“Freedom of Choice”…The phrase has a nice ring to it, and it also conveys much more than what one would initially think upon reading or hearing the words. It’s kind of like “The buck stops here” or “You get what you pay for” – simple and concise yet deep and profound. There’s more to it than meets the eye.

So what is Freedom of Choice and why has CP-TA selected this phrase as an important tag line for the organization (and part of the title of a recent CP-TA collaborative paper)?

“Freedom” means different things to different people, but one definition is, “The power to act or speak or think without externally imposed restraints.” Another definition is, “The absence of interference with the sovereignty of an individual by the use of coercion or aggression.”

Fortunately, most of us in the telecom industry are rarely subject to physical aggression or Soprano’s-style coercion. On the other hand, we are indeed restrained by things like business priorities, market windows, standards compliance, interoperability requirements, etc. This is just life.

Telecom infrastructure especially – as opposed to IT or enterprise gear – has a myriad of boundaries, largely due to the long product lifecycles of central office equipment and the need to extract as much revenue out of capital expenditures as is efficiently possible. So like it or not, we never have a truly “green field” environment in which to deploy our products and services; we have to contend with externally imposed restraints. More on this below.

According to Wikipedia, “choice” consists of the mental process of thinking involved with the process of judging the merits of multiple options and selecting one of them for action. [Interestingly, “choice” is also used in the context of “superior” or “refined”, as in “choice wines”… or “choice standards-based ATCA products” – har har!]

What’s more, the Wikipedia entry on choice also indicates that, “Most people regard having choices as a good thing…a severely limited or artificially restricted choice can lead to discomfort with choosing and possibly an unsatisfactory outcome.”

Hmmm, it seems pretty straightforward to me:
•    Many choices = a good thing…Hooray!
•    Restricted choice = discomfort and possibly an unsatisfactory outcome…Ouch!

OK, so where does this leave us? Freedom is good, choice is good, and so freedom of choice is good. It’s so easy to understand that…a caveman could do it [sorry, couldn’t resist].

Back to reality: even though we have to work within physical and economic constraints in the telecom world, it is certainly much more helpful to be able to select from a long list of vendors supplying competing yet interoperable solutions than to be relegated to something akin to Henry Ford’s alleged quip, “Any color you want as long as it’s black”. We’re in the Internet age now, which means we want second, third, fourth opinions and we want them fast. Being confined, restrained, or held back is just not cool anymore. In fact, was it ever cool? Most Microsoft haters don’t think so….

What I’m talking about here is market competition and all the beautiful benefits it brings: increased innovation, reduced prices, and ultimately faster forward progress. With a vibrant ecosystem in which multiple companies are competing, collaborating, and constantly searching for the next big thing, customers win. To wit: Internet search, the mobile phone handset market, or even your local food court or mile of cars. More choices equate to more smiles and better business all around.

This is what one gets with open standards (like ATCA) – standards that are widely used, consensus based, developed collaboratively through due process, and published and maintained by recognized industry standards organizations (like PICMG). The same goes for open standards like AMC and MicroTCA.

Unfortunately, smiles and choices are NOT what one gets with single-vendor “standards” such as BladeCenter from IBM or BladeSystem from HP. Alas, picking a single-vendor “standard” like one of these two contenders is in effect a big vote for Henry Ford’s “black” – and let’s hope you like black, because that’s what you’re going to get…for a long, long time.

So hopefully it’s now clear why CP-TA has chosen carefully to describe what it stands for and why customers should care:

Open standards promote competition, innovation, forward progress, and more customer options.

Fostering the flexibility to select from these options is ultimately what CP-TA is about:

Freedom of Choice.

Brian Wood
VP of Marketing
Continuous Computing

The opinions in this blog entry represent those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Communications Platforms Trade Association (CP-TA).