Telecom Platform Deployment Featured Article

While a complete economic recovery is still in progress, companies that have invested in the market for Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture -- or “ATCA”-based products -- are seeing some positive signs that their labor has paid off.

 

According to newly published data based on research by VDC Research Group (News - Alert), the total 2009 ATCA market will be comparable to 2008 levels, which reportedly reached $483 million. What’s more, analysts are predicting the ATCA market will experience a strong return and stable growth in 2010 as the economy bounces back. 

 

“While some embedded computing segments will contract by double digits this year, our ATCA market sizing research indicates that 2009 will be within a few percentage points of what we saw in 2008,” said Eric Heikkila, director of VDC Research Group’s embedded hardware and systems practice, in a press release. “The key is the relative stability of investment in new applications, which has been a sweet spot for ATCA. Tier II and III Network Equipment Providers have broadly adopted ATCA and those are the firms producing much of the innovative equipment that is still driving new revenue for Service Providers.”

 

The report, based on VDC Research Group’s interviews with more than 50 network equipment providers, reveals that nearly 80 percent of Tier II and III NEPs are commercially implementing the ATCA form factor, while nearly 60 percent of Tier I NEPs are basing equipment on the standard.

 

By 2013, VDC Research Group said it predicts a majority of these NEPs will source commercial-off-the-shelf ATCA building blocks and integrated platforms rather than build networks in-house.

 

“Our members are reporting that revenues from ATCA product lines have actually been a bright spot in 2009,” said Sven Freudenfeld, president of the Communications Platform Trade Association, which represents companies in the space. “The telecommunications networking industry is innovating its way out of the economic downturn through products based on interoperable open standards rather than legacy proprietary designs.”

 

Jeff Hudgins, president of marketing for Canton, Mass.-based NEI, an integrator of technologies and solution designs for robust carrier communications platforms and services, recently told TMCnet that more adoption is happening in the communications space – especially as it revolves around ATCA.   

 

“NEI was an earlier adopter of ATCA, and from the beginning, we have been very active on the committees advancing the architecture,” Hudgins told TMCnet. “Since we were so early to the ATCA architecture we developed a core competency that continues to benefit our customers. So, it was only natural being in the communications space that we started to work on developing solutions which support the architecture inside of the ATCA framework and then some of the network processing.”