Light Reading - Who Makes What: Embedded Systems

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February 16, 2006 | Tim Hills | Comments (7)

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Ever since its inception six years ago, Light Reading has covered the commoditization of hardware used in telecom equipment – from arrival of off-the-shelf next-generation Sonet/SDH chips and optical subsystems to the emergence of AdvancedTCA , the architecture that aims to recreate the conditions that revolutionized the PC industry a couple of decades ago.

However, what’s happening on the hardware side is less than half the picture. There are parallel commoditization developments on the software side – and from a telecom equipment manufacturer’s point of view, they’re even more important than hardware developments. Why? Because equipment is usually designed so the communications chips and optical components can be replaced to take advantage of advances in technology. In general, this isn’t the case with off-the-shelf software. Once it’s embedded in a product, it’s probably going to be there for ever, so it’s important to pick the right technology in the first place.

This report marks Light Reading's first effort at covering the software side of the telecom equipment industry’s growing reliance on off-the-shelf subsystems, and it’s in a format that many of our regular readers will be familiar with – a “Who Makes What” that proposes a way of categorizing products and lists vendors in each market segment.

As with previous “Who Makes What” reports, we’ve done our best to identify all vendors, but we’re bound to have overlooked some, particularly as this is a new area of coverage for Light Reading. So please feel free to point out omissions – by either posting a note on the message board linked to this article (our preferred method) or by sending an email to editors@lightreading.com. Please include Embedded Software in the subject field to help us find messages. We will update the report, if necessary adding product categories and names, as we receive comments from readers.

For the uninitiated in this field, when telecom equipment vendors develop new products, they’ll typically buy in off-the-shelf software for generic functions and then focus their own software team’s efforts on writing the applications code that will differentiate their device from others. The amount of off-the-shelf software in products is increasing as competition forces vendors to look for ways of reducing time-to-market, costs, and risks, and as software interfaces are standardized.

A basic characteristic of such embedded-software devices is that they encapsulate dedicated, special-purpose computers performing only predefined tasks (although these may be extensive). This is done by marrying appropriate programmable hardware – which may be very limited, compared to a general-purpose computer – with some form of software control. Sometimes the device is so specialized that it is possible to dispense with an operating system altogether and implement the entire control logic by a single application program.

This report aims to address embedded software in the context of modern communications or storage products. It provides a reference work for embedded software component or tool providers and network equipment vendors, by identifying the main elements of a typical embedded software deployment, defining product categories and major system interfaces, and listing vendors in this field.

Here’s a hyperlinked list of contents:

Report Focus

This report focuses on vendors whose products contribute to the embedded software associated with data communications, storage, and telecom products; it does not attempt cover the whole embedded-software industry, nor does it include other general IT software packages such as databases or Operations Support System (OSS) software components – for example, Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs), aimed at facilitating the creation, rollout and management of next generation services.

Note that some vendors have a very large number of individual products (for specific protocols, for example), and it is not possible to list them all. Sometimes we have used a simple generic name, such as Enterprise Security Products, to indicate this. But please let us know if a particularly important individual product is missing.