Alcatel, Ericsson, Motorola, NEC, Nokia and Siemens have launched SCOPE, an industry alliance to accelerate the deployment of carrier grade base platforms for service provider applications. Its mission is to help, enable and promote the availability of open carrier grade base platforms based on Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) hardware/software and free open source software building blocks, and to promote interoperability to better serve Service Providers and consumers. SCOPE plans to complement the work of several industry initiatives such as PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group, Service Availability Forum, Open Source Development Lab and others that have successfully created high quality open specifications that enable the creation of carrier grade base platforms. SCOPE will not create specifications, but it will establish profiles that enable and encourage the use of COTS and free open source software building blocks based upon open specifications developed by those other industry groups. SCOPE will focus on existing open specifications it believes best meets the needs of Service Providers and identify areas where additional specification work is needed. SCOPE's initial activities will be focused on creating profiles for hardware, operating system, base platform middleware and tools suites based on Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA), Carrier Grade Linux, and SA Forum's interface specifications. SCOPE expects its first profile to be published in Q1 of 2006.
www.scope-alliance.org