Huge Shift in Telecom Industry Supply Chains

Continuous Computing, a suppler of protocol-centric hardware, software and systems to telecom industry original equipment manufacturers, is introducing a solutions and services practice in response to demand for more prepackaged platforms from global customers.

The new practice will deliver customized, fully-integrated, application-level solutions to network equipment providers, especially in the wireless space, and including deep packet inspection capabilities.

The move reflects a change in global telecom operations and technology development, which require faster development at lower cost, at a time when virtually all service providers and equipment suppliers have fewer in-house resources to do so, says Brian Wood, Continuous Computing VP.

The new capabilities will accelerate the creation and delivery of carrier-class systems to service providers much faster, in many cases as much as 12 to 24 months faster, says Wood.

The demand for more prepackaged platforms also is part of a broader industry trend to focus on core competencies, while outsourcing lower-level or less-essential functions to business partners.

In part, that is a simple response to the fact that virtually all communications entities now operate with fewer in-house resources. But it also reflects a drive, across the ecosystem to add more value and differentiation.

“At all levels of the value chain, everybody is trying to add more value,” says Wood. “over the last two years we had been at platform level but now we are moving to the systems level.”

“OEMs are moving to software features while operators are moving to the marketing level,” he says.

“Everyone is moving,” Wood says, and the transformational change arguably is greatest for the equipment providers, who have to change the most as headcounts are orders of magnitude lower than in decades past.

There also is an industry-wide narrowing of the gap between enterprise solutions and carrier-grade solutions. Traditionally, enterprise products had a lifespan of two to three years, so costs had to be lower.

Telecom products had lifecycles more in the seven to 10 year range, and were hardened. So development cycles were longer and cost was higher.

These days, the gap is narrowing. Telecom equipment cycles are moving closer to the enterprise lifecycle as everything becomes IP based.

So there is less distinction between enterprise class and carrier class products. Obviously carrier class products require more redundancy, more cooling and other modifications of basic platforms to harden them.

But that is a truly big shift. Differentiation now occurs at the level of software, not hardware or protocols. And enterprise and carrier systems increasingly are produced on a common foundation.