About the Institute

Operations is itself a science worth studying seriously.

The Institute's work is to raise these from engineering intuition into verifiable theory and reproducible method.

Every research result must be reproducible in a real or high-fidelity infrastructure environment; conclusions that hold only on a simplified model are not accepted.

The research environment covers the combinations found in practice: multi-platform virtualisation, container orchestration, distributed storage, multi-vendor network equipment and heterogeneous operating systems — because operations research detached from the heterogeneity of real environments generally yields conclusions of no practical meaning.

One track goes through academic publication and open datasets, bringing results into public knowledge; the other goes through technology licensing and joint development, bringing them into industry practice.

The Institute is also the technical support body for the COR Council — the theoretical basis of the maturity model and standards the Council publishes comes largely from the Institute's research. Note, however, that the Institute has no final say over the standards: research and standard-setting must remain two separate things, or the same group both proposes a method and rules that it is correct.