Using Fully Integrated Platforms to Develop Telecom Equipment,
Brian Wood, Continuous Computing

The telecom supply chain has changed greatly in recent years. The three primary approaches to developing telecom equipment are as follows in time order (with typical time-to-market in parentheses):

1. Proprietary, in-house development (36 months)
2. Integration of COTS building blocks (24 months)
3. Acquisition of fully-integrated platforms (12 months)

Telecom equipment manufacturers (TEMs) were once vertically integrated, creating almost everything in-house. They could thus maximize gross margins, but could only deliver new products on three-year schedules. However, such timetables served the highly-regulated, monopolistic carriers just fine.

More recently, TEMs have moved toward integrating standards-based, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) building blocks. The key forces were widespread telecom deregulation and telecom’s “nuclear winter” in 2000-2002, resulting in TEMs shedding thousands of workers and turning toward standards-based platforms such as CompactPCI and AdvancedTCA. Although painful, this shift resulted in TEMs accelerating time-to-market from 36 to 24 months.

Unfortunately, COTS integration has not been nearly as easy, fast, or financially rewarding as was initially projected. It has not been plug-and-play, particularly for designers unfamiliar with the approach. Integrating a chassis, compute blade, switch, packet processor, middleware, operating system, and protocol software, all from different vendors, is not easy. The unfortunate result is a stream of schedule delays, with much longer time-to-market and lower operating profits than expected.

Enter a new phase in which TEMs start with fully-integrated platforms, while focusing internal R&D teams on application development. Realizing the lack of value in spending time and money on platform integration, TEMs are now focusing their efforts on the most value-add (and differentiating) aspect of their products, namely the application. With this approach, R&D budgets go for tasks that deserve to be done internally, while engineering team members can work on more interesting, innovative, and profitable endeavors than platform integration. It’s fun to be an engineer again!

The net result of acquiring fully-integrated platforms and focusing internal resources on application development is that TEMs can get to market in only 12 months, thereby reducing costs and increasing market penetration. Higher volume and operating margins are why TEMs are shifting to fully-integrated platforms that include high availability middleware, protocol stacks, unified management, and hardware platforms for new product deliveries.

For example, Continuous Computing is addressing this shift with FlexTCA, a new product family of fully-integrated platforms for creating IPTV, security, and wireless core solutions. FlexTCA enables TEMs to significantly decrease their time-to-market while increasing program ROI by up to 50 percent.

Fast-changing markets, cutthroat competition, and erosion of their traditional revenue base have made telecoms anxious to have low-cost, flexible equipment that can meet application needs immediately if not sooner. As a result, the TEMs need standard platforms that include everything required to develop equipment quickly. Their suppliers, in turn, must provide an integrated package of hardware and software that can provide a solid, ready-to-go base for applications.