AT&T finally made it official and today announced its ECOMP platform as an open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation.

AT&T developed the Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management, and Policy (ECOMP) software in-house. It provides a framework for real-time, policy-driven software automation of virtual network functions (VNFs). The carrier says it is already production-ready, having been in use for two years, internally.

The business goal of the project is to allow service providers to rapidly create new services in an automated fashion the way webscale titans are able to do.

The transition of the ECOMP code and collateral to the Linux Foundation begins today. Linux will establish a governance and membership structure, and the project will be covered by the Apache 2.0 license.

The organizations committed to ECOMP to date include Amdocs, AT&T, Bell Canada, Brocade, Ericsson, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Metaswitch, and Orange.

At an AT&T event at its retail store in downtown San Francisco today, Chris Rice, SVP at AT&T Labs, said ECOMP is divided into 11 modules. Each of those modules can fit into a virtual machine (with containers inside those VMs). And a module can be installed in an OpenStack cloud in 15 minutes.

Amdocs recently said it was working with the Linux Foundation and has contributed two modules to the project.

SDxCentral Managing Editor Craig Matsumoto contributed to this report.