Three of the world's biggest network equipment vendors--and bitter rivals--announced they will create interoperability among their OSS systems through their new "OSSii" initiative. "By enabling multi-vendor interoperability 'up front' between the OSS of all three vendors, OSSii will promote competition by simplifying operations, reducing the overall integration costs as well as speeding up the time-to-market of new services," Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC), Huawei and Nokia Siemens Networks announced in a joint statement. "The reciprocal agreement will cover fault, performance, configuration and basic network event and trace management for the northbound interfaces from Radio Access, Circuit Core and Packet Core network management systems." The companies said the agreement includes "bilateral cross licensing agreements," and is open to other vendors that wish to join. The action is notable considering the three companies compete head-to-head for network equipment sales to carriers. Release