Erlang is Ericsson's till-now proprietary concurrent, distributed language and environment. Among other things, I believe they wrote a lot of massively parallel telephony apps (e.g., running inside phone switches) using it. Anyway, looks like they've just open-sourced it.
The system strikes me as more like KeyKOS than Joule or E, but in any case it seems to have a lot of desirable properties and may be worth looking at for ideas if nothing else.
See <URL:http://www.erlang.org> for more.
-dan