Authors: Brian Wood – VP Marketing, Sven Freudenfeld, Keate Despain Sr., Stuart Jamieson, and Dharmaraja Rajan

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The market for Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA), Advanced Mezzanine Card (AMC) and MicroTCA products has changed over the last year. Vendors and customers both have gone through a consolidation phase, with new companies forming to take advantage of open platforms and compete for market share.

Two examples of this are the acquisition of Intel’s Modular Communications Platforms business by RadiSys, and the purchase of Motorola’s Embedded Communications Computing Group by Emerson Network Power.

Industry standard platforms like ATCA provide a flexible, open foundation that enables Telecom Equipment Manufacturers (TEMs) / Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) to leverage a common hardware architecture across multiple network elements. Industry standard platforms also foster a competitive, interoperable ecosystem that gives TEMs easy access to best-of-breed technology and enables them to quickly and cost effectively deliver new features and services based on choice and innovation.

The Tier 1 telecom market has already undergone significant consolidation with Nokia and Siemens forming Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), and Alcatel and Lucent forming Alcatel-Lucent. These combinations benefit the ATCA space, as both large entities have been expanding their common platform approach. TEMs like Nortel Networks are leading the adoption with common ATCA platforms that work across multiple solutions. In other words, these TEMs are driving forward by consolidating product lines across common ATCA architectures. Such ATCA platforms provide a base set of functions that, together with other commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) building blocks, can be adapted readily to create a broad range of network elements delivering highly differentiated services for applications such as 3G Wireless, IPTV, and IMS.

Note too that industry consolidation does not signal a lack of ATCA market uptake, but rather a natural strengthening of industry leaders to increase and defend their competitive position. Consolidation is an indication of market maturity where the COTS technology is moving from an “enabling” to an “established” state with widespread adoption across the telecom industry. In support of this, the SCOPE Alliance, founded and headed by the major TEMs, is clear evidence of the TEMs’ strong commitment to using COTS building blocks such as ATCA. The group has released a number of open specification profiles to guide vendors to produce the products that they need. As Tier 1 TEMs consolidate, so too will the supply chain for those companies. For example, the number of ATCA suppliers for Nokia Siemens Networks and Alcatel-Lucent, assuming dual sourcing, has been cut in half from eight to four. The remaining building block suppliers will thus need to become larger themselves in order to accommodate increased demand from a smaller base of healthier, more dominant TEMs like Alcatel-Lucent and NSN.

Tier 1 TEMS Embrace Open Platforms For Choice And Innovation

Using ATCA as a COTS platform has clear benefits for TEMs. These include reducing time to market, alleviating resource constraints, and eliminating the need to create, support and service proprietary platforms. Most importantly, it gives TEMs the freedom to select COTS vendors from the ATCA ecosystem, which greatly reduces the cost associated with creating new platforms. Choice drives competition and innovation.


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Most Tier 1 TEMs are opting to integrate ATCA building blocks themselves while developing their own value-added applications and software stacks. The use of standardized ATCA platforms and building blocks gives TEMs a flexible, interoperable framework for quickly integrating cost-effective components from multiple suppliers and reusing those components across multiple network elements and applications.

Even if TEMs elect to purchase integrated solutions from a single ATCA supplier, the open nature of those solutions still gives them multiple-sourcing options for the future. This avoids the “lock in” mechanisms often found with sole suppliers or proprietary architectures. This is a wise consideration when one factors in the pace of technology change today. Open platforms such as ATCA limit this dependency, enabling TEMs to quickly build best-of-breed technology and solutions at the lowest possible cost tailored to their platform needs.

Tier 1 TEMs have developed a business model based on strong ecosystem collaboration that emphasizes flexibility and multiple sourcing. The driving force for this approach is the requirement for long product life cycle support, which is in turn driven by the tremendous validation costs and reliability requirements of global service providers. TEMs that develop network elements based on a closed proprietary architecture run the risk of losing control of their own product direction and costs, whereas open platforms eliminate this risk.

“Service providers are grappling with meeting customer demand for new services without increasing network complexity. To address this challenge, Nortel is developing platforms based on ATCA technology and built from commercial-off-the-shelf hardware,” said Dave Ayers, vice president, Common Engineering, CTO, Nortel. “By building on these industry-standard ATCA common platforms, we can help our service provider customers reduce time to market for innovative services, while establishing a flexible foundation for the continuing evolution of their network.”

ATCA technology suppliers understand this open platform requirement and are working together through organizations such as PICMG and the Communications Platforms Trade Association (CP-TA) to address the Tier 1 TEMs’ requirements. This collaborative approach enables suppliers to offer components and platforms that meet the TEMs’ needs while also enabling the TEMs’ engineering teams to work closely with suppliers. This approach also ensures that TEMs will be able to drive costs down by utilizing a common architecture and components across a broad range of network elements, thereby generating economies of scale.

ATCA’S Role In Tier 2 And Tier 3 TEM Markets

Interestingly, Tier 2 and Tier 3 TEMs may benefit the most from open platforms. These TEMs often lack the engineering resources to develop new platforms from scratch, and ATCA enables them to get to market quickly. The challenge for Tier 2/3 TEMs is that they lack the manpower to integrate the COTS components and to validate the resulting system. To simplify the integration efforts of Tier 2/3 TEMs, CP-TA has created interoperability documents and test tools that can help TEMs significantly shorten their integration efforts.

Even with the help of organizations like CP-TA, integrating the hardware and system TEM software needed for an ATCA platform is challenging. As a result, most Tier 2/3 TEMs prefer vendors who can provide not only the ATCA building blocks, but also pre-integrated platforms. This turnkey approach enables Tier 2/3 TEMs to focus internal resources on their key competency ” application software development ” while leveraging the ATCA ecosystem for their ATCA platform.

Accordingly, integrated platforms for the Tier 2/3 market are expected to represent a substantial portion of the overall ATCA market. Venture Development Corporation’s May 2007 research report indicates that the market share for integrated ATCA platforms is estimated to be 35% of the overall ATCA market by the end of 2008, followed by 32% for ATCA blades and 19% for base platforms. The remaining 14% represents AMC and MicroTCA.

Today, there are more than 45 companies offering ATCA-based building blocks and 25 of those companies have joined CP-TA in order to foster an interoperable ecosystem for ATCA system components. This large and growing community is committed to developing an open framework for carrier-grade telecom platforms, providing TEMs of all sizes the choice, innovation and cost-competitiveness they need to be successful.

New Frontiers: ATCA Is Here To Stay

In general, ATCA base platforms are deployed in the core network where they are used as network elements for applications. Most of these systems require a full High Availability (HA) configuration with multiple blades, each blade equipped with one or more cores and consuming up to 200W. To maximize flexibility, these blades may also be equipped with hot swappable, front-loadable AMC modules, which may be used to add a variety of application-specific processor, I/O, network, and mass storage capabilities, and inserted/removed from the ATCA blade without service interruption.

Furthermore, although telecom infrastructure is still the mainstay and indeed the very raison d’tre for ATCA, the performance, functionality, and broad ecosystem of the open standard make it a natural migration choice for many other applications. For example, some datacenter and large enterprise environment deployments are moving toward ATCA.

These applications, which often have relaxed redundancy requirements, leverage existing ATCA components but on a potentially smaller scale in 2U to 5U servers with AC rather than DC power. Another area where ATCA is showing promise is the military market, which is just starting to take full advantage of the enhanced capabilities of ATCA and AMC technology. Finally, medical, industrial control and aerospace are also prime candidates, giving ATCA and AMC huge potential for future growth.

“Nortel is leveraging common platforms based on industry-standard ATCA technology to maximize our R&D investment by enabling technology re-use, improving time to market for new products and solutions, and most importantly, making it possible for our service provider customers to fast-track the introduction of new revenue-generating services,” said Nortel’s Ayers.

“Instead of reinventing the wheel every time, ATCA-based platforms give us a solid foundation on which to innovate and build, and it’s a strategy that has already allowed us to introduce a broad range of solutions, including CDMA, GSM and IMS, to name a few.”

The ATCA ecosystem has already been embraced in the telecom market, with TEMs continually implementing new network elements and deploying ATCA platforms with operators around the world. The first ATCA-based network element was installed at a service provider nearly four years ago and is still operating today. The Tier 2/3 TEM market space is creating another wave of adoption, and ATCA is gaining traction outside telecom.

Industry-wide surveys conducted by leading analyst firms such as IDC, Light Reading, VDC, and Yankee Group indicate that more than 40 percent of TEMs are now shipping ATCA-based systems. ATCA sales, according to Crystal Cube Consulting analyst Ernie Bergstrom, will reach $1 billion in 2008, and hit $3 to $4 billion in 2010. The outsourced ATCA market is expected to top $3 billion by 2011. Working through collaborative organizations such as PICMG, SAF, CP-TA, and SCOPE, providers within the ATCA ecosystem have banded together in order to close gaps in the standards while addressing the needs of future customers.

ATCA provides, and will continue to provide a true standards-based open architecture that enables TEMs of all sizes to build robust, carrier-grade systems while providing the freedom of choice among building block ingredients and application-ready systems. ATCA is already here, and it is here to stay.

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