Open-source group takes first interoperability steps

By China Martens, IDG News Service, 04/19/07

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Nonprofit consortium the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) has begun making moves to increase businesses' use of open-source software.

The industry group Wednesday issued an interoperability roadmap and announced its first major project -- the Common Customer View prototype.

Formed in February, OSA has 12 members -- Adaptive Planning Inc., Centric CRM, CollabNet Inc., EnterpriseDB Corp., GroundWork Open Source Inc., Hyperic Inc., JasperSoft Corp., Openbravo SL, SourceForge.net, SpikeSource Inc., Talend and Unisys Corp. The consortium expects to announce new members within a week, according to Anthony Gold, OSA board member and vice president and general manager of open-source business at Unisys.

There's a lack of well-defined interoperability standards in the open-source business software arena, which can deter companies from adopting the technology. Trying to get different open-source components to work together without such standards is hard work for users.

After discussions with end-user chief information officers and other IT staff as well as systems integrators, OSA members created the interoperability roadmap to show the particular interoperability problems the consortium plans to tackle and to provide a timeline for work on the issues, Gold said. The end result for each issue will be a document describing standards and best practices that the open-source community can use as a guide for building and deploying interoperable software.

Along with those efforts, the OSA will create prototypes of working code to show that the interoperability principles work in practice. The first prototype is the Common Customer View, which aims to bring together information held in different members' applications including CRM (customer relationship management), ERP (enterprise resource planning) and business intelligence software and a legacy point-of-sale application. The prototype will also draw on Talend's open-source data integration software and other integration expertise from Unisys and SpikeSource.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.

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