TM Forum and The Linux Foundation announced they are joining forces to drive open source adoption by operators and create a new industry marketplace for commercial applications.

The collaboration will see TM Forum share its portfolio of open APIs with The Linux Foundation. Ken Dilbeck, TM Forum’s VP of collaborative R&D, told Mobile World Live the move will lay a common, agnostic foundation for projects which will reduce future integration friction.

“One of the key things that we believe is unique about our API programme is all of our APIs are derived from a common information model, a set of common patterns. Whenever you go to glue systems together, if the APIs are so similar and derived from the same way they use information it makes things a lot easier.”

In addition to artificial intelligence and machine learning, Dilbeck pointed to automation as a key objective for the partnership to tackle, particularly as operators push to automate everything from customer interactions to their networks.

He said the goal is for the APIs to provide automation capabilities in a dynamic way so providers can adapt to new services without having to constantly update their codebase to accommodate the changes.

Looking ahead, Dilbeck added there are a number of other ways the partnership will prove beneficial: “As open source is applied to more critical systems, the discipline we provide will be helpful to them and the more we need to have the agility and flexibility of the open source environment, it will help us break out so we can become more responsive to industry needs.”