GUEST BLOG: The SOSA Technical Standard – a game-changer for both the industry and the warfighter
BlogMarch 10, 2026
The SOSA Technical Standard is just that, a technical standard, written by technical people for a technical audience.
Since its first draft snapshot release in 2018, a great deal has been written about various technical aspects of the standard. However, the impact of the SOSA Technical Standard stretches far beyond just how it affects system designs. It has fundamentally shifted how suppliers design their products and present them to the market and has changed how integrators approach their projects and leverage components that are available on the open market.
If we look at the OpenVPX products that have been introduced since the first SOSA snapshot was released, we can see the evidence of the impact that the SOSA approach has had on the market. Most notable is the sheer number of plug-in cards designed in alignment with the standard – far more than those not designed in alignment with the standard during the same time period. That data point alone points to the power of the standard and the value that the integrator community places on the ease of integration that following the standard provides.
There is, however, a second, less-obvious data point that highlights the power and success of the standard: That is the proliferation of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) backplanes designed in alignment with the standard, and of both COTS development and deployable chassis based on those backplanes. Now, COTS backplanes and development chassis aren’t new, and they aren’t limited to OpenVPX-based, SOSA aligned platforms. They are a common thing among all Eurocard-like form factors. However, there has not only been an explosion in the variety of backplanes and development chassis offered to the market since the SOSA standard entered the picture, but the emergence of a COTS-deployable chassis market is almost unprecedented.
Some may argue that this success is the result of U.S. government mandates regarding the use of the SOSA Technical Standard. While that is true for some programs and systems, there are many examples of systems where integrators chose to follow the standard without a mandate – they simply leveraged the standard for the value that it brought to their project. Indeed, integrators are often leveraging the benefits of the SOSA approach quite unintentionally simply by using SOSA aligned components in their designs. One only needs to look at projects being pursued outside of the U.S., where there is no requirement to follow the standard, yet the standard is being leveraged to good effect.
Taking a longer view, one can see that none of this is truly “new.” The entire COTS defense market started because of the ease of integration and vendor-neutral interoperability that VME enabled. What is different is that the systems today are vastly more complex and higher-performance. While VITA 65/OpenVPX was a great effort to place controls on the various technical aspects of VPX-based systems, it fell somewhat short on many things (not the least of which was the proliferation of slot profiles and communications protocols called out by the standard). As a result, the industry went through a period during which interoperability and replaceability were not so well-controlled by standard language. The SOSA standard has changed that, and now integrators can reasonably expect that components from different suppliers with compatible features will “just work” and that future technology insertions can be successfully accomplished without being locked to the original hardware vendor.
The SOSA Technical Standard is an excellent example of what can be accomplished when a standard is drafted with the development of a market as a key criterion. History is littered with examples of standards drafted by decree that, in the end, were not generally adopted and subsequently failed to generate sufficient market traction. From a hardware standpoint, the SOSA Technical Standard clearly has market traction, and the integrator community – and ultimately the warfighter – is benefiting.
Mark Littlefield is Director, System Products for Elma Electronic.
Elma Electronic · https://www.elma.com/en
