Door Openers

An open letter to Brian Wood and Nirlay Kundu

Dear Brian and Nirlay, it was good to speak with you following the ATCA Virtual Summit.  I would describe you both as highly caffeinated, but to be fair, morning coffee probably accounts for one percent of your animation in describing CP-TA’s role, and what’s happening right now accounts for 90 percent. And what do I mean by what is happening right now?

• The All-IP network is arriving, as you explained, Brian, and operators will need more specialized equipment to optimize for IP, not just the general compute blade also more DSP blades, more media processing blades, more packet processing blades.  Just look at what’s going on for packets, as Mike Coward of Continuous Computing put it during his Summit presentation.  Operators hunt for viruses, look for opportunities to target advertising and tier services, and shape traffic.

• Remember, it’s not soup yet but…PICMG does have a technical committee working on what CAN be fairly described as “rocket science,” as PICMG president Joe Pavlat puts it, of bringing 40 gigabit per second speed to AdvancedTCA.  No wonder for the enthusiasm as we spoke.  AdvancedTCA does not even need to audition. It’s got the part because it scales (check out what Sven Freudenfeld of Kontron explained during the Summit) even if your enthusiasm and that of many others comes a bit in advance of spec completion.

• “ATCA allows applications that need high bandwidth to be built without requiring customization.”  And now we pull the camera back to reveal that this statement from Valerie Andrews and Justin Moll of Elma doesn’t reside on a PowerPoint about telecom applications, but on one called “ATCA System Platforms for Mil/Aero Applications.”  And yes, Nirlay the sales cycles are longer for defense and aerospace, but as you said when we spoke, “you have to start somewhere.”  One place Elma suggested starting was at Next Generation BMD and Radar Tracking – I regret not having more questions ready for you in this area, but hope we will have another chance to speak, and if I could do a quick commercial here for CompactPCI AdvancedTCA & MicroTCA Systems, abstracts for articles about areas that AdvancedTCA is expanding into beyond telecom are welcome (afisher@opensystemsmedia.com).  Brian Carr of Emerson got the ball rolling for us in this area with an article AdvancedTCA: Open standard moves beyond the Central Office.

The bullets could continue, but suffice to say that “door openers,” the phrase you used Brian with regard to both migration to the All-IP network and to 40 Gbps, is an apt one, and even a quick tour through the slides from the Summit (you can attend the whole event by grabbing the archived version at http://ow.ly/2ao0q) reveals a number of door openers, including what you pointed out Brian – that operators are starting to use femtocells and small cells to offload traffic from their core networks, a trend you describe as a very good catalyst for the adoption of ATCA.  You also noted that while rapid changes have taken place just in the last couple of years at the edge of the network, market forces would ripple through into the core of the network.

Once again, it was good to talk to you both and to hear your involvement in what CP-TA is doing to make standards-based infrastructure the norm.