SCOPE Press Release
SCOPE Alliance Addresses MicroTCA and Long Life Cycle Support in Newly Released Profiles
Group Announces 2008 Officers
Piscataway, NJ, February 19, 2008 – The SCOPE Alliance, an association of leading Network Equipment Providers (NEPs), today announced the availability of its MicroTCA Hardware Profile and its Services and Support Profile addressing Long Life Cycle Support. In addition, SCOPE announced its 2008 officers. The Alliance developed the profiles to help prevent fragmentation in the telecommunications market, reduce development costs, decrease cycle times, and encourage the use of common building blocks in the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) ecosystem.
The new MicroTCA profile, designed for hardware vendors, building block manufacturers and NEPs, provides guidelines, narrows options and prioritizes requirements specifically for use in telecommunications networks. SCOPE identified a smaller subset of choices within the PICMG specification that will best serve the needs of central office applications. The MicroTCA profile also identifies and prioritizes gaps for vendors implementing the specification.
“SCOPE is excited about the potential for MicroTCA growth within the telecommunications industry, and our MicroTCA profile aims to get all implementers on the same page,” said Ron Breault, SCOPE technical co-chair. “We’ve prioritized the requirements and options within the spec, which is expected to speed implementation and increase the likelihood of interoperability between MicroTCA systems of different vendors.”
The Services and Support Profile – Long Life Cycle Support paper defines standard terminology and methods for NEPs, which SCOPE believes will provide consistency within the ecosystem. The profile addresses the requirements of Central Office systems, many of which are now also valid for Data Centers.
“As an organization of the world’s leading NEPs, we know how important it is to be able to qualify the components within a COTS ecosystem,” said Timo Jokiaho, SCOPE technical officer. “Our goal in the Long Life Cycle Support paper is to get everyone speaking the same language, in regard to the carrier grade engineering qualification process, which we believe will eventually decrease costs and cycle times.”
In addition to helping those implementing industry specifications, SCOPE’s feedback assists industry standards organizations in defining and prioritizing future work.
“We welcome SCOPE’s feedback on our specifications, especially as we’re seeing growing adoption of MicroTCA,” said Joe Pavlat, PICMG president. “Creating a true COTS ecosystem requires the participation of a variety of organizations, and we believe the whole industry benefits from the work SCOPE is doing.”
SCOPE Announces 2008 Officers
SCOPE elected the following officers to lead the organization’s work in 2008.
Chairman: Paul Steinberg, Motorola
Vice-chair: Chris Wardale, NEC
Finance and Membership Officer: Magnus Buhrgard, Ericsson
Marketing Officer: Leslie Guth, Alcatel-Lucent
Marketing Co-Chair: Tero Mustala, Nokia Siemens Networks
Technical Officer: Timo Jokiaho, Nokia Siemens Networks
Technical Co-Chair: Ron Breault, Nortel
The new profile documents are free to download at www.SCOPE-Alliance.org.
About SCOPE Alliance
The SCOPE Alliance is an association of Network Equipment Providers aimed at accelerating the deployment of Carrier Grade Base Platforms for service provider applications. Its mission is to enable and promote the availability of open Carrier Grade Base Platforms based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software building blocks, and to promote interoperability to better serve Service Providers and consumers. For more information about the SCOPE Alliance, visit: www.SCOPE-Alliance.org.
Contact:
Liz Delapoer
503.619.5225
Nereus for SCOPE Alliance
ldelapoer@nereus-worldwide.com
Charmain Williams
+1-732-465-6610
IEEE-ISTO
