OpenClovis Aims to Transform Telecommunications Market with New Open Source Platform Backed by Industry Giants

PETALUMA, Calif. OpenClovis, Inc. (previously Clovis Solutions, Inc.) today announced it has launched a new open source project that aims to transform the telecommunications industry. The company is hosting the “OpenClovis Software Project” and has contributed to open source, under the GNU Public License (GPL), more than 500,000 lines of code developed over three years by software experts with experience from Alcatel, AT&T, Bellcore, CIENA, Cisco Systems, Lucent and Nortel.

“We believe this bold initiative is necessary to stimulate growth in a market challenged by increased competition, demand for new services and continued economic pressures,” said V.K. Budhraja, CEO and president of OpenClovis. “Our goal is to extend all the benefits of open source to the telecommunications industry including faster time to market, lower costs, high reliability and greater choice.”

The OpenClovis Software Project will provide the industry with an extensive set of high-quality, modular and reusable software components and tools that are standards-based and designed to be hardware- and operating system (OS)- agnostic. The project’s objective is to help network equipment vendors quickly and cost-effectively build platform manageability and high availability into their next generation communication systems.

“The availability of an open source application service platform that addresses the requirements of the telecommunications industry is a major step that will accelerate industry adoption of open standards based building block solutions like AdvancedTCA,” said Tim Kober, director, Strategic Platform Planning, Modular Communications Platform Division, Intel. “By putting its code into open source, OpenClovis will help create solid, scalable, carrier-class software for next generation telecommunications networks.”

Market Challenge
In the past, most infrastructure hardware and software was designed and controlled in-house and was proprietary to the network equipment providers. However, rising cost pressures, increased competition, and shortened development cycles are now forcing telecommunications companies to use more commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components, while allocating internal resources to their own core competencies.

Network equipment providers (NEPs) and telecommunications equipment manufacturers (TEMs) are now demanding not only flexible hardware building blocks, but also software building blocks to help them rapidly create reliable and secure next generation solutions.

“Going open source is a courageous move for OpenClovis but one that makes a great deal of sense," said Caroline Chappell, research analyst for Light Reading's Services Software Insider. "The telecommunications market is adopting standards-based hardware and operating systems but there is still a question mark over standards from the middleware level and up. Vendors pushing SOA technologies into the telco service creation arena need the functionality and scalability of an OpenClovis solution if they are to meet carrier-class requirements. Such a solution could push carrier-class capabilities into the enterprise as well, with interesting results.”

To demonstrate its commitment to open source to transform telecommunications, Clovis Solutions has changed its name to OpenClovis, Inc.

The company will soon announce the next version of its commercial products, the OpenClovis Application Service Platform and OpenClovis Integrated Development Environment, aimed at network and telecommunications equipment providers who plan to develop their next generation products using open industry standard architectures. The OpenClovis products will be sold and supported under the dual GPL open source and commercial license model that has already been used successfully by other open source software companies such as MySQL, Sleepycat Software (recently acquired by Oracle) and TrollTech.

The OpenClovis Software Project
The goal of the “OpenClovis Software Project” is to deliver significant advantages to network equipment providers and operators by accelerating the development and consistent implementation of software at the application service platform level.

"By building a community of innovation, we are furthering the ability of service providers and network equipment providers to rapidly develop and deploy new, next generation network (NGN) services on industry leading platforms like the IBM BladeCenter," said Bruce Anthony, distinguished engineer and CTO, IBM Systems & Technology Group. "The OpenClovis project will foster collective innovation around this important technology and help deliver these capabilities to businesses around the world."

The company today released a beta version of OpenClovis version 2.2 and will provide the code for its next generation product when that is available. To date, there has been significant interest in the project and a number of organizations have already downloaded the code including Alliance Systems, Artesyn Technologies, Aviva Networks, Kontron, Performance Technologies, Pinnacle Data Systems, RadiSys, Teak Technologies and Wichorus.

The “OpenClovis Software Project” site is currently at www.openclovis.org and is now available for access.




Open Source EcoSystem
OpenClovis is working together with standards bodies such as the Service Availability Forum (SAF) to help the industry deliver innovative and reliable network equipment solutions better, faster and at a lower cost.

OpenClovis is also partnering with telecommunications industry leaders in the move toward highly available, interoperable and standards-based solutions. Already, several major corporations support the OpenClovis Software Project to accelerate the industry shift to COTS hardware and software, including AT&T, HP, IBM, Intel and Wind River.

“OpenClovis’ contribution marks a significant milestone in the industry’s adoption of open source and COTS to cut costs, reduce time-to-market and deliver differentiated value,” said Glenn Seiler, manager of Linux Platforms, Wind River. “Until now, the industry lacked mature, comprehensive and robust open source projects for high availability and application management. Wind River looks forward to partnering with OpenClovis to help create a standards-based, open platform for highly available distributed telecommunications systems.”

About OpenClovis (previously Clovis Solutions)
OpenClovis (www.openclovis.com) provides a premier open source, commercial off-the-shelf application service platform for the telecommunications industry. The OpenClovis platform is designed to reduce the cost of developing telecommunications equipment and accelerate time to market by providing developers with a flexible, standards-based software platform available under both open source and commercial licenses. With OpenClovis, telecommunication and network equipment manufacturers have the tools to quickly and easily add a management and high availability platform on which to build their differentiated applications. OpenClovis has received investment backing from American River Ventures, AT&T, Intel Capital, Sevin Rosen Funds and Walden International. The company has partnerships with industry leaders such as HP and IBM.


Contacts:

Patricia Colby
Page One PR
650-565-9800 x 103
patricia@pageonepr.com

- more –







Addendum

A variety of telecommunications industry players are supporting the OpenClovis Software Project:

Alliance Systems
“Alliance Systems sees the growth in the standards based platforms and affirms OpenClovis’ decision to offer its code as an open source product as this will further enable end users to more easily implement standards-based middleware on Alliance Systems families of AdvancedTCA, blade and rack mount server platforms,” said Rusty Cone, president of Alliance Systems. “Alliance Systems designs, builds, ships and supports hardware platforms targeted for OEMs, ISVs and end users who are looking for cost effective, scalable platforms. Alliance Systems is utilizing OpenClovis in its Application Ready ATCA development system as well as others of its server product line. Alliance has already downloaded OpenClovis and has validated its capabilities and performance attributes.”

JBoss
“The open source development model continues to change the economics of business in favor of the customer, and we truly believe in the potential of software innovation, once freed from the fetters of proprietary development," said Robert Bickel, advisor to multiple open source companies including JBoss and Hyperic. “Now OpenClovis is aiming to do for the telecommunications industry what Red Hat and JBoss have done for enterprise IT.”

Mercury Computer Systems
“With its code in open source, OpenClovis can leverage the industry’s collective expertise to develop new standards and ensure quality,” said Mark Skalabrin, vice president and general manager of the Advanced Solutions business at Mercury Computer Systems, Inc. “This will enable customers to understand the value of the code before making a decision to move forward with a solution.”

Performance Technologies
“Performance Technologies fully supports the OpenClovis Software Project as it seeks to address both the economic and technical challenges facing network equipment providers,” said Ed Bizari, vice president of marketing for Performance Technologies. “The open source model, which Performance Technologies adopted in 2000, ultimately allows a greater emphasis to be placed on value-added activities and innovation, where it is most required.”

Wichorus
“High availability is critical to our products and customers. An open source model supported by OpenClovis could prove to be a catalyst in rapid collaborative innovations in modular infrastructure and high availability software,” said Rehan Jalil, president and chief executive officer at Wichorus, Inc.