Demand for open standards, architectures growing in Europe
BlogSeptember 10, 2025
LONDON -- DSEI UK 2025. Speaking with embedded computing suppliers at the DSEI 2025 show in London this week, I’m hearing growing support of requirements for open standards and open architectures, even if they don’t necessarily know about the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) mandate for MOSA, or modular open systems approach, content.
Many European customers we speak to don’t bring up MOSA per se, but they do want VPX products and to build systems based on common standards, said Patrick Dietrich, President of Connect Tech, this week at DSEI.
VPX, an open standard – and an example of MOSA – has been in use for years in European defense systems. Large MOSA initiatives are often driven by large programs of record in the U.S.; such programs are rarer in European militaries as their budgets are much smaller.
"While Europe doesn't currently have a direct equivalent to the MOSA mandate or the SOSA Technical Standard, there is strong momentum toward open standards across allied nations," noted Paul Tanner, Vice President and General Manager, Mercury Systems International. "We're seeing increasing alignment on the need for modular, scaleable, and upgradeable systems to ensure readiness and strengthen collaboration across the transatlantic defense community.
While it might not be mentioning MOSA specifically, the U.K. Ministry of Defense (MoD) is starting to ask for technology aligned to the Sensor Open Systems Architecture, or SOSA, Technical Standard especially in airborne situations, Nigel Norman, CEO of Sarsen Technology, told me.
Noah Donaldson, Chief Technical Officer of Annapolis Micro Systems, speaking with Nigel and me, concurred, saying that the MoD created its own type of SOSA Technical Standard, called STICS or Standards for Integrated C5ISR/electronic warfare (EW) Systems.
“STICS is an approach that enables U.K. Strategic Command to achieve the rapid integration and reconfiguration of cost-effective, high performance C5ISR/EW capabilities,” according to the MoD. “It is a set of federated open technical standards, system structures, modular building blocks and behaviors to enable industry to deliver open and modular C5ISR/EW systems.”
STICS is very similar to CMOSS, Simon Collins, Director of Product Management at Abaco Systems, told me today. The commonality regarding MoD versus DoD solutions is at the circuit-card and backplane level and common interfaces. The specification for a U.S. standard like VICTORY (which focuses on standardizing interfaces and protocols for military-vehicle communications) would be placed on top of that, or for the U.K. MoD, where STICS specifications would exist.
Developing products that align to the SOSA Technical Standard for European embedded suppliers would be difficult because of the export regulations like the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), said Flemming Chistensen, CEO at Sundance Microprocessor Technology. Because of this, many develop products based on open standards like VITA, for instance VPX and VITA 90. These standards are embraced by organizations like the SOSA Consortium, so customers can then adapt to them if they want to later on.
