Here John and Shreekant make the case for communications servers speeding up the development of converged services while driving down costs.
In the telecom segment it’s all about convergence between computing and communications, wireline and wireless, triple and quad play, and applications integration, such as IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS). But seamless mobility goes beyond telecom and has implications in hospital medical imaging, on the battlefield, and on the factory floor.
Service providers want to deliver seamless mobility efficiently and profitably, integrating traditional and next-generation services. Responding to pressure from the carriers, operators and service providers, Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) must deliver new applications faster and much more cost effectively.
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Traditionally, each new major service extension, such as picture messaging, required new equipment or specific equipment to deliver that service. When the pace of innovation was slower, this was not a significant challenge, as there was considerable time for such expansion. However, creating new services by continually adding additional equipment is no longer effective in today’s dynamic marketplace.
With each new piece of equipment introduced into a network comes a range of challenges that must be addressed by the network operator. No longer streamlined, architectures become cumbersome to extend and manage. The challenges include:
The financial burdens of sparing
Training of operations and maintenance personnel
Planning for network growth, including the cost of the central office footprint space
What’s more, competitive pressure demands that both the development time and lifecycle costs of new equipment be reduced significantly. Infrastructure network elements have traditionally been based on proprietary, product-specific hardware and software. This approach to product development has led to 24- to 36-month development cycles and significant lifecycle costs for products that are typically deployed for more than 10 years.
On a practical level, recent telecommunications industry contraction has cut R&D budgets, dictating that NEPs look for ways to place more of their development budgets into new, value-add applications and services and spend less on non-differentiated elements.
Mark Bieberich, Director of the Communications Network Infrastructure at leading analyst firm The Yankee Group, summarized the issue: “Communications service providers are under increasing pressure to quickly deliver differentiated new services and applications, while improving cost effectiveness, availability and performance.”
Communications servers: A new solution
Bieberich then went on to propose a solution: “The availability of highly scalable, secure, standards-based servers with carrier-grade reliability will be critical to the success of these new initiatives.”
Communications servers have emerged as the common communications platform upon which NEPs build network infrastructure elements such as:
VoIP media gateways
Softswitches
IMS infrastructure
Wireless equipment including Radio Network Controller (RNC), Secure Global Network (SGN), and Gateway General Support Node (GGSN)
The communications server is architected specifically to:
Act as a common platform for a wide range of applications
Provide the flexibility for NEPs to incorporate their added value at every level of integration
Meet communications equipment’s carrier grade and longevity-of-supply requirements
Streamline the value chain, speeding time to market of next-generation products and allowing NEPs to focus their development energies on added value
Communications servers must be based on open standards that empower a rich ecosystem of vendors, each providing diverse elements that add value and interoperate with the communications server.
The appearance of communications servers parallels the earlier evolution of enterprise servers. Twenty years ago, the enterprise server emerged in response to the need to drive down infrastructure costs and provide more interoperable computing. Enterprise servers today serve as the basis for web servers, e-mail servers, print servers, and file servers, among others.
Just as enterprise servers arose in response to a particular set of market needs, communications servers capable of supporting multiple service offerings and infrastructure functions change the ROI and total cost of ownership equations throughout the communications industry.
What’s riding on the shoulders of communications servers is the ability to accelerate the cost-effective development of converged services. They’ll do this by driving down infrastructure costs, improving time to market, and shifting NEP resources toward the development of new applications and services.
Communications servers enable solution providers to faster and more efficiently build the equipment that will allow people to communicate across multiple converged networks, transmitting highly dense and advanced content with reliability and high quality. Some examples of converged communications include:
Mobile phone users monitor stock transactions in real time, receive instant sports results, browse the Internet, watch TV programs, and send digital photos
Medical professionals transmit graphics-intensive diagnostic information including CAT or PET scans, MRI, and X-rays to distant specialists for quick analysis and response
Military drone airplanes fly over conflict situations and send graphical data back to commanders who have to analyze the data instantly to make battlefield decisions
Life sciences researchers share huge data sets of information about the molecular design and expected behavior of newly developed pharmaceutical agents
Industry momentum
In a February 2006 report, The Yankee Group stated, “The time is now to start modifying product road maps and business processes to make room for standards-based communications servers [1].”
Nortel is one company that has adopted a standards-based, common platform strategy. In a recent interview by Dr. Lance A. Leventhal, Technology Editor at ATCA Newsletter, Mitchell Simcoe, Senior Manager of Carrier VoIP/IMS Product Marketing at Nortel Networks, supported this trend: “A comprehensive business analysis convinced us that we could gain significant competitive advantage by using a fully integrated communications server. The company could then combine its value-added software and services with the economies of an outsourced, standards-based, carrier-grade base platform.”
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Paul Brescia, Senior Manager, PLM, OEM Platforms at Nortel, was able to quantify some of the benefits of the communications server approach: “By taking out the design cycle and the productization cycle that would have been used on a plain vanilla AdvancedTCA chassis, we’ve probably sliced a year off time to market2.”
And Brian Partridge, senior analyst of the Yankee Group, doesn’t see the benefits that Nortel has realized as unusual: “Recent Yankee Group research shows that leading Tier 1 telecom equipment manufacturers are embracing the concept of common platforms and estimate a 30 percent improvement in time-to-market and project development costs from using standards-based communications servers1.”
Leading equipment manufacturers in several industries – such as telecommunications, medical, defense, and aerospace – already are embracing communications servers. In so doing, they are accelerating implementation of their own next-generation infrastructures and ecosystems that will ultimately support a world of seamless mobility.
References
[1] Standards-Based Communications Servers for Telecommunications Yankee Group, February 2006
[2] Motorola and Nortel case study, www.motorola.com/computing
John Fryer is director of technology marketing for Embedded Communications Computing within Motorola’s Networks business. He is responsible for determining market trends and future customer requirements to develop strategic directions of Motorola’s AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA based communications servers.
Shreekant Raivadera manages Motorola’s communications server marketing communications program.
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