Instant Connect is a business of the STA Group LLC, a Chicago-based provider of innovative technologies for diverse industries since 2002. More than 200 STA engineers are currently developing tomorrow’s leading-edge technology.
The Instant Connect platform was originally developed by Cisco in the early 2000s, in response to the events of 9/11.
The company – and the world – saw a gap in the ability of first responders to communicate across organizational and technical boundaries. Push-to-talk devices and radio networks, while invaluable, were isolated from each other, and connectivity to enterprise communications, mobile devices, and other desktop communications was still unachievable.
Cisco asked the question: What if ALL of these devices – PTT and IP – could share a common environment that allowed users to use any device they wanted, anywhere, to communicate instantly? In other words – what if mobile and other IP devices became push-to-talk devices at the same time?
Innovators at Cisco, led by Charlie Giancarlo, developed a roadmap to communication convergence. Starting with an inexpensive card on a router to digitize land-mobile radio (LMR) push-to-talk (PTT) audio over the Internet, the team developed the software to connect and manage all these audio streams through the network. This product started life as IP Interoperability and Collaboration System (aka IPICS) – which today is called Instant Connect.