To What Extent Does It Pay to Approach Open Source Software for a Big Telco Player?

In this paper we describe the strategy under adoption in Telecom Italia (TI) Technology Department toward open source software. This stems from trying to create synergy among big Telco Player to increase knowledge and influence over strategic communities to the evaluation of the creation of new communities over internally developed applications. In particular here the approach and the expectations in starting the community on WADE (Workflow and Agent Development Environment) is described. This is a platform used to develop mission critical applications and is the main evolution of JADE a popular Open Source framework for the development of interoperable intelligent multi-agent systems. It adds to JADE the support for the execution of tasks defined according to the workflow metaphor as well as a number of mechanisms that help managing the complexity of the distribution both in terms of administration and fault tolerance. The idea is to use WADE as a mean to gather critical information on the opportunity of approaching OS as a strategic mean toward the development of always more important application in Operating Support System for TI, possibly also involving other great Telco Players For this reason great care is being paid in setting up the Community environment and in deciding which metrics are to be extracted from it, since the result will be the input for a strategic decision in TI.