SCOPE Alliance

Diversified Technology, an embedded hardware company, was founded in 1971 and is owned by Ergon. The company has a long history of involvement with the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG) standards. Diversified Technology develops both commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) and customised products based on PCI/ISA, COM Express, CompactPCI, AdvancedTCA and other standardised form factors.

One of the core areas of Diversified Technology’s business focuses on the AdvancedTCA (xTCA) standards. The company offers a range of xTCA-compliant blade systems, node boards and switches to customers providing servers and other network equipment to network operators in the consumer and military sectors.

There was, however, a challenge in the scope of the xCTA PICMG standards, as Joe McDevitt, CTO at Diversified Technology points out: “There were simply too many options laid out by the specifications – we could have ended up with any number of very different solutions. It was like being in the middle of a spaghetti junction without any signposts – you would get somewhere but you could not be sure it is the location you were supposed to be at. Then we heard about SCOPE.”

The SCOPE Alliance was formed in 2006 in order to better define the PICMG standards and help companies engaged in the production of components for Carrier Grade Base Platforms (CGBPs).

SCOPE ‘s sponsor members include Network Equipment Providers such as Motorola, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, NEC, Huawei and Nokia Siemens Networks. SCOPE members wanted as wide a variety of PICMG-compliant products as possible while ensuring that all modules and blades within the chassis were compatible with each other, thus making product development and integration for the CGBPs run more efficiently.

In order to do this, SCOPE publishes documents that specifically define the key content and characteristics of those components needed by the telecoms industry, including PICMG’s standards. PICMG is a consortium of companies that collaboratively develop open specifications for high performance telecommunications and industrial computing hardware applications. To date, SCOPE’s activities have included defining profiles and gaps for PICMG 3.0 - AdvancedTCA, AdvancedMC as well as μTCA (MicroTCA).

Diversified Technology was quick to adopt the SCOPE standards. Joe McDevitt explains: “the SCOPE definitions filled in the blanks for us and guided us in the correct, most effective way to develop our xCTA product range.”

SCOPE’s guidelines allowed Diversified Technology to make their xCTA blades, switches and nodes compliant and interoperable with other third-party equipment within the GCBP without needing to continually check with other vendors and operators that their development was proceeding in the correct manner. Diversified Technology can now produce hardware that is aligned with its customers’ requirements from the outset. “The benefits of this are substantial”, continued McDevitt, “our production cycles have been made more efficient and we have removed the danger that we could lose contracts through our hardware not being compatible with other elements of the system.”

Diversified Technology has also been able to see an impact on its bottom line as the time and money spent on travelling to meet with Network Equipment Providers has been greatly reduced as the company does not need to liaise so closely with them during product development.

SCOPE has also proved to be a good means through which to network with other businesses in the industry and jointly decide on the best approaches for the improvement of CGBPs. “The SCOPE Alliance has been an excellent forum to discuss how we as an industry are going to move forward. Quite often, even the areas we disagree on have proven to be rich in debate and given us cause for thought”, said McDevitt.

Moving forward, Diversified Technology plans to monitor the SCOPE Alliance’s progress closely. In particular, the company is interested to see how SCOPE will evolve its definitions around power usage. McDevitt concluded: “The green agenda is quite high up on any company’s list of priorities. We foresee that SCOPE will be able to provide some interesting guidance in this area.”