It does indeed focus us on the telcos, where, as you know, our AdvancedTCA product line is designed in at practically every major TEM. And we have volume production going with every single one of those applications within multiple programs.

The enterprise space, though, is different ground. We have identified a new “carrier enterprise” product space where we believe AdvancedTCA is a good fit. However, we are not interested in competing with IBM or HP in data center applications.

Our focus will be to clearly delineate between carrier network or carrier enterprise and identify those things that our AdvancedTCA products do well – NEBS compliance, high availability, flexibility, longevity of supply - those characteristics of AdvancedTCA that can address mission critical applications which are not currently met by enterprise class servers. The benefits of AdvancedTCA are well positioned for the all-IP network and the convergence of applications in what might commonly be referred to as the network data center.

Joe – Speaking of adding value beyond hardware, how do you see OpenSAF as taking the work of the Service Availability Forum forward?

Stephen – I have been actively involved. People might ask why would we take our middleware and high availability software and make it freely available? It comes back to commercialization. If more people have access to this type of technology, the market will adapt faster and the results will benefit the entire industry. We are enabling people to download our high availability firmware, our middleware, and apply it to their applications.

Some of the OpenSAF founders (including Sun) see opportunities for taking advantage of standard middleware product that is SA Forum compliant that allows the migration of applications faster for the carriers and for the TEMs. So you get the ability to have commercialization of some of the products available across the board. If Nokia-Siemens or Motorola can move their applications faster to new platforms, then the ability to adapt AdvancedTCA into new applications will happen sooner rather than later.

And I will tell you that we’ve seen a tremendous amount of interest in AdvancedTCA and it is our fastest growing market segment. We’ve doubled year over year and I expect this trend to continue.

Joe – Highly available systems have traditionally been required in the telecom space but less so in other markets. What opportunities is Emerson pursuing to build highly available systems for other markets?

Stephen – We are already working on it. We have announced a two-slot AdvancedTCA system, ideal for carrier enterprise applications, which will allow TEMs to move their applications to a smaller footprint, with the same high availability middleware on that platform. We are also in the process of making that available on MicroTCA platforms and the biggest pickup has been in the military—and not always just hardened systems—many are communications applications. So with open standards, standard products and open middleware, customers are not locking themselves into particular vendor, and we are seeing a tremendous interest in areas that would not traditionally be considered high availability.

Joe – How do you see MicroTCA ramping up? To which markets and when?

Stephen – MicroTCA has so many options, and can do so many things, that there was no tipping point application [where one would say] “it works really well for this and it is better than anything else.” So part of the reason MicroTCA has not taken off as quickly as people might have wanted it to is because they have to ask “Which version of MicroTCA do we want and what kind of form factor for what kind of application?” Some people said this will always be a low-cost solution, lower cost than AdvancedTCA. Yet at the same time we see people putting Cavium processors and DSPs on MicroTCA —that does not make it low cost.

Last year, we announced a joint effort with Hybricon to develop a proof-of-concept for a MicroTCA conduction-cooled platform which demonstrates MicroTCA’s viability across a number of industries with demanding environments. We’re also seeing interest from the enterprise space. Our first design win for MicroTCA was the aggregation system for a point-of-sale vendor. But the strongest feedback we have been getting for MicroTCA is in military and aerospace—that looks like the first space in which MicroTCA is going to realize any kind of volume.

Joe – What does Emerson need from the standards bodies?

Stephen – First, higher bandwidth fabric. 10 Gig is very important, because we are now seeing that with real 10 gig systems, the telcos can do applications that were previously unavailable.

One of the other things we have pushed hard on is backwards compatibility—we are not abandoning it. We are ensuring we maintain compatibility through 10GBASE-KR.

Customers also want more bandwidth. The issue is that even though there are companies that can do 40 gig platforms now – mesh, full mesh, and in some cases that includes 100 gigs in the lab - this is not commercially viable yet, it is not standard.

So, as the embedded computing industry leader, Emerson will continue to support open standards and use commercially available products, not only to provide the performance customers need, but also to continue to demonstrate cost and value in an open market.

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