The Open Source Alliance is a cooperative of 40 companies specialized in different fields of Open Source Software and Services based in Austria. The SME alliance offers project management and quality assurance for a wide variety of products and services, following a one-stop shop principle.

Focus is on semantic web  technologies, SIP applications and scalable media hubs such as IPTV applications. Intense research is the key for the success on our markets in Austria and Switzerland. With more than ten years of experience in project management and a number of interdisciplinary, creative and dedicated co-op members, we are also able to handle medium and big projects. Using Free Software, customers get mature platforms with big value and transparent recipes.

osAlliance's business model is based on services, customisation and integration. We have shown several times that we are in the unique position of being able to swiftly and efficiently put the results of our vast research activities into practice. As a solution provider, osAlliance is not bound to specific products, however we are strongly committed to the Open Source community.

Since April 2007 the cooperative is running two Open Innovation Labs in Vienna and Dornbirn in close co-operation with Telekom Austria. 28 projects around digital culture have been carried out in the fields of OpenSource, Web innovation, Gaming, D.I.Y. Culture, Electronic Music and many more with private sponsors funding.

The co-operative has also a tradition to work within EC funded and national research projects since the mid 90s:

- For Web4Groups (TAP RE 1010), we had specified in 1996 voting tools and implemented a voice gateway . A commercial spin-off together with Omega Generation and Kapsch AG, called web for us, was founded in 1999.

- Within TRIMEDIA (ESPRIT IV 26942), we had been responsible for a business electronic commerce environment to be set up using its groupware technologies for broadcasting stations.

- Within SENIOR ONLINE (TAP DE 4002), user requirements and local demonstrations have been carried out. The project has been followed up with a market validation study and a national education toolkit.

- For SELECT (TAP RE 4008), we carried out specification and groupware related work on collaborative ans semantic filtering in close co-operation with the Technical University in Vienna.

- As a co-ordinator of the antenna-e project (SOCRATES Youth for Europe EI-CE-02-1999-R1) 300 community radio stations have exchanged, contributed and experimented at a contest for streamed audio content.

- Within EDEN (Electronic Democracy European Network, IST) we had a key role as a technical partner for setting up urban planning mediation activities.

- In the project publicVoiceXML, which we were co-ordinating, we were publishing a reference implementation of W3C's VoiceXML 2.0 standard open source. The co-op member telesis could successfully start building business based on consulting, customisation and double licensing.

- In StreamOnTheFly, which was co-ordinated by us as an activity within a middleware cluster project (www.eutist-ami.org), we are developing tools for radio community stations. A solution based on StreamOnTheFly has been provided to the national broadcasting company ORF. We still have a vital developer and user community.

- Within the tOSSad project, we had a minor role to provide best practice know-how for business models in the Open Source sector.

- For ZIELLEITUNG (FFG-protecnetplus), we had developed a telephony based guide for tourism.

- As a partner in the COMMUNIA network, we are developing business models based on Creative Commons and our service RegisteredCommons.org

Key Persons

Dr. Roland Alton-Scheidl (*1964 in Zurich) studied computer science (focus on Computer Supported Co-operative Work) and Media Art in Vienna. He is managing Europe's first open source co-op (www.osAlliance.com) and he is teaching at the Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences (www.fhv.at). He spent time at the Austrian Academy of Sciences as a research fellow for socio-economics and served in the IT industry as consultant in the 90's. He had designed and developed PUBLIC VOICE Lab’s Audiotex and Web4Groups service and co-edited books such as the highly successful Internet Guide Österreich Online, a book on "Rating/Voting/Annotations" the book "Senior Online" or a documentation of the "Open Source Initiative Vorarlberg". He was engaged in eight EC funded projects as a project, technical or quality manager and is now focussing on key accounts. He is strongly committed to the Free Software movement, supported the transfer of Creative Commons licenses into Austrian law and is the project lead for RegisteredCommons.org. He developed a bachelor's course and the Austrian competence network for media design (fhplus.media.coop). For the Telekom Austria, he developed a concept for net culture labs. Read publications or his blog at http://roland.alton.at


Dr. Martin Springer (* 1966 in Munich) studied Philosophy and Physics at the University of Heidelberg and got his Physics diploma in 1993. He worked as a research assistant at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland from 1991 to 1993. For the German multimedia pioneer Pixelpark he developed procedures for a multimedia kiosk system and creative concepts for interactive CD-ROMs. With the advent of the world wide web he was in charge of the concept development for the initial corporate web sites of major German companies. In 1998 he founded the company Convergence which developed Linux based Open Source software (linuxtv.org) for Digital Video Broadcast (DVB). These days the Linux DVB software is part of the official Linux kernel, being deployed in CE devices throughout the world. Between 2002 and 2005 Martin Springer developed product strategies for international manufacturers of DTV set-top boxes. Today he consults companies in the digital media sector and contributes to the Digital Media Project (DMP) together with the MPEG founders. Read publications or his blog at http://camorra.org/bio/


Ing. Juergen Schmidt is the CTO at osAlliance with a deep background in database technologies. Together with the co-op member strg.at, he developed spunQ, an Open Source database modeller. He is involved as a manager in projects such as for the worldwide acting customer Belimo, responsible for setting up an Intranet solution, including automatic translation support.


Link

http://osAlliance.com