SCOPE Alliance at AdvancedTCA Summit

By Leslie Guth, SCOPE Alliance

SCOPE Alliance’s Technical Officer, Brian Moore of Motorola, represented SCOPE at the AdvancedTCA Summit. He joined the COTS Ecosystem panel along with representatives of CP-TA, SA Forum, AXIe Consortium, PICMG, and OpenSAF.

The session introduced practitioners to groups within the AdvancedTCA /MicroTCA COTS ecosystem that advance standards, promote interoperability, provide open source software, and tailor specifications to the needs of particular communities. Session participants discussed how their groups relate to practical projects based on standard platforms and described their purpose, membership, status, goals, and current projects.

Brian explained that SCOPE is an industry alliance committed to accelerating the deployment of Carrier Grade Base Platforms (CGBPs) for service provider applications. He described SCOPE’s mission to help enable and promote the availability of open CGBPs based on COTS HW / SW and free and open source (FOSS) building blocks, and to promote interoperability to better serve service providers and consumers. He closed by outlining SCOPE’s key activities and recent accomplishments.

SCOPE Activities and Accomplishments

• Providing the COTS ecosystem and SIGs with a common NEP perspective via the following activities:
• Profiling existing open specifications such as PICMG, LF-CGL, and SAF
• Identifying and prioritizing gaps in relevant specifications
• Elaborating common requirements for CGBP in significant areas:
• Establishing carrier-grade definitions for terms such as environmental, life cycle, service availability, and virtualization
• Enabling a rich ecosystem of COTS building blocks for CGBPs offering:
• Fast time to market
• Innovative solutions
• Multiplevendors in each area
• Reducing component cost through larger/common volumes
• Developing position papers and white papers
• Creating profiles and doing gap analysis
• Documenting case studies
• Holding technical workshops

For more information about the SCOPE Alliance, or to become a SCOPE member, please visit www.scope-alliance.org.

Leslie Guth (Alcatel-Lucent) is the 2010 Chair of the SCOPE Alliance. You can reach her via the Alliance’s press representative, Karen Riley Sawyer of Nereus, at kriley@nereus-worldwide.com.