IONA Technologies, a maker of high-performance integration solutions for IT environments, has announced the availability of the IONA MTOSI Toolkit for Artix, the company's extensible enterprise service bus. The MTOSI Toolkit is available for free download at http://www.iona.com/MTOSItoolkit.

The Multi-technology Operations System Interface (MTOSI) is a TeleManagement Forum (TMF) initiative to provide a standard, open interface that facilitates ease of integration in telecommunications IT environments. IONA's MTOSI Toolkit for Artix provides a variety of developer resources that leverage the MTOSI standard to allow seamless integration of Operations Support Systems (OSS) and Business Support Systems (BSS) as the foundation of new business initiatives.

"Success in today's highly competitive telecommunications market can be directly tied to the ability of carriers' IT systems to support new ways of doing business and new ways of interacting with their customers," said Paul Hughes, vice president, Communications Software Strategies, Yankee Group. "Existing standards such as CORBA, and emerging standards such as MTOSI help ensure that existing systems can more easily be adapted to support the SOA initiatives that will ultimately drive new ways of generating revenue. IONA's MTOSI Toolkit offers an excellent way for developers to familiarize themselves with this important standard and its role in successful SOA implementations."

To ensure the IONA MTOSI Toolkit is as useful to developers as possible, a number of resources have been included for their use. In addition to a fully featured evaluation copy of Artix, the toolkit also provides a complete set of MTOSI 1.0 WSDLs, reference implementations for both C++ and Java, and demonstration applications illustrating how MTOSI can be used to accomplish transport independent OSS integrations and facilitate the transport of XML data over CORBA.

"Telecommunications carriers have long employed a best-of-breed approach when selecting and deploying technology, and because of this, certain integration challenges have arisen as new computing methodologies, such as Service Oriented Architecture, are adopted to deliver new services to their customers," explained Alpna Doshi, vice president, Telecom Business, Satyam and a TeleManagement Forum Board Member. "We're pleased that IONA is making the MTOSI Toolkit available. It's important that vendors understand the value of standards such as TMF's MTOSI and that they are delivering resources to developers that make adopting these standards in real-world environments as easy as possible."

"The MTOSI Toolkit for Artix builds on IONA's long heritage of delivering the right combination of technology and expertise to solve the complex integration challenges facing the telecommunications industry," said Larry Alston, vice president, Marketing and Product Management, IONA. "The ability to leverage standards-based technology to deploy systems that are flexible and responsive to business change is a powerful value proposition. The MTOSI Toolkit can help show developers how this can be done."