OSPT Alliance & Calypso Networks Association (CNA)

Promoting an open & collaborative transport ticketing ecosystem

OSPT Alliance and Calypso Networks Association (CNA) are now collaborating to drive global adoption of open standards in transport ticketing, with the long-term goal of converging their respective standards – CIPURSE™ and Calypso.

In an increasingly crowded, competitive and complex ecosystem, public transport operators (PTOs) are under great pressure to select the best technologies, solutions and partners for their systems. These challenges are only intensified by the dominance of proprietary systems.

Recognizing an increasingly aligned value set and agenda, the associations have joined forces to promote the widespread benefits open standards provide over proprietary solutions.

Both CNA and OSPT Alliance have long championed the needs of PTOs, but it’s clear that they need a simple, coherent message to help them understand and implement open standards.

By combining work efforts, the collaboration aims to:

• Educate the industry on the benefits of open standards with one clear voice;
• Simplify the choice and integration options for transport operators integrating open standards;
• Harmonize the technical outputs of both organizations;
• Encourage innovation by removing the overlap of work and bringing together stakeholders across the entire ecosystem;
• Establish a more open, collaborative ecosystem and a compelling alternative to proprietary systems.

The initial work of the collaboration will focus on analyzing in detail the unique strengths of the two standards, before defining a roadmap to convergence that will enable compatibility between Calypso and CIPURSE. Ensuring interoperability between the two standards and supporting existing solutions throughout will be a key priority.

To quickly bring the full benefits of the cooperation to all stakeholders, OSPT Alliance and CNA have created shared working groups addressing three areas:

• Governance – to optimize organizational setup.
• Marketing & communications – to ensure a common promotion of the open standard concept.
• Technical – to work on topics such as an SDK based on the existing Keyple Open Source Software and a common Secure Access Module Specification.

This is an exciting and ambitious project that we hope you’ll support. If you have any questions, please contact General Secretary, Mike Strock, at [email protected]

Watch the full announcement from President of OSPT Alliance, Philippe Martineau, and Chairman of CNA, Philippe Vappereau.