I recently attended an industry event where a particular supplier to the IT world was pushing their products into the telecom world.  During the presentation, we arrived to the topic of open compatibility with fellow travelers in the equipment market.  Having worked with this company many times, I was interested to see how they handle the question of "FREEDOM-OF-CHOICE" within in an open standard as it applied to their offering. The simple answer was that they just DON'T offer freedom of choice.  If you buy their solution, you are locked in and they become your "strategic" supplier.

I don't care how big your brand recognition is worldwide.  If you are going to bet $10 to $100M product lines on a single supplier, I would expect product choice to be right up there as one of your top priorities. For example, If you require cost reductions, how are you going to get competitive pricing once you commit.  The vendors all know once you have validated their platform, switching costs are difficult as you LOCK into their platform.  Another challenge is flexibility of components.  We sell to a worldwide customer base. Your multi-million dollar investment cannot service the broadest market possible if your architecture is controlled by a single supplier.  Questions to ask are: what choice of AMC interface cards do you offer? What type of deep packet inspection processing blades do you offer? Do you offer any DSP blades for voice applications? If not, you are subject to their investment strategy and timelines, not the open market availability of components to an industry standard such as ATCA.

The CP-TA team, in conjunction with the PICMG organization for ATCA, has clearly addressed these concerns.  The flexibility and competitive nature of an open standard are driving this platform into the telecom market faster then ever.  It's also driving it into new areas like the IT world because FREEDOM-OF-CHOICE is valued everywhere.  IT technology is readily available for use in the ATCA form factor and the hosts of companies developing solutions with CP-TA are making it happen. If you agree or disagree with my statement that FREEDOM-OF-CHOICE is a requirement in developing telecom infrastructure, shoot me a note.

Keate Despain
CP-TA member
RadiSys Corporation