[4] FOKUS was founded in 1988 as a research establishment for Open Communication Systems and an institute of the former "Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung GmbH" (GMD, Society for Mathematics and Data Processing).

[6] The executive board of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft has decided to appoint Dr. Tom Ritter as deputy director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems FOKUS.

It also carries out research into some of the key challenges to social development and the smart cities of the future, such as access to information, the sustainable and efficient use of resources, networked mobility and a modern public administration system.

[2] The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), for example, which has become the standard for Voice over IP and Internet telephony, was originally developed at Fraunhofer FOKUS.

[8][9] The success of the institute is based on an organization comprising different business units:[10] In 2024, FOKUS employed 494 people, including 178 students and interns.