expertise spans platform selection, building the technology and integrating it with existing processes and systems. As well as technical knowledge, we have experts on hand to help with the business side of planning your go-to-market strategy, launch plan and ongoing scaling and operations.
Secure by design
We solve the security challenges that are critical to ensure the continual and safe operation of your businesses. Our design processes ensure system security by addressing a product’s risks and vulnerabilities as designed, as implemented and as used. This involves defining security requirements, security architecture and system design, along with testing to verify regulatory and legal compliance. It includes anti-counterfeit features for produce and brand protection.
Featured insights
Our expertise
- Digital services
- Digital security
- AI and analytics
- Extended reality (XR)
- User experience (UX)
- Connectivity and IOT
If you want to digitally transform your physical product business, or you’re an existing service provider looking to deliver a radical experience to accelerate growth in a new market, we can help.
From platform selection to building the technology and integrating it with existing processes and systems, our consultants know what it takes to develop successful digital platforms that span the physical and digital worlds.
We have expertise in digital security, AI, UX, and full-service development including go-to-market strategy, launch plan and ongoing scaling and operations.
Digital security can become a business differentiator by using the latest technology to create customer trust and loyalty in your product and connected services.
Our expertise has been applied widely: to create wearables enabling new customer experiences; to empower new vehicle fleet management business models; and to allow pharmaceutical products to be authenticated in front of the consumer, so gaining their trust.
We solve the security challenges that are critical to ensure the continual and safe operation of your businesses. The advice we give is based upon a 20-year heritage of understanding precisely what security technology can achieve. This ensures that the right investment decisions are made to reduce security risk.
CC has a deep understanding of AI and its applications. Our expertise spans Bayesian inference, real-time signal processing and data analysis and is combined with extensive technical skills in areas such as predictive analytics, deep learning, edge AI and empathetic AI.
Our consultants are pushing the boundaries of the human-machine interface to develop edge AI use cases, generative AI models, new supervised machine learning models and types of data analytics.
Our work is unlocking new frontiers in areas such as uncrewed aerial vehicles, synthetic biology, remote monitoring systems, telecoms and beyond.
From consumer devices to industrial and medical applications, CC helps you explore the limits of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). We fuse content creation and technological excellence with world-class user experience design.
Our experience spans SteamVR, HTC Vive, Google VR (Cardboard and Daydream), Microsoft HoloLens, Samsung Gear VR, Sony Eyeglass and WebVR. This, coupled with hardware development, mathematical and physics expertise, allows us to create otherwise impossible XR experiences.
Examples include AR for minimally invasive surgery, VR that allows designers in different locations to interact with a CAD model in real time, and a custom SteamVR application to integrate an existing product with HTC’s Vive VR technology.
Understanding user needs involves asking the right questions and then gathering and synthesising the results. We employ qualitative and quantitative approaches to create user journeys, storyboards and personas that provide the context and foundations for designing and validating appropriate experiences.
We generate design concepts and evolve them into digital products using wireframes, paper prototypes, high-fidelity mock-ups and visual assets. These activities consider information architecture, interaction design, graphical and conversational user interface design, animations and sound effects.
Our digital UX design and front-end development teams work together to ensure effective and efficient implementation. Through rigorous quality assurance (QA) and usability tests, we consistently deliver outstanding user experiences.
We have the world’s largest independent wireless development team. It spans radio frequency, communications protocol, digital signal processing, power-optimised analogue and digital electronic design, embedded software, user experience and mechanical design.
Our consultancy expertise has led to the creation and development of several major wireless technologies and delivered a steady stream of disruptive breakthroughs. They include RF and satellite telecommunications to the world’s first wireless pacemaker and the ground-to-air radio system that controls more than 50% of the world’s air traffic.
Our facilities
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AI infrastructureCC’s comprehensive onsite compute infrastructure allows us to explore options and train and test models more rapidly to get better results. We run petaflop-scale, containerised compute on site, with multiple NVIDIA DGX-1 deep learning supercomputers and other GPU and FPGA-accelerated servers. This links to petabyte-scale local NetApp storage, project-specific cloud and our continuous integration systems. |
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Digital labWith one petabyte local storage and specialised hardware for telecoms chassis design, machine learning development and more, this facility allows us to develop, test and operate new cloud-ready digital services rapidly in a secure environment. It enables rapid end-to-end prototyping and experimentation of sensitive concepts. We work across the full spectrum of cloud service providers, supporting both public and private infrastructures. |
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O-RAN test bedThe open radio access network (O-RAN) testbed is a complete 5G private network, from internet to user equipment. This cloud-based network implements a disaggregated radio access network (RAN), using an O-RAN architecture, integrated with a 5G core. Through the network, we can simulate performance of virtual or physical network technologies, providing a deep understanding of the complex interactions with O-RAN networks and helping our clients develop high performance solutions. |
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Scalable software test facilityContinuous integration (CI) is central to building and delivering high-quality software. Our virtualised CI test facility enables us to test complex software at scale, with or without hardware in the loop, to identify problems earlier and fix them faster. It provides a clean, isolated virtual build environment, pre-loaded with industry-leading tools such as Coverity static analysis. CI testing is integrated with our version control, enabling every software revision to be automatically built, tested on real hardware and analysed. |
Our experts
Martin Brock
Chief Technology Officer
Martin Cookson
Director for Digital Service Innovation
Ruth Thomson
Senior Vice President Global Commercial Head for Consumer, Industrial and Energy
Mark Dorn
Director - Defence Cybersecurity and Assurance
Alex Lee Corbin
Experience Design Group Lead
Mark Hanlon
Associate Director of Software Architecture
Tarika George
Business Development - Simulation and AI
