SCOPE Alliance: Influencing the Telecom Industry Agenda
By Paul Steinberg, SCOPE Alliance Chairman

Since our founding in January 2006, the SCOPE Alliance has been committed to accelerating the deployment of Carrier Grade Base Platforms for service provider applications. Our mission is to enable and promote the availability of open Carrier Grade Base Platforms (CGBPs) based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software building blocks, and to promote interoperability to better serve service providers and consumers.

To date, we have worked with other organizations to improve industry specifications and with COTS building block vendors to drive a robust ecosystem of interoperable COTS products. SCOPE has focused on improving the CGBP and its related tools. We developed a common reference architecture as well as presenting the Network Equipment Providers’ (NEPs) perspective on how industry specifications from PICMG, the Linux Foundation, and the Service Availability Forum relate to our architecture and goals. We’ve been successful in developing specification profiles and gap analyses for the hardware, OS, and middleware layers of the stack, as well as addressing new areas such as virtualization.

In October 2008, we released a Technical Position Paper, The SCOPE Alliance – Influencing the Agenda, to provide the industry insight into the latest SCOPE requirements for network elements, enabling the ecosystem to better meet the NEPs’ needs.

In the paper, we describe the evolving changes to network architectures and the corresponding mandates of the telecom industry. This includes the traditional carrier-grade requirements that ensure equipment is suitable for running highly available services, as well as new requirements such as modularity, portability, and hardware independence that emphasize speed of deployment and low operating costs.

We also expand the scope of the Carrier Grade Platform Reference Architecture, spreading our focus beyond just the base platform. The paper provides a detailed description of each component of the reference architecture and highlights SCOPE’s accomplishments in each area.

Relevant technologies are changing rapidly, making it virtually impossible for any single supplier to be best in class across all aspects of the CGBP. NEPs need to be able to leverage a broad ecosystem of interoperable building blocks so that they can focus on providing new and improved products. We believe that this paper provides COTS vendors with a concise understanding of SCOPE’s technical output as well as highlighting future areas under consideration. The Technical Position Paper is free to download at www.scope-alliance.org.

You can reach Paul Steinberg via lzielinski@nereus-worldwide.com.