Communications and Technology Industry Research

The Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (AdvancedTCA, or ATCA) form factor, the successor to CompactPCI (News - Alert) (cPCI), was originally formulated for very high density, high-end devices used by network service providers. Today there are several industry standard form factors, such as MicroTCA and CompactPCI, and de facto standard devices such as IBM (News - Alert) Blade Centers and 1U Linux appliances, not to mention a plethora of proprietary, purpose-built hardware.

 

ATCA remains best suited to carrier environments. Indeed, a combination of ATCA and high-bandwidth Ethernet-based hardware will handle the world’s rapidly expanding wireline and wireless network infrastructures, along with a ton of run-of-the-mill PCI-based media servers working in the background. Modularized, heavy-duty ATCA hardware has (and continues to) revitalize service providers worldwide in the areas of applications, signaling or replacing and/or expanding sections of Network Operations Centers (NOCs).

 

And now, in a new report tracking ATCA adoption among Network Equipment Providers (NEPs), analysts from VDC Research Group predict an accelerated trend away from proprietary architectures developed in-house and toward open standards and Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) building blocks. Analysts say the economic downturn is hastening a trend that was already well underway.

 

In its new report “ATCA Adoption Trends Within The Network Equipment Provider Community,” VDC Research Group predicts that 85 percent of Tier I NEPs will be implementing the standard ATCA architecture by the end of 2010 and the percentage of those implementations using COTS building blocks will increase as NEPs look to prioritize their research and development budgets in the economic downturn.

 

Tier II and III NEPs have embraced open standards and the COTS model for some time, and a combination of factors is driving adoption in the Tier I segment. These factors include the economic slowdown putting increased pressure on development budgets, and a strong supplier ecosystem building scale in the market.

 

VDC Research Group surveyed nearly 30 NEPs for the report and found that more than half of Tier I NEPs and more than three-quarters of Tier II and III NEPs are currently implementing ATCA. As standards like ATCA and MicroTCA (News - Alert) have matured, many NEPs have shifted their competitive focus away from hardware and integration to the software layer.

 

A case study on Tekelec’s implementation of ATCA is included in the report, which was commissioned by the Communications Platforms Trade Association (News - Alert) (CP-TA), a global organization of communications platform and building block providers whose mission is to accelerate the adoption of SIG-governed, open specification-based communications platforms by certifying interoperable building blocks. The full report is available free on its Website.