SA Forum Specifications Make Good Business Sense

By Lacy Williams, Service Availability (SA) Forum/GoAhead Software

As demand for mobile solutions grows, operators must ensure their networks can deliver high quality, new converged services quickly and cost-effectively. To stay competitive, telecom equipment manufacturers (TEMs) face four basic challenges: increased complexity, tight schedules, shrinking budgets, and evolving standards.

As end user requirements grow, so does the complexity of embedded systems. This increase heightens the risk of system failure. Software in particular is a key source of new failure-point introduction. Not only are equipment manufacturers working to offer newer and better applications, they are doing it with smaller budgets and extremely aggressive time-to-market goals. In a recent survey, 70 percent of TEMs reported time-to-market requirements of one year or less.  In practice, nearly 40 percent of all projects are completed behind schedule. Developers must therefore minimize schedule risk throughout their initial system design. 

The industry has responded by moving from proprietary vertically-integrated platforms to ones based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS), open standards-based solutions. We have seen standards widely adopted at the hardware and operating system layers.  The focus has now shifted to the service availability middleware layer. By adopting COTS middleware, developers can ensure that core service availability and management requirements will be met, while still being able to focus on revenue-generating applications.

The SA Forum solution has two key components: the Hardware Platform Interface (HPI) and the Application Interface Specification (AIS). They abstract the service availability middleware from other platform components. This offers a standardized way to ensure continuous service of the system and applications. The specifications provide three major benefits that greatly simplify development and integration: 1) the ability to discover, monitor, control, and manage hardware resources, 2) application portability, regardless of middleware provider, and 3) unified platform and software management.

Market research highlights the cost and time benefits of the COTS approach. Highlights include the ability to cut R&D costs by nearly 30 percent. By leveraging standardized interfaces for service availability and platform management, equipment manufacturers can simplify development and integration and also increase their ability to re-use platforms and port applications across platforms. This reduces hardware and software costs, and even simplifies QA. What’s more, there are successful commercial SA Forum implementations available today, which have allowed TEMs to cut development cycles by more than half.

Reliability cannot be compromised in the rush to implementing new applications, and competitive pressures are too great to focus resources on “commodity” requirements. Leading innovators are therefore turning to COTS solutions based on SA Forum specifications to design flexible, open systems. Standard interfaces free developers from proprietary APIs, paving the way to a truly interoperable architecture. The SA Forum Application Webcast contains compelling stories of TEMs who have used SA Forum based solutions to minimize schedule risk, enable rapid development, and as a result, gain a competitive edge.  

Lacy Williams is a Marketing Manager at GoAhead Software and a member of the Service Availability Forum’s Marketing Workgroup.  You can reach her at lwilliams@goahead.com.