SolutionsEngineering third parties while focusing on their core competence of developing revenue-generating applications. At the same time, emerging standards are allowing designers the flexibility to build systems by combining sets of interoperable, off-theshelf hardware, operating systems and middleware building blocks from several competing vendors. As the telecom world moves away from proprietary systems in favor of those built using commercially available standards-based components, the challenge for TEMs becomes deciding where to concentrate their efforts. They must choose where to rely on other suppliers to allow them to quickly address the service, cost and time-to-market requirements of their customers.
The Solution
The need to address the challenges of reduced time-to-market, reduced capital and operational expenditures, and increased opportunities for service offerings over IP is driving the demand for modular communications platforms comprised of standards-based hardware, operating system and middleware. By incorporating such industry-standard building blocks as AdvancedTCA (ATCA), carrier-grade Linux (CGL) and Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) interfaces, the modular platforms are intended to help drive new service offerings based on COTS components. With key standards such as ATCA, CGL and the SA Forum specifications gaining increasing acceptance in the market, the ecosystem continues to mature with more companies providing the sophisticated pre-tested, pre-integrated components that TEMs require to quickly build cost-effective, application-ready platforms. The transition from all-proprietary systems to standards-based systems is well underway and is expected to accelerate as rapid adoption of these standards continues. The migration to standards-based integration is illustrated in Figure 2. Let us look at the various layers of such application-ready platforms in a bit more detail. Standards-based hardware can provide significant cost savings to TEMs. Among the most important factors driving standardization of the hardware layer is the ATCA standard. A natural evolution of the PICMG specifications, ATCA is the first open standard targeted primarily at
SBC 2
GoAhead SelfReliant Manager SBC 3
SBC 1
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Proxy DNS
SIP Bulk Call Generator
SBC 4
GoAhead SIP Application 1 Active
Figure 3
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GoAhead SIP Application 2 Active
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GoAhead SIP Application 3 Standby
An integrated solution for IMS Applications.
developers of telecommunication systems. It provides specifications for creating carrier-grade hardware architecture to provide the reliability, performance and scalability demanded by telecommunication applications. ATCA is quickly gaining industry acceptance, and major TEMs have already announced plans to provide network elements based on this standard. Although revenue estimates vary widely (the 2007 estimates range from $4 billion to $20 billion), this standard is clearly gaining popularity with OEMs. Another important development is the Hardware Platform Interface (HPI) specification from the SA Forum. HPI specifies a rich set of hardware platform services which, when implemented by the hardware OEMs, provide significant ease of integration with HPI-compliant commercial middleware from a variety of providers. This specification has quickly gained widespread acceptance in the COTS ecosystem, and an increasing number of hardware providers and ISVs are implementing the HPI services. Carrier-grade Linux (CGL) continues to be adopted by the telecom market with several TEMs already delivering systems based on CGL. CGL is one of the four working groups of what was until recently called the Open Software Development Laboratory (OSDL)—an industry body dedicated to accelerating the adoption of the Linux kernel across multiple markets. Recently OSDL merged with The Free Standards Group to form The Linux Foundation. The CGL Working Group is defin-
ing feature roadmaps and specifications for use in telecommunications architectures. MontaVista, Red Hat and Wind River are among several commercial vendors providing different distributions of Linux software based on CGL specifications. The next logical step up the standardization chain is middleware. If the middleware layer can provide abstraction between layers, the potential benefits to TEMs are huge, allowing them to focus on telecommunication services—their primary added value—without having to worry about the underpinnings. Such standardization is well underway. The SA Forum has delivered interface specifications that help middleware vendors write software conforming to established application program interfaces (APIs) at the hardware and application layers. The Application Interface Specification (AIS) establishes a common interface between the application layer and middleware components. These specifications aim to facilitate portability of middleware and applications across multiple platforms, reducing startup costs and integration efforts. Several middleware and systems vendors have announced support for AIS, creating and marketing middleware for high availability, systems management and database development. The application layer is where SPs generate their revenue. The hardware, OS and middleware layers constitute enabling technologies that support applications and services provided at the application layer. This is also where the TEMs have the greatest opportunity to differentiate May 2007
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