About 50 percent of the network equipment provider (NEP) community will adopt advanced telecommunications architecture (ATCA) in parts of their product line by 2007, said IDC in a survey. The survey predicts that more than 900 percent growth in ATCA adoption with revenue increasing from USD 790 million in 2007 to USD 8.6 billion in 2011.
"Rates of ATCA adoption vary, with some companies adopting immediately and others waiting until the next wave of design wins in order to adopt more of these commercial off-the-shelf (COTS)—based components for future telecom server products," said Lee Doyle, group vice president of Network Infrastructure at IDC.
In spite of its growth opportunities ATCA faces a number if challenges in its widespread adoption. IDC said the technology needs to prove itself in terms of reliability, scalability, and performance. The ATCA community needs to prove its products will adhere to standards and will be truly interoperable. ATCA board and chassis volumes need to ramp up to provide expected cost benefits.
Timing is another issue that ATCA faces. Some of the vendors that had originally considered ATCA implementations are planning microTCA implementations instead or will implement both over the next two years.
According to recent IDC findings, the NEP community is very supportive of the goals of ATCA and COTS technology and sees the value in having a common platform that meets their specific needs. The NEPs see the benefits in terms of lower hardcore costs, reduced maintenance, ability to leverage third-party boards, and, most important, the ability to lock-in on their equipment and application servers due to the ability to move to other vendors’ implementations of the same core standards-based components.
However, NEPs face challenges such as the need to deliver new platforms and applications, and the need to reduce costs and improve engineering productivity.
IDC expects that network service providers (NSP) will have an important, but indirect role in the adoption of ATCA technology. Many NSPs are actively promoting COTS technology, and they like the idea of having a common industry-standard computing platform to run increasingly software-intensive networks. However, the impact will be indirect as NSPs (in most cases) cannot adopt ATCA directly into their network. They have to rely on NEPs to deliver ATCA-based server products (e.g, servers supporting IP multimedia subsystem services) that they can deploy to modernise and update their networks.
IDC’s study, ‘ATCA Opportunity: Adoption of Computing Architectures in Network Equipment’, includes market forecast of 2006-2011 and survey results of more than 25 top executives at 15 network equipment manufacturers.
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