xTCA Market Embraces Co-opetition

By Brian Wood, CP-TA

Communications Platforms Trade Association (CP-TA) board member Rob Pettigrew of Emerson Network Power Embedded Computing shared his views on the xTCA market in a recent CP-TA blog post. He refers to co-opetition as the motivation for otherwise competing companies to collaborate, and he also discusses the benefits it brings to embedded computing.

Customers demand the ability to build systems using equipment from multiple – often competing – vendors without system interoperability issues or costly forklift upgrades. In this environment, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are increasingly turning to open standards-based systems, especially to strengthen choice and configuration flexibility.

Though optimal flexibility and choice cannot be achieved without open standards, a degree of co-opetition between vendors must exist for standards to succeed. Such an environment exists in the AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA markets, facilitated by many standards bodies and trade associations, including the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG), the Service Availability Forum (SAF), and CP-TA.

A large, thriving ecosystem of vendors has evolved due to most tier 1 and tier 2 network equipment providers (NEPs) deploying applications on AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA open computing platforms to focus their development efforts and shorten time-to-market.  This offers an ecosystem of complementary and competing products along with greatly-improved interoperability, both essential for a truly open computing platform.

“Competing vendors vying for an increasing share of the market will strive to differentiate their products through innovation, value proposition, or price, but it is mutually beneficial to all of them to improve interoperability,” Pettigrew writes. “This mutual benefit drives competing companies to cooperate on standards bodies, trade associations, and open source projects to improve the market appeal of their products.”

To learn more about co-opetition in open standards and how to successfully integrate open standards-based products, read Rob’s full CP-TA blog here.

To join us in this important work, please visit CP-TA’s web site at www.cp-ta.org.

Brian Wood is Marketing Work Group chair for the Communications Platforms Trade Association (CP-TA). You may contact him via Karen Riley Sawyer at kriley@nereus-worldwide.com.