ATCA Products

March 24, 2005

In my recent blog, AdvancedTCA Growing Quickly I talked about how Instat mentioned the OSC market and more specifically the ATCA market is advancing nicely. This post was based on some research by Instat. I had a chance to ask Eric M. Mantion, Senior Analyst at Instat about the OSC and ATCA market in particular. Here are his comments:

Why do you see AdvancedTCA gaining share over other standards? What are the advantages over prior technologies?

There really aren't that many other standards. For the most part, there really is just PICMG 2.0 (known as CompactPCI) and its numerous variants. IBM's BladeCenter is out there, and is doing fine in the enterprise space, but that's not the telecom's space. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent, every year on capital equipment for service providers on a worldwide basis. While the CompactPCI standard has been out there for a while, it is not a good fit everywhere and there some substantial areas that were improved in PICMG 3.0 -- most noticeably backplane capacity and thermal envelopes.

IYO are there areas where ATCA doesn’t make sense?

ATCA is also still a bit expensive, so we also won't see PICMG 2.0 fade away. Any more than the dump truck could replace the pick-up truck, or vice versa. One example might be WiMAX basestations that are priced between $20 and $35k -- far to little to support an $8k chassis. If the price could drop to $3k, then that might be different. Plus, there are other derivatives that are also being considered, like MicroTCA. In the end, there is a lot of momentum building behind PICMG but these markets (like any gargantuan market) changes slowly.

When will the costs drop on ATCTA equipment to make it a no brainer choice for OSC implementations?

The ACTA will never be the "last remaining OSC," but we do expect it to start entering the enterprise market in 2007.

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