NetWorld+Interop Special Coverage: OSS Vendor Brings New Views To Enterprises

This week, an OSS vendor rolled out an enterprise management solution that has a real chance to make some hay. The company, called Auspice, has developed the TLX management platform, essentially a "meta-manager" that enables operations staff to do automatic correlation of data gathered by the plethora of management and business applications used by most IT organizations.

TLX, which already is used widely 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 their interactions with those components.

As IT organizations continue to develop their image as "service providers," many are finding that OSS-style technologies and practices are useful in automating their own user provisioning and service efforts. TLX could be the first product to jump from the OSS environment to the enterprise.