OSS Vendor Offers New View on Enterprise

At NetWorld+Interop, OSS vendor Auspice introduced an enterprise-class version of its management platform that has a real chance to make hay. Auspice's TLX is essentially a "meta-manager" that lets operations staff automatically correlate data gathered by the plethora of management and business applications used by most IT organizations.

TLX, which is widely used by U.S. cable service providers, is based on technology developed by NASA to manage heterogeneous devices and systems on the International Space Station. It creates a common management interface to a variety of devices and applications and then lets operations organizations write scripts to automate those components.

If your IT organization is developing a "service provider" mentality, you'll find that OSS technology has a lot to offer, from automating the process of "provisioning" new users and services to "billing" departments back for their infrastructure usage. With more IT departments implementing the service-provider model, TLX is an idea whose time has come.