Does ATCA interoperability have the ability to save a company/division?

That is a pretty big question because it covers so many facets of a project.  But let’s look at the financials; building a cutting edge ATCA-based HW platform costs about $15-18 million.  Not many companies have that kind of budget for HW development anymore. Some readers may say it doesn’t cost that much. Well humor me, because if your accounting department is like mine, it could cost even more. Here is how I got the numbers:

$3 million for Lifetime support of a CPU blade
$2-4 million for chassis development with 40G capability
$3 million for a 10G KR capable switch
$3 million for i/o or packet processing blade
$3 million for SW to tie it all together and make it work

…And we are in the ball park. If your company is not selling, say, 250-300 ATCA shelves, then you just lost a boatload of money on hardware investment that could/should have been used elsewhere.

Now we get to the part about interoperability. Frequently, executives state that there is no way they will fund this $18 million development. They cite that since these assets are available as COTS from solid companies that have been building ATCA for 8 years, they’d rather buy the stuff and glue it together. That’s where interoperability comes in. To achieve interoperability, you need all the companies supplying ingredients into this brand new HW platform to work together and play nice across disparate assets. That is what CP-TA’s mission is all about: creating interoperability guidelines for the xTCA ecosystem, so nobody has to do it themselves. So come join us and be one of the companies that is SAVED by interoperability.