Motorola signs $45M deal with GoAhead Software to develop advanced reliability

Working together to advance wireless telecommunications, Motorola, Inc. (Arlington Heights, IL) and GoAhead Software Inc. (Bellevue, WA) jointly announced a five-year deal, valued at $45 million, to provide new levels of service availability for wireless networks worldwide. GoAhead's SelfReliant software will be incorporated into Motorola's Aspira end-to-end solutions architecture for the wireless Internet. By using this SelfReliant software as an enabler to its high availability platform, Motorola is poised to be the first wireless manufacturer to offer a new generation of reliable communications platforms to service providers.

Motorola's high availability platforms will enable service providers around the globe to offer a variety of high-quality applications for Internet protocol (IP)-based end-to-end systems. To meet increasing customer demand for high availability and 99.999 percent (five nines) service reliability, Motorola will integrate GoAhead's cross-platform, off-the-shelf service availability software package into Motorola's Aspira IP-based architecture.

"Clustering software, a $367 million market in 1999, is projected to be one of the fastest growing serverware markets because service availability is increasingly seen as an absolute requirement for Web and telecommunications applications," said Dan Kusnetzky, vice president, system software, for International Data Corp.

Through the implementation of SelfReliant 7000, Motorola will enable communications networks to reach 99.999% service availability, resulting in less than five minutes of downtime per year. In addition, the GoAhead SelfReliant software will provide transaction integrity (preservation of client state) and simplify the overall management of complex available systems. The product detects and diagnoses faults quickly and automatically, and immediately initiates user-defined recovery actions. These recovery actions may include automatically transferring operations from active components to standby components while maintaining virtually uninterrupted cellular service for end users.

The SelfReliant 7000 telecommunications service availability product is a cross-platform solution that will enable Motorola to offer virtually uninterrupted, reliable wireless services to its customers, regardless of their choice of operating systems. The products are open, scaleable, extensible and take little time to implement.

Edited by Ellen Jensen
Managing Editor, Wireless Networks Online