Tempe, AZ — (press release excerpt) — Fueled by the telecommunication industry's exploding growth and demand for next-generation technology, Motorola Computer Group, which provides embedded equipment for nine of the world's top 10 telecommunications original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), Tuesday unveiled its 2001 telecommunications strategy, positioning the company to place computing technologies into… every telecommunications system running wireless, enterprise, networking and transmission applications in the world.

Motorola Computer Group, part of Motorola's Integrated Electronic Systems Sector (IESS), is the worldwide leader in providing embedded computing platforms to OEMs. “We're moving from simply supplying boards and systems to delivering complete carrier-grade platforms by being tightly integrated into our customers' businesses and processes,” said John Hughes, vice president, telecommunications business, Motorola Computer Group.

The group expects sales to experience significant growth next year, is continuing to hone its infinite infrastructure solutions for telecom customers, and is launching two major product initiatives for 2001: complete solutions for carrier-grade, high-availability applications — bolstered by a new software strategy — and a packet-based, application-enabled systems platform. The infrastructure of today's telecom networks is changing at unprecedented rates. Industry sources state that network capacity is doubling every 90 days, and it has been said that overall infrastructure bandwidth will have grown two orders of magnitude within the next two years.

Motorola serves the telecommunications market in four segments: wireless, enterprise, networks and transmission. “Motorola Computer Group has taken its dominance in the traditional embedded computing space and been able to focus on the needs of the telecommunications market in an especially critical time in the industry,” said Paul Zorfass, senior analyst, International Data Corp./First Technology Inc.

Motorola's first new initiative, a complete solution set for carrier-grade, high-availability systems, encompasses everything needed for architectures that enable telecommunications solutions that people depend on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The “everything” includes flexible configuration platforms that provide choices of processor family, operating system, voice and data transport, packaging, and integrated third-party I/O, communication and multimedia products.

“Traditionally, voice services have run on very reliable circuit switched networks,” said Tom McKearney, vice president and director of marketing, Motorola Computer Group's telecommunications business. “But as the telecom industry embraces packet technology to accommodate the dramatic growth in both data and Internet usage, voice services will become just another application on these packet networks. This makes high availability even more critical, as voice services on packet networks must maintain the equivalent in a wireline world of continuous dial tone, as well as a continuous 'Web tone'.”

To provide this level of availability, Motorola's carrier-grade hardware platforms are designed for networking, wireless and Internet applications that require 99.999 percent availability (5NINES), the equivalent of five minutes or less of downtime per year, both planned and unplanned. The company's new high-availability software strategy, also announced today, is a key part of the plan.

Through the software strategy, Motorola will take its success in bringing Advanced High Availability Software for Linux (HA Linux) to the market and transfer this know-how to other operating systems, specifically, Windows 2000, Wind River's VxWorks AE RTOS, and LynxOS. Access to standard HA-system platforms, based on rules and policies originally developed for fault-tolerant platforms, will help developers easily make their systems “HA Aware,” while network architects will benefit from software standardization and re-use across platforms.

The second new product initiative will provide telecommunication OEMs with highly integrated, application-ready systems based on open standards and scalable, leading-edge technology, supported by flexible engineering and manufacturing services. The latest example of this strategy at work is Motorola's new switched IP-based architecture designed to provide an open system infrastructure running at wire speed for next-generation networks (see related news release).

 
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