Interoperability is a challenge facing the entire software industry, both open
and proprietary. While many proprietary vendors attempt to address this with all-encompassing
top-down architectures that each claim to be the Grand Unified Theory of IT, we
have a different approach. Interoperability is a challenge best addressed collaboratively,
with a practical bottom-up approach that encourages participation from developers
worldwide and focuses on the needs of the customer instead of the vendor. The
Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) was founded to help focus and accelerate this approach,
and consequently speed the adoption of interoperable business solutions based
on open source software (OSS). This article describes the interoperability challenge
and the OSA's approach in more detail.
Interoperability has been a major challenge facing the business software consumer
for decades. Proprietary software applications, each designed with distinct
requirements in mind and built on technology stacks by engineering teams working
largely in isolation, were simply not designed to work together. The result
has been customers enduring the time and expense of getting everything to work
together.
The industry has attempted successive waves of standards with limited success.
Many of the resulting standards are extremely complex, leading to poor understanding
of their meaning and resulting in incompatible implementations that claim to
be compliant.
Another problem is the proliferation of standards, with multiple competing,
incompatible standards often sponsored by competing proprietary vendors. This
complexity and poor interoperability has been a barrier to successful adoption
in many businesses, where CIOs and business executives frequently ask why the
products involved "don't just work together" and "why can't the
vendor community solve this".
More recently, OSS has emerged as a proven means of delivering high-quality
products, and since the source code is publicly available, developers no longer
need to work in isolation. Moreover, OSS developers are especially motivated
to build products that use widely adopted standards and are highly modular in
nature, as this is the best way to grow the community and encourage participation
from a greater number of developers without the benefit of real-time coordination.
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