CP-TA recently hosted a webinar called “Fine-tuning xTCA: What’s New With xTCA” along with PICMG, SCOPE Alliance and leading industry analyst Lee Doyle of IDC. (You can access an archived version of the webinar here). During the presentation, we polled the attendees with several interesting questions regarding proprietary vs. standard components, interoperability challenges and xTCA compliance. The questions and the results of the polling are below.

We were not surprised to find that of the Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) shipping or developing ATCA-based products, half indicated they are buying COTS ATCA components while the other half are building in-house. This is consistent with industry research published recently from sources such as Heavy Reading. We expect the trend to continue toward the outsourcing of components and integrated platforms as time-to-market becomes a “make or break” proposition for NEPs and they shift their focus to applications.

We were surprised, however, to see a large share of respondents say they prefer a formal interoperability certification program over other alternatives. This runs counter to what we have heard from the industry over the last year, which is that CP-TA’s interoperability guidelines and testing procedures provide an excellent way for vendors to self-test, and that a formal interoperability certification process is not needed.

What do YOU think? We’d like to hear your feedback.

Here are the full results from the webinar polls: