HP Building Portfolio of Products For Telecom Carriers, Equipment Providers

Hewlett-Packard on Thursday unveiled plans to create a portfolio of products and services, including a telecom industry standard server, for companies selling equipment into the telecom service provider market. HP refers to those companies as network-equipment providers.

"The opportunity exists to bring the benefits and price-performance advantages of commercial, off-the-shelf, standard components to the very specialized, and traditionally proprietary, carrier network," says Joy King, director of network and service-provider solutions for HP.

"The problem has been that while everyone wants the price-performance advantages, nobody is willing to, nor should have to, give up the specialized environment and requirements of carrier networks, which include everything from density to form factor and specific requirements like earthquake protection," she says.

HP's Advanced Open Telecom Platform will include rack-mount, blade, and custom server designs. In addition, the platform will include carrier-grade Linux, telecom network software, management software, testing and validation, and consulting and integration services.

As part of Advanced Open Telecom Platform, HP in 2005 plans to introduce a telecom-specific blade server based on the emerging Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture industry standard."Instead of having to continue to build proprietary platforms in-house, we can now allow them to reinvest those resources, both financial and in people, into developing higher-level software and services for their consumers," King says.

In August, HP announced a multiyear agreement with one network equipment provider, Motorola Inc., in which Motorola plans to incorporate HP technologies into its CDMA and iDEN network infrastructure offerings.

The Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture-compliant blade server will be of particular interest to network-equipment providers that have for years created platforms based on "homegrown" blade designs, says Tim Leigh, a director for the network and service-provider solutions group at HP.

"The [network-equipment providers] want the confidence to outsource, whether they need something that is rack-mounted or a blade, and we give them that choice," Leigh says. "More importantly, they need someone to provide support worldwide and take over life-cycle management of all the components that go into an integrated program."