In a new report tracking Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA®) adoption among Network Equipment Providers (NEPs), analysts from VDC Research Group predict an accelerated trend away from proprietary architectures developed in-house and toward open standards and Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) building blocks. Analysts say the economic downturn is hastening a trend that was already well underway.
In its new report “ATCA Adoption Trends Within The Network Equipment Provider Community,” VDC Research Group predicts that 85% of Tier I NEPs will be implementing the standard ATCA architecture by the end of 2010 and the percentage of those implementations using COTS building blocks will increase as NEPs look to prioritize their research and development budgets in the economic downturn.
“Tier II and III NEPs have been embracing open standards and the COTS model for some time,” said Andre Girard, analyst with VDC Research Group’s Embedded Computing practice. “We are finding that a combination of factors is driving adoption in the Tier I segment. These factors include the economic slowdown putting increased pressure on development budgets, and a strong supplier ecosystem building scale in the market.”
VDC Research Group surveyed nearly 30 NEPs for the report and found that more than half of Tier I NEPs and more than three-quarters of Tier II and III NEPs are currently implementing ATCA. As standards like ATCA and MicroTCA have matured, many NEPs have shifted their competitive focus away from hardware and integration to the software layer.
“Service Providers want options that include server-based, IP-centric platforms that are future-proofed for the continued evolution of their networks,” said Ron de Lange, executive vice president with Tekelec. “With open standards like ATCA, we minimize costs and deliver high-quality multimedia session management products by leveraging a strong supplier ecosystem and the economies of scale that come with a common architecture and components across a broad range of network elements.”
A case study on Tekelec’s implementation of ATCA is included in the report, which was commissioned by the Communications Platforms Trade Association (CP-TA). The full report is available free on its web site at www.cp-ta.org/news/white_papers
