The steady move from proprietary platforms to ones based on open industry standards shows no sign of slowing down. The telecommunication industry, which is the largest market for communications equipment outside of the consumer space, is slowly but surely moving away from a one-hundred-year tradition of building everything themselves while at the same time discouraging competition by keeping the equipment proprietary. What the telecommunication industry is moving towards is the outsourcing of design and manufacturing tasks to others, based upon open standards. Sometimes the telecom equipment providers play a crucial role in the definition of the platforms, as was the case with AdvancedTCA. The military and aerospace markets continue their move towards COTS platforms, and seem especially interested in the potential of ruggedized MicroTCA.

What do telcos want?

But a number of tough problems remain. Today's high-speed, highly available, switched-fabric platforms are extremely complex, and the core hardware is but a piece of the overall system. Telecom manufacturers want to purchase platforms that are ready to accept their application, which is their real value add. A reliable operating system - increasingly Linux - must be ported to the hardware. High Availability, also called HA, middleware must be integrated, and all of the system management bits must be connected physically and logically. Careful thermal design is required to make everything work reliably at high temperatures. And, to top it off, these telcos want to buy different parts of the system from different vendors to get best in class performance and to encourage price competition. In other words, they want interoperability.

These requirements have led our industry to realize that interoperability just doesn't happen automatically. There must be methods developed to establish interoperability requirements, develop test methods, and do the actual testing. PICMG has been conducting interoperability workshops since 1993 on an informal basis, and these workshops have served the ecosystem well. But they are not enough. Formal testing methodologies must be developed, and someone has to own them. In the case of AdvancedTCA, MicroTCA, and the Advanced Mezzanine Card, that organization is the Communications Platforms Trade Association, or CP-TA. In this issue, Nirlay Kundu from Emerson Network Power, who also chairs the Compliance Group at CP-TA, explains the problems they are addressing, their approach, and their goals. He does a good job of explaining how their programs can reduce costs for both vendor and customer. You can also find out more about the organization's activities at their Web site, www.cp-ta.org.

Sven Freudenfeld from Kontron digs a little deeper into interoperability issues, discussing additional issues for systems integrators, who are becoming an indispensable part of the AdvancedTCA value chain. He explains the importance of integration management, platform pre-validation, and testing. Sven is very active in CP-TA, and he presented a recent web seminar on the issues of bringing application-ready platforms to market quickly, noting that forecasters expect 80 million IPTV subscribers by 2011. AdvancedTCA is becoming the platform of choice for IPTV, as we've discussed in previous issues. His presentation can be viewed at www.cp-ta.org.

I've noted in earlier columns that Ethernet is the overwhelming choice for most AdvancedTCA applications. Gary Lee from Fulcrum Microsystems tells us about a new development in the form of Carrier Ethernet, which is replacing SONET-SDH technology in backbone and access networks, describing its higher performance and lower cost. He points out that the availability of high-volume boards and switches makes AdvancedTCA a good choice for Carrier Ethernet systems.

One of the attractions of AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA is the ability to build highly available and highly reliable platforms. While the size, capacity, and speed of conventional mechanical hard disks continues to improve, they are a weak component in systems trying to reach 5-nines and 6-nines availability and 20 years of operational life. Paul Dinh from Virtium Technology introduces us to Solid State Drive technology using Flash memory and explains how system performance as well as reliability can improve. The military and aerospace markets have been moving to Flash storage for some time and will likely demand it for upcoming MicroTCA applications.

In this month's Global Technology column, our colleague Hermann Strass provides us quite a bit of detail about who is doing what with AdvancedTCA. He notes that last year's sales of AdvancedTCA gear worldwide totaled about $600-700M, and we're on target for about a billion dollars in sales this year. I think his numbers are about right and agree that a few early, overly enthusiastic predictions by a few excited analysts were unrealistic and have been scaled back.

To round out this month's editorial, Curt Schwaderer's Software Corner gives us some examples of how the convergence of multiple applications onto single platforms is providing very capable multimedia solutions for businesses at ever lower costs and operational expense.

Joe Pavlat, Editorial Director