Here at the Open Sources Blog we are often lucky to get an early look at new open source companies and besides helping them get some press, we also inform the world of products that might be interesting.
Today we have an example of an audacious play backed by investment from AT&T and Intel as well as industry partnerships with HP, IBM and others. And it's in one of the most conservative IT markets of all -- telecommunications.
The company, OpenClovis (www.openclovis.com), is open sourcing a middleware HA and management layer of code that runs on Linux. The idea is that vendors write applications on top of this layer and hey, presto, instant HA and manageability. It apparently sits beneath the new telco platform stacks recently announced by Oracle and BEA.
OpenClovis is a bet on some big trends in telecommunications. When telco tanked in 2001, the shaken survivors of the industry began a race to escape the high costs of their broken business model. It started with the shift from proprietary, integrated hardware and software stacks. Smart vendors recognized that their competitive advantage and real value add were further up the solution stack. Plumbing was a commodity. That's when Linux began to gain traction on the software side. On the hardware side, Intel stepped forward with ATCA, and IBM with BladeCenter. These were all commodity volume opportunities for big vendors who know how to play this game to win.
While network equipment providers and telecommunication equipment manufacturers are re-examining the cost structures of their business models and embracing this trend to commercial off the shelf, wouldn't that be an excellent time to enter the market with open source middleware? Every telco application and service requires carrier grade-level availability and management. What if there were an open platform that provided that layer? Hey, no need for everyone to keep recreating that piece hardcoded into every new application. Vendors and carriers can focus on their real value add -- developing the actual service or application.
OpenClovis certainly has impressive industry backers. Now it's up to them to build the open source community and ecosystem they'll need to succeed.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on May 14, 2006 11:19 PM
