Moving Away from ATCA

Why Some Suppliers Say They Are Swearing Off the Telecom Standard

“The ATCA architecture is still not quite there; it’s not the equivalent of a standard BladeCenter-type architecture,” says Brad Hurte, vice president of marketing and product management at Ortiva Wireless, a BladeCenter customer that offers a mobile video streaming platform on a licensed or hosted basis.

These technological limitations, the fact that standards servers provide lower costs than ATCA, and the longer-than-expected shelf life of CompactPCI (ATCA’s precursor) all contributed to the take rate for ATCA solutions to be lower than expected, says Firth.

Despite any shortcomings these suppliers see in ATCA, the technology still has its believers.

PICMG, the 13-year-old consortium of more than 450 companies that developed ATCA, says that more than 45 companies today offer products based on the standard.

Research firm IDC recently released a study stating ATCA still is poised for strong growth, reaching $5 billion in revenue by 2012, “despite being slowed by the mergers of four major [network equipment providers] and continued high prices.” IDC did not respond to xchange’s request for an interview.

Indeed. IBM’s Firth says ATCA is not going away; such solutions will coexist with products like IBM’s BladeCenter.

For example, Sun Microsystems Inc. as recently as November unveiled a family of new ATCA-based gear under its popular Netra line. However, a spokesman representing Sun was quick to point out to xchange that while the company’s Netra line is specifically ATCA-standardized, Sun also offers products that are not ATCA-standardized.

And Intel and Motorola sold off their ATCA assets, rather than simply discontinuing them, meaning somebody was willing to buy them. Embedded tech-nology specialist RadiSys bought only the ATCA holdings from Intel, which is one piece of evidence supporting Martino’s comment that ATCA is becoming more of a component market. However, Emerson spokesman Mark Polzin emphasized ATCA solutions are just part of what that company expects to attain through its acquisition of Motorola’s Embedded Communications Computing business. Emerson declined to speak with xchange in mid-December to com-ment on ATCA in general and its plans for the Motorola ECC ATCA in particular, saying the deal had not yet closed.

However, leaders at RadiSys spoke with xchange in early December, reiterating their interest in ATCA, which they say is a strong, growing market that allowed the company to move away from its traditional “perfect-fit solutions” business to a model using standardized technology that enables it to leverage R&D across multiple solutions for its service provider and telecom equipment manufacturer (TEM) customers. In fact, RadiSys already had some ATCA products before expanding its portfolio in this arena through the recent acquisition from Intel, which has a history of investing in such technologies to get the market going and later selling those businesses, notes former Intel employee Keate Despain, who is now senior director of product marketing at RadiSys.

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