ATCA flowering from the cracks: a weak economy sets the stage for a new telecom computing architecture

Jim Barthold

They may have been right. The Advanced Telecommunications Computer Architecture (ATCA or AdvancedTCA), a radical way of making interoperable baseline equipment components by forcing those who build them to inter-cooperate, was born and nurtured during the telecom downturn. Now it's emerging as a roadmap for vendors and service providers to build the foundations of new telecom networking gear.

While the remarkable cooperative nature of AdvancedTCA and the savings it promises for telecom may be of little consolation to the thousands who lost fortunes or jobs during the telecom deep freeze, it is a sign that a 100-year-old industry may have learned a new trick--working together for a common good.

AdvancedTCA is an open specification for building high-performance telecom and data communications systems. It started as a way for PICMG (the PC Industrial Computers Manufacturers Group) to make the square peg, computer-centric CompactPCI specification fit into telecom's round space. In the end, it became more than just advanced CompactPCI.

"We learned a lot of lessons in how that [CompactPCI] specification was written. AdvancedTCA is a tighter specification so it will be even more widely adopted," said Rob Davidson, PICMG's marketing vice president. "It gets a lot of the suppliers out of the business of having to build everything and lets them start to buy best-of-breed, off-the-shelf components that they can then integrate quickly to provide fast time-to-market, easy-to-maintain, modular, open, standards-based equipment."

That sounds like any specification developed by any industry group. What differentiates AdvancedTCA is the support it's getting from big-time PC-centric players like Intel and Hewlett-Packard, who have succumbed to the wisdom of building telecom-friendly gear.

"With ATCA you're seeing a full range of people making investments in products, all the leading TEMs (telecom equipment manufacturers) doing development on ATCA and the leading platform integrators providing partially integrated platforms to the TEMs," said Anthony Ambrose, general manager of Intel's marketing and platform programs.

Intel, said Ambrose, "put a lot of money and a lot of investment in getting that specification out the door" and has already pushed its first products--a chassis, a switch, a single board computer and networking processing blades--into the market.

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"You could build a basic system out of this capability," said Ambrose. "In telecom, that's a pretty radical high-speed situation where you go from paper to working hardware in less than a year."

It's also pretty radical for any industry to knowingly let Intel take the lead in product development. That's probably why so many other component vendors have a piece of the ATCA spec.

"Intel has been ahead of the ecosystem in really driving this standard, working very closely with the equipment manufacturers to help them understand how to move from what they call MOMA [My Own Modular Architecture]. Obviously they want to influence them with the Intel processors," said Tim Leigh, director of network and service provider solutions for Hewlett-Packard.

To make sure that Intel doesn't over-influence vendors, PICMG holds interoperability workshops where everybody gets a shot at building and testing equipment that meets ATCA specifications. It's not a certification process, but it's also not a good thing to circumvent.

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"If you deviate from those specifications, you will stick out like a sore thumb. The community will not accept another deviation because that will take them down the failure path that CompactPCI went down," said Leigh.

So vendors attend the workshops and play nicely together.

"We all bring our equipment together at these events," said Steve Corbesero, vice president of product marketing for Carlo Gavazzi Computing Solutions. "Not only do we test each other's products to make sure that they work, but we're also verifying that they work against the specification."

The broad specification covers the component stage, the molecular structure of any telecom product.

"You can put broadband interfaces to it and build a router out of it. You can put DSL interfaces into it and build a DSLAM out of it. You can build a variety of telecom or cable infrastructures based on this standard," said Davidson. "It's a modular open standard. Modular is the key; you can use different modules."

Hewlett-Packard sees this as an opportunity to put things together in a bigger package that it can then hand off to yet a bigger equipment maker.

"All the equipment manufacturers and all of the people who play in the sand box know that the food chain has changed and the ultimate goal is to get a service as quickly as possible up and running to increase the ARPU," said Leigh. "People's investments are focused; their resources are focused and people are playing in a food chain like we've never seen before."

The food chain is defined. Chip technology companies hand off to platform integrators who hand off to applications providers who hand off to integrators at the full scope of the services who hand off to equipment manufacturers who eventually hand off to the operators. All follow AdvancedTCA specs.

"It's an interlocking that I've never seen; I've been in the industry 25 years and I've never seen that happen," Leigh said.

ATCA's lineage traces directly back to the telecom slump when service providers stopped demanding new products and vendors were laying off workers and had time to formulate new ways of doing business when the market resumed.

"We saw the downturn at the big and small telco equipment manufacturers, letting go of some of their engineering staffs, utilizing their older equipment longer than they intended. Now they need to field new equipment and AdvancedTCA answers the need," said Corbesero.

The vendors weren't sitting on their fewer hands during the slump, added Leigh.

"There was time to develop something. There was time to reset, think about a game plan," he said.

That game plan is ATCA, which, according to PICMG, is "just hitting the flowering right now."

"These things take a long time," said Davidson. "The spec was ratified at the end of 2002 and the first products didn't start to come out in terms of development systems until mid-2003. Then you're looking at the maturing and filling out of the product offering, design cycles of 12 to 18 months ..."

It will be 2006-2007 before "you'll really see the deployment start to happen," said Leigh.

Even though some, like Intel, have products now, in 2006-2007 there will be a "more refined compliancy and certification" and about a 20 percent to 30 percent savings on resources and investment around product life cycle management, Leigh said.

"We've pushed and driven the standards through the Tier 1 equipment manufacturers and some Tier 2 and we're planning the pull-out at the operator level ... educating them on the importance of ATCA," he said. "The ultimate goal is to reduce the overall capex for equipment manufacturing, thus reducing the overall opex for the service providers."

Jim Barthold is a contributing writer for Telecommunications[R] magazine (jimbarthold@comcast.net).

COPYRIGHT 2005 Horizon House Publications, Inc.
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