Telecom middleware start-up Clovis Systems has changed its name to OpenClovis, and released its entire middleware stack, tools, and test suite under the GPL. The company hopes the move will help its products reach new markets, including military, aerospace, medical, industrial, telematics, and telemetry, and reduce its R&D costs.

What's OpenClovis?

OpenClovis CTO Jim Lawrence desribes the OpenClovis software suite as a hardware- and OS-agnostic “application service platform” (ASP) designed for pre-integration on COTS hardware, such as AdvancedTCA servers and BladeCenters.

It comprises a set of modular, reusable software components that sit on top of a carrier-grade OS such as Carrier Grade Linux (CGL), and provide an interface for the various hardware and software management functions needed to keep complex, distributed systems running. OpenClovis components are highly modular, Lawrence says, and comply with standards from the Service Availability Forum, OCAF (open communications architecture forum, under the aegis of the ITU's “Study Group 13”), and SCOPE.

OpenClovis middleware “marketecture” diagram
(Click to enlarge)
Lawrence says OpenClovis middleware can scale from hundreds to possibly thousands of systems. “We don't know the limits, because no one has ever run into them,” he claims.

The middleware's scalability derives from its hierarchical, distributed object registry, according to Lawrence. He explains, “Traditionally, you had only one monstrous policy management subsystem, one state machine. Each ClovisLocal instance, whether on an applications processor or I/O processor, maintains its own object registry. Having the state machine local, and hierarchical, you can have thousands of managed objects in one cluster.”

Lawrence boasts, “In testing the product, we were instantiating 80K objects per cluster, with very little degradation in performance. It tends to create a lot of little pipes, instead of one big fat pipe.”

Asked what interprocess communications mechanism OpenClovis uses, and how it compares to Enea's soon-to-be-open-sourced Linx technology, Lawrence replies, “It's called IOC, Intelligent Object Communications. Enea is a competitor, and there's a lot of similarities between IOC and Linx. But the breadth of what Enea can offer today is significantly narrower.”

He adds, “What Enea recently announced in terms of open source was limited. Same thing with Solid, and the MySQL engine they're open-sourcing. I'm not going to speculate what advantages that gives them.”

Tools and test components

The OpenClovis suite comes with an Eclipse-based “OpenClovis IDE” (integrated development environment). Lawrence says OpenClovis has invested considerable effort in the IDE, because “we saw that Wind River dominated the telecom market because of tools.” He adds, “We're also releasing the IDE [under the GPL]. This is not a bait-and-switch.”

Also being released are OpenClovis's test suites. “We have hardware platforms in our lab, and when we pre-integrate, we go through a complete CGL (Carrier Grade Linux) test,” he said.

OpenClovis currently supports x86 and PowerPC, with IA64 and AMD64 in the works. The suite is tested with a variety of Carrier Grade Linux distributions, and is architected in a way that makes testing new distributions more efficient, Lawrence says. “We are focused on the COTS market, the ATCA and BladeCenter markets, where most are looking at Linux.”

Lawrence claims that “the entire product, including tools, testing, and the OpenClovis IDE” can be integrated with Wind River's WorkBench toolsuite.

Sabbu Iyer, VP of marketing, adds, “We've had a lot of partnership discussions with Wind River.”

Lawrence also mentions HP's choice of Carrier Grade Distributions, Debian TE (telecom edition), as a heavily tested distribution. Supporting MontaVista Carrier Grade Edition should not be a problem either, according to Lawrence.

Why open-source it?

Highly scalable, highly available systems built on COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) hardware platforms are increasingly relevant not only in telecom, but in a range of markets, Lawrence believes, given that some companies' computing resources are used by literally millions of people around the globe. “If eBay goes down, they're losing millions of dollars per minute,” he observes.

OpenClovis's sales team cannot cover every relevant industry; however, by releasing its product under the GPL the company will enable vendors across many industries to try it out, with low expense and risk, and then purchase a commercial license if appropriate, he explains. This sort of “dual-license” model is well-proven in the telecom industry by vendors such as MySQL and JBoss.

Lawrence expects 60-80 percent of OpenClovis users to opt for a commercial license, because with the exception of a hardware platforms management component, most of the modular middleware suite integrates closely with user applications. This close integration leaves “very little ambiguity” that companies redistributing OpenClovis middleware would be obliged to release their applications under the GPL, too. “It will not affect our revenue as much as you might think, and any loss is more than made up for by the broader industry penetration the move will allow,” Lawrence concludes.

He adds, “After talking with customers, we realized that the value of our company is not in the software. It's in our resources, and our ability to innovate quickly. There's nothing to stop someone else from picking up our code and marketing it. But they don't have the hundreds of resource years of expertise with it, and a Nortel doesn't want to be talking to someone who can't walk through our 500,000 lines of code.”

Business markets

Clovis was founded in 2002, and has raised about $20M of venture funding through two rounds so far. It has OEM (original equipment manufacturer) partnerships with HP and IBM, and is “looking for profitability” next year, according to Lawrence.

Currently, OpenClovis's primary customers are telecom equipment manufacturers, including HP and IBM. AT&T is also an investor, and potential customer, and Intel has endorsed the company's open source transition, it says. OpenClovis also sells directly to Tier 1 carriers.

Many current and potential OpenClovis customers, including Lucent, Nokia, and Alcatel, have developed their own telecom middleware over the years, but are looking for something more pre-integrated as they move to COTS systems, Lawrence says. Such vendors can now try out OpenClovis with minimal up-front investment, and buy it without risk if it works for them, thanks to the open source model.

Lawrence explains, “During the downturn, there was an R&D dollar reduction, and that has not recovered. The days of nine, 10, 11 percent R&D budgets are gone. You can't go in and ask for millions of dollars up front. By going open source, it goes to free.”

He adds, “This helps them get their products to market, because they're not spending months negotiating contracts.”

Availability

OpenClovis middleware, tools, and test suites are available now, under the GPL, from an area of the company's website that is powered by SourceForge.

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