Telco future is open

Telecommunication companies (telcos) must diversify the number of services they offer and ensure those services are scalable to survive in an increasingly competitive market.

This is the view of Mary Brady, telco solutions principal at Hewlett-Packard (HP) SA. "In response to these market forces, HP has developed a new framework for telcos that uses modular standards-based technologies to enable operators to increase revenue through new services, while reducing structural cost and risk."

Brady says HP expects the telco environment to become increasingly Internet Protocol-based and to move away from proprietary systems to open systems on which telcos can run as many niche voice and data service applications as desired and scale up as necessary.

"At present, most telcos have a mixture of server and proprietary systems, but need an architecture that is more uniform, consolidated and easier to manage," says Brady. "HP has designed the new Advanced Open Telecom Platform (AOTP) to meet those needs."

AOTP aims to meet telco requirements by having a high level of availability built in, while allowing hardware and software scalability and flexibility through using blade technology and by being standards-based, explains Brady.

"Telcos want to introduce a lot of services for their subscribers, but typically these will all start with a small number of users and so ideally they require a small infrastructure that can scale up later as volumes grow on these applications," says Brady. "AOTP aims to provide operators with agile networks to deliver new personalised services."