
US microTCA maker sets up European headquarters
The privately owned company specialises in complete systems based around the microTCA standard. This uses the mezzanine AMC cards from the larger Advanced TCA standard on their own in smaller racks.
The company is looking to recruit technical sales specialists and a small software team to support customers and its four distributors in Europe, says Ian Shearer, who joined Vadatech from Mercury Computers in the UK to head up the operation. The company already supplies high performance computing systems at CERN.
"Most of the conversations with customers are around the problems they need to solve and we customise the systems very often without an NRE as long as there is a commitment to purchase," he said. "A lot of the early work in the US was around niche designs in defense and telecoms, but there’s a lot of interest in application servers and cloud computing from the reliability and hotswap capabilities without the size and cost of ATCA."
There is also a growing opportunity in VME replacement to make use of higher performance silicon without the cost of moving to a switch fabric such as VPX, he says. "One customer is moving from VME to microTCA and replacing four VME boards with a couple of AMCs," he said. "For top end industrial applications microTCA seems much moree cost effective route forwards."
www.vadatech.com
