The Interoperability Challenge

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.