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The article reports that the international workshop on Distributed Systems: Operations and Management (DSOM) 2009 was held at the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, Italy from October 26-27, 2009. The theme of DSOM 2009 was "Integrated Management of Systems, Services, Processes and People in IT." Its focus was on the traditional network and system management disciplines.

This article presents information on the Latin American Network Operations and Management Symposium. The symposium was attended by academics, researchers and communication professionals from Europe, America and Asia. The technical session was held to stimulate discussions and interactions among attendees. The highlights included Mobile and Wireless, Security, Policy-based Management, and Monitoring and Measurement. Some of the key points made within the Security session included new ways for characterizing traffic and detecting traffic anomalies. In the Policy-based Management session use of ontology was shown to help expand rules.

The six articles in this special section focus on advancements in networking software. Networking and communications systems are currently undergoing a substantive transformation on several fronts, promising substantially lower cost, simplified operations, and dramatically faster innovation cycles as traditional barriers to the deployment of innovations are removed. Where in the past networking functions were predominantly implemented using purpose-built hardware, custom protocols, and firmware images, those networking functions are increasingly instantiated through software that is abstracted from hardware, freely programmable, and relying on algorithmic invocation of generic application programming interfaces (APIs). This transformation is best summarized as ?softwarization? of the network, which is, in turn, realized through advances in networking software. These articles exemplify this transformation, providing an excellent cross-section across these facets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National research and education networks (NRENs), such as ESnet, G?ANT, and RNP, currently promote the employment of dynamic circuit networks (DCNs) to improve scientific communications beyond the capabilities of today's Internet. In spite of their alleged benefits to materialize user-initiated, ad hoc dedicated end-to-end circuits for high-demanding applications, DCNs also pose important challenges. Two examples are dealing with the end-user's lack of ability or willingness to understand low-level technicalities of virtual circuit establishment, and accommodating NRENs' local policies throughout the life-cycle of DCN. In this article, we seek to improve the usability of DCN services with a focus on the inexperienced end-user and the skilled network operator alike. We introduce MEICAN, a platform to manage the life-cycle of DCN from definition to provisioning of virtual circuits. We also present a case study of inter-domain circuit reservation with mixed manual and automated policy checking, and discuss lessons learned, relevant challenges, and open issues still to be overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]