The COTS Ecosystem--Strength in numbers

I recently had a rare opportunity to sit down with five organizations that today make up one entity--the COTS Ecosystem. One can't help but be impressed that the group functions in concert, not only missing each others toes but actually happily coexisting to provide form and function to a rapidly evolving and sometimes confusing space.

Included in the ecosystem are PICMG, CP-TA, the SCOPE Alliance, Service Availability Forum, and The Linux Foundation. By way of introduction, Here's a brief overview of each of the players in the ecosystem and in the roundtable discussion:

• PICMG, founded in 1994, is a consortium of companies that collaboratively develop open specifications for high-performance telecommunications and industrial computing applications. PICMG is represented by Rob Davidson, Vice President of Marketing for PICMG.
• CP-TA is an association of communications platforms and building block providers with a goal of accelerating the adoption of SIG-governed, open specification-based communications platforms through interoperability testing and certification. CP-TA is represented by Sven Freudenfeld, Vice President and Marketing Chairman for the group.
• The SCOPE Alliance is committed to accelerating deployment of carrier-grade base platforms for service provider applications. Chris Wardale, Board Vice Chair for SCOPE is present.
• The Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) supports the broad adoption of open standards by developing missing standard interfaces necessary to deliver highly available carrier-grade systems with off-the-shelf hardware platforms, middleware, and service applications. Asif Naseem, President of the SA Forum joins the discussion.
• The Linux Foundation helps close the gap between open source and proprietary platforms. The Carrier Linux work group was formed in 2002 and was hosted by OSDL. When OSDL merged into the Linux foundation, the Carrier Grade Linux work group continued its work. Dan Cauchy, Chairman of Carrier Grade Linux Workgroup for Linux Foundation represents the group.

The organizations were not initially created to work together. The ecosystem instead is the product of a gradual evolution that has, in the past three years, been picking up steam. What follows is a conversation that helps to define each group, how they work separately and together to form this extremely valuable service.

CommsDesign: How was the decision made for each group to join the ecosystem. How did this evolve?

Sven Freudenfeld--CP-TA: The effort started with the PICMG organization, defining standardized building blocks or standards for the embedded and computing industry. They primarily targeted the telecom industry and the rolling out of the Advanced Telecommunications Architecture, (ATCA) and specifying telecom requirements. It was a ground-laying organization for defining hardware specifications to meet the telecom environment.

That was a starting point. Then, there was a need to clarify some of the standards and finalize them. The fact that we have standards does not guarantee, for example, interoperability given multiple vendors. Since this is an open community, the need grew to ratify some of the specifications.

Chris Wardale--Scope Alliance: The SCOPE alliance came after everyone else. We looked at the landscape and saw that there are lots of activities in different layers--the hardware, operating system, middleware, and applications layers. From our point of view we saw that a holistic picture could be created if we looked across those layers. That was really the reason the SCOPE Alliance was established.

Rob Davidson, PICMG: PICMG has been around since 1994 and has multiple specifications. The ones most followed in this community include AdvancedTCA, AMC and MicroTCA. We formed to advance the needs of the industrial automation marketplace for more rugged modular-type PCI computers. From there, we probably organically defined our niche in the marketplace around the hardware and lower-level software specifications. It's sort of what the organization does. It takes three executive member companies to start a specification initiative inside of PICMG so it's driven from the bottom up, not from the top down. Some of the more successful specification initiatives such as ATCA started as working groups outside of PICMG, created a foundation and brought them into PICMG. As an organization we could help bring them to market quickly.

Dan Cauchy - Linux Foundation: Figure 1 below is a good representation of how the organizations really work well together and have very little overlap.

At the bottom, PICMG focuses on hardware specifications, and the Linux Foundation on operating systems and LINUX requirements and specifications. The SA Forum concentrates on middleware and high availability specifications. These are the three organizations working on actual or technical specs.

One of the issues when you have so many members and so many requirements, you often end up with specs that are quite general and maybe a little bloated for specific applications. This is where the SCOPE Alliance comes in. Formed by the network equipment providers, the SCOPE Alliance has played a critical role in this industry in narrowing down the important aspects in each of the very large specifications and narrowing them down to specific requirements for equipment categories in specific applications.

The SCOPE alliance plays a critical role in guiding the industry and telling us what is important for specific sets of equipment. Then the CP-TA comes in and provides the glue that gives us interoperability and testing. The organizations work very well together--it's all complementary.

Asif Naseem, Service Availability Forum: There are two key trends that actually catalyzed the formation of the SA Forum. One trend on the service provider side is that all of the network operators are moving their networks from stovepipe architectures to a more service-oriented transport agnostic network where there's no need for separate control, access, and services layers. Common layers are used to create an architecture that's substantially more efficient and can provide converged services and can quickly be put together.