The telecom industry's move toward open systems may have been an achingly slow process, but service providers and vendors may finally have learned that use of open interfaces and non-proprietary, commercial off-the-shelf, or COTS technology and products can offer effective, distinctive solutions.

Still, that doesn't mean using COTS systems is a no-brainer. Groups like the Service Availability Forum, which promotes high-availability, carrier-grade systems using COTS hardware try to create the road map by directly addressing the standard interfaces needed to allows COTS systems from different vendors to work together.

Two such standards are the Application Interface Specification (AIS) and the Hardware Platform Interface (HPI). At NXTcomm, GoAhead Software will be announcing a new middleware management platform that complies with the AIS B.02, which was announced by the SA Forum in January 2006. The company's SAFfire 2.0 platform will support AIS B.02 capabilities such availability management framework and information model management service, among others.

The new platform also offers operating system independence for carrier-grade product manufacturers and management capabilities such as system modeling, discovery, monitoring and alarm management. SAFfire 2.0 also supports pre-integration and pre-validation with several leading hardware platforms, according to Asif Naseem, chief technology officer and chief operating officer for GoAhead Software, as well as the current president of the SA Forum.

"When I was at Bell Labs we would design our own chassis and write our own operating system and do everything else about the product, but companies can't effectively do that today and compete," he said. "No one would attempt it. You need off-the-shelf components."