Embracing Standards Based Platforms

Executive Summary In today's complex and everchanging communications industry, dramatic transformations in standards, technology, and the ecosystem that provides them are changing the way solutions are developed, validated, and deployed. An important strategy for telecommunication equipment vendors to remain competitive is to consolidate standards-based commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components into product platforms and deploy new products using such platforms. Similar transformations have happened before in most other mature industries such as the auto industry and the computer industry. The telecommunications sector is reaching the same critical maturity level. At the same time, many of the enablers for the horizontal transformation have presented themselves. Integrating product platforms from diverse components can still be a daunting task. Therefore, a much more cost-effective alternative is to rely on complete , fully pre-integrated product platforms. Similar to desktop computers with pre-installed OS and common software, pre-integrated telecommunications product platforms allow the equipment manufacturer to focus on services and application, the high-level software that defines the differentiating functionality of the final product. Such horizontal transformation cannot happen without standards. Not coin-cidentally a wide range of standards forums and organizations are working on outlining common requirements, architectural structure, and component interfaces. This paper overviews the relevant standardization efforts.