About Wickenby
Today's technologies are as follows: Growing acceptance of COTS hardware product based on the PICMG AdvancedTCA, MicroTCA and the earlier CompactPCI 2.16 specifications. Reliability push from 99.999% to 99.9999% Emergence of COTS firmware/middleware product based on SAF HPI.

Technology

We are targeting the telecoms infrastructure which we define as the shelf product supported by the shelf management and, critically, the shelf management interface to the system manager. We do not plan to enter the market for the active functional boards.

The telecoms shelf infrastructure market space up until 2000 has been almost exclusively for proprietary shelf design by the individual systems integrators. A tiny fraction of the market has gone to product meeting the PICMG CompactPCI 2.16 specification.

Telecoms providers have seen a downturn of revenue at the same time as an increase in the demand for bandwidth. Capital expenditure has been reduced and buyers are looking for much more competitive product to exploit their core competency. Systems providers now have to provide systems at lower cost with a much shorter time to market.

This led several leading telecoms customers and suppliers to look for a Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) approach rather than the usual proprietary design in order to reduce infrastructure costs. They approached PICMG in part due to the use of a telecoms related variant (2.16) of the general purpose COTS CompactPCI specification. This led to the development of the telecoms specifications AdvancedTCA (released Dec. 2002) and later MicroTCA (released July 2006). David Wright, through the PICMG membership of Wickenby Consulting Ltd. has taken part in the writing of these specifications since their inception in 2001.

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