Last week we had the pleasure of a visit from Craig Gallen from the University of Southampton, near London.

Craig is working on his Engineering Doctorate and he is basing his work around a project called OpenOSS. In this case, OSS stands for Operation Support System and it’s kind of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system for carriers. It’s supposed to be able to handle provisioning, billing, monitoring, etc. for the entire tele-communications network for a given carrier.

As one can imagine, these systems are not small, nor inexpensive, and most of the time they are pretty monolithic. In much the same way that open source is nibbling away at other traditionally large, expensive and monolithic systems, Craig is out to prove that it can do the same for OSS.

(left to right: Craig Gallen, David Hustace, Jessica Hustace, Tarus Balog, Matt Brozowski)

OpenOSS is based on the NGOSS specification put forth by the Telemanagement Forum and implemented using OSS/J.

While the NGOSS spec is huge, Craig was able to demonstrate a system in Nice, France back in May that showed the potential of open source in OSS. OpenNMS played the role of the network monitor and trap receiver. We spent two days with Craig to improve the role that OpenNMS currently plays within OpenOSS as well as perhaps expanding into other sections of the OSS model.

It was exciting and we are proud to be a part of OpenOSS. Over the next six months as we move to a pure Java implementation of OpenNMS, expect to see at least an OSS/J interface for the event data from OpenNMS.

For more information, check out the OpenOSS project or join the #openoss IRC channel on freenode.net.