Service Availability Forum Expands Its Mission to Include Education

By Asif Naseem, SA Forum

In an age of rapid service deployment and increased focus on uninterrupted service availability, the re-use of highly available applications and the integration of third-party software are critical requirements. The Service Availability™ (SA) Forum has created specifications for carrier-grade service availability that benefit Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) and help foster a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) ecosystem. With initial adoptions well underway, the Forum has expanded its charter to include educational materials that help developers quickly ascertain the benefits of the specifications and how to use them.

The SA Forum has created a critical mass of specifications for carrier-grade service availability. The Hardware Platform Interface (HPI) abstracts the hardware from management middleware and makes each independent of the other. The Application Interface Specification (AIS) standardizes the interface between SA Forum-compliant high availability (HA) middleware and service applications. Lastly, the Java Mapping maps the AIS services to the Java language.

SA Forum members believe that enabling development of systems and applications based on the specifications will accelerate the acceptance and investment in a COTS ecosystem by key players in the communications industry. This is why the Forum is adding another focus area to its efforts, namely education. It will try to raise awareness of applications based on AIS implementations, and will also try to educate the systems and applications development community on the service availability solution. The first program will be a series of Webcasts that focus on implementing open specifications for carrier-grade and mission-critical applications and systems. This multi-track tutorial is aimed at both novice and seasoned developers. It includes real-world case studies of successful systems and applications based on open specifications. It will soon be available for download from the SA Forum Web site (www.saforum.org).   

SA Forum specifications continue to gain traction. More NEPs, Telecom Equipment Manufacturers (TEMs), and other mission-critical equipment manufacturers are looking to standardization at the service availability layer to avoid vendor lock-in, ensure portability, and speed time to delivery. The SA Forum’s expanded charter to educate the COTS ecosystem on both the technical and business value of open specifications will ease the decision-making process and aid the adoption effort.

Asif Naseem is President of the Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) and COO of GoAhead Software. You can reach him via the SA Forum’s press contact, Lori Zielinski of Nereus Worldwide, at lzielinski@nereus-worldwide.com.