GoAhead Software to release SA Forum compliant middleware

GoAhead Software will release next month the first high-availability middleware solution compliant with the Service Availability Forum’s Hardware Platform Interface (HPI) specifications according to announcements made this week.

The company will deliver a beta version of HPI next month and a commercial product in the fourth quarter. HPI helps isolate applications from the hardware platform to protect it from changes to the operating system or other hardware. It also helps equipment makers move away from proprietary systems and use pre-integrated building blocks for hardware, CPU, OS, databases and stacks.

GoAhead’s SelfReliant middleware manages the redundant components of an operating system to achieve five-nines availability and reliability. A two-to-three millisecond failover speed together with a feature called checkpointing helps preserve application data in the event of a failure. GoAhead transitioned its reliability and device management technology into the SelfReliant product in 1999. The company was founded 10 years ago in Brisbane, Australia and later relocated to Seattle. The company has been on a roll since appointing former Microsoft executive Jim Ewel as its new CEO in May, announcing new deals with Blueslice, Telos, Sonim Technologies and a growing relationship with Motorola.

The SA Forum, begun in December of 2002 by GoAhead and other mostly hardware companies such as HP, Motorola, Nokia, Siemens, Intel, Radisys and Force Computer, delivered the HPI specification in October of last year. The group was formed to create standards for equipment manufacturers to meet carrier-grade requirements based on interoperable hardware and software building blocks.

Ewel said the downturn has forced network equipment providers to rethink the way they build their products and that the build-or-buy decision they struggled with before have been replaced by one that bodes well for his company. “The NEPs laid off a lot of people during the downturn. Now they are starting projects again, but they’re not ready to hire so it’s become a buy-versus-hire decision and that’s an easier economic decision for them and an easier opportunity for us to sell,” Ewel said.

His company’s SelfReliant middleware is designed to manage availability of an entire service rather than the individual components that deliver it. It does so in part through sub-second failovers, but also by modeling all the resources and dependencies that go into providing on-demand services. Adding HPI compliance also helps equipment makers spend less time on high-availability development and integration by using the ready-made building blocks.

“Seventy-seven percent to 82% of the code across a project is common code that can be reused across common projects,” Ewel said. “You can imagine how this would allow [a network equipment provider] to speed up a project using common code.”

GoAhead also announced three new customers this week. Sonim Technologies will use SelfReliant middleware in its Instant Communications Solution (ICS), which is used in Push-To-Talk technology in wireless data networks. Sonim recently signed with Ericsson to provide solutions for its IMS-based Instant Talk offering.

Telos, makers of the Sonata SE wireless softswitch and other packet-based wireless solutions, and the China Putian Institute of Technology—the R&D arm of China Putian Corporation, service provider and maker of IT products—will use GoAhead’s middleware to jointly develop softswitch and SGSN technology.

“The China market is going gangbusters right now,” Ewel said. They don’t have much existing infrastructure so wireless is the way to go and Telos is proving the base platform.”