Billing and OSS company Amdocs said it will work closely with The Linux Foundation to contribute modules to the Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy (ECOMP) platform and accelerate its adoption.

ECOMP was developed by AT&T and is now hosted by the Linux Foundation as an open source project that is available to service providers and cloud developers. Amdocs says it will play a key role in the new Linux Foundation project, which it is now calling OpenECOMP.

Amdocs didn’t provide any specifics on the modules it has developed for OpenECOMP but said that it will help service providers deploy the technology. “Having co-developed important modules to be contributed to OpenECOMP, we are in a position to help customers achieve an early advantage in leveraging OpenECOMP for service innovation,” said Gary Miles, chief marketing officer at Amdocs, in a prepared statement.

Sarah Wallace, director, service enablement, AI & analytics with IHS Markit, said that Amdocs' involvement in the platform denotes the importance of OSS and BSS in a virtualized environment. “Amdocs partnering with Linux Foundation’s OpenECOMP platform reinforces the market’s need for all functions of OSS and BSS to be exposed and able to work with network functions in a virtualized environment. This is what will enable new and innovative services,” she said.

Two operators besides AT&T have said they will trial ECOMP. In December Bell Canada, which provides communications services to 21 million customers in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario and in the Northwest Territories, said it was testing the platform. And last September Orange said it was also planning to trial ECOMP.

Last week at AT&T’s Developer Summit in Las Vegas, Victor Nilson, senior vice president of Big Data for AT&T, told SDxCentral there are a number of operators interested in using ECOMP. And he said there will be more announcements in the future about those operators. “Operators can either write their own [management and orchestration platform], or they can use ECOMP, which is something that is proven and can scale,” Nilson added.