CNA and OSPT Alliance announce ticketing open standards collaboration

Calypso Networks Association (CNA) and OSPT Alliance have announced a collaboration to drive the adoption of open standards in transport ticketing. The end goal of the cooperation programme is to achieve convergence between their respective open standards – CALYPSO^® and CIPURSE™ – simplifying the choice and integration options for public transport operators (PTOs) while bringing time and cost efficiencies to the entire transport ticketing value chain.

“Since our mission first began a decade ago, the market has evolved dramatically. For PTOs however, the challenges caused by the dominance of proprietary systems have only intensified,” commented Philippe Martineau, President of OSPT Alliance. “CNA shares our passion to achieve a more open, collaborative ecosystem. And, in an increasingly complex and crowded market, it’s more important than ever that we combine our efforts to deliver operators a clear, coherent message, reduce market fragmentation and provide an alternative to vendor lock-in.”

“Convergence between CALYPSO and CIPURSE makes perfect sense. By combining voices and minds, we can take open standards’ adoption to the next level in transport ticketing” added Philippe Vappereau, Chairman of CNA. “Our common aim is to simplify for all ticketing players, whether users or suppliers, the market complexity that limits the development of open solutions in favor of proprietary ones. There’s a lot to be done, but we’re excited, optimistic and prepared for a busy few years ahead.” 

The initial work of this collaboration is to analyse in detail the unique strengths of the two standards and, with backward compatibility in mind, define a roadmap that respects and supports existing solutions.

To quickly bring the full benefits of the cooperation to all stakeholders, the associations are creating shared working groups, which aims to ensure the necessary specifications and tools to enable compatibility between CALYPSO and CIPURSE are delivered. Three working groups have been established: Governance (to optimise organisational setup), Marketing and Communications (to ensure a common promotion of the open standard concept), and Technical (to work on topics such as an SDK based on the existing Eclipse Keyple Open Source Software and a common Secure Access Module Specification).