Italtel Uses Force

SUPERCOMM 2004, CHICAGO -- Force Computers, a Solectron company and a leader in embedded computing solutions, today announced that Italtel, one of the world’s leading providers of telecommunication technologies and services, will base its next generation iMSS Media Servers, Media Gateway Servers and Signaling Servers on Force’s new Centellis™ CO 31KX AdvancedTCA® modular communications platform.

Force Computers is the first to market with a commercial ATCA system designed for Central Office deployment. With Force’s Centellis CO 31KX, Italtel will be able to provide “five nines,” or 99.999-percent high availability, and other sophisticated features to expand the capabilities of their network equipment.

Italtel will also be incorporating Force’s ATCA-717, a single board computer blade featuring the Intel® Pentium® M processor; and the ATCA-F300, a base and fabric interface switch with a Gigabit Ethernet interface for connecting to a Shelf Management Controller with IPMI support.

“Force’s readily deployable ATCA systems and boards are a major step in the movement towards open standards based network infrastructure equipment,” said Franco Serio, Italtel executive vice president, Business Unit Products/Co-Head. “We are committed to providing our customers with leading-edge technology and services for the evolution of their next-generation network infrastructures and Force’s development and leadership in ATCA is a perfect match with what Italtel is trying to achieve,” he added. “Force can provide us with the clear benefits of ATCA right away, and these range from lowering capital and operating costs to reducing development time and speeding time to market. These were critical factors in our decision to partner with Force.”

“We are pleased with Italtel’s decision to move to the ATCA standard,” said Paul Mercadante, president of Force Computers. “This partnership confirms the technical capabilities of our ATCA products. We think that Italtel’s experience will prove the industry research, which shows that telecom equipment manufacturers and network providers can save as much as 30 percent in not only development time and budget, but at least 15 percent in product and life cycle management cost by switching from proprietary systems to the standards-based ATCA products, as well.”

Italtel developed its line of carrier-grade iMSS-Next Generation Solutions products for addressing the requirements of Media, Media Gateway and Signaling server applications. As a result, service providers can now more easily implement both network and service convergence strategies and migrate to a complete IP solution.

Force Computers

Italtel SpA