Osa's New President Will Continue to Focus on Interoperability
Bentley: What's in store for OSA in 2009?
Gold:Well, we've had a good start. We've made a lot of progress with pulling together a lot of companies to help drive the message of interoperability and open solutions in the enterprise. But what we want to do is get a lot more traction. We want to be recognized as a thought leader or a business leader of driving open solutions for the enterprise into the business space. There are two parts to doing that.
Bentley: And they are?
Gold: One is driving standards. And we're definitely not talking about creating new standards. There are plenty of standards bodies already out there. But we want to drive existing standards.... The other is driving community around that effort.
Bentley: How did you come to these goals?
Gold: We looked at what enterprises are doing to achieve their objectives, and clearly open source is playing more and more of a role there. I don't know if you saw Gartner's report that came out a couple of days ago. I don't know how many companies they surveyed, but they said 85 percent of them were using open source, and about half of those were in mission-critical application environments. Open source is making substantial inroads into the main pieces of the enterprise.
The challenge is, the world out there is hybrid. No one's using pure open source anywhere, or pure proprietary. There's a mix of legacy and commercial and open source. So how do you integrate it all together? That's one of the things that a lot of people are struggling with, particularly in the current climate. There are these great open source pieces where I can save costs, but how do I really use them? I'm not going to throw away what I have and replace it with open source. I am willing to consider how I can leverage open source in a modular way where it makes sense in my existing environment. Maybe start to wrap services around my legacy components and start building a service-oriented architecture, that kind of thing.
Really, what I'd like to see the OSA do is drive the reference architecture around that, around how the interoperability between open solutions and existing environments can work.
Bentley:And how do you go about building community around that?
Gold: Well, for instance, we have interest from several large educational institutions that want to leverage the OSA to share best practices and code across multiple institutions. So there's the idea of putting together some vertical focus communities. What are reference architectures that we could build in financial services? In business administration? Or in government and public sector?
It isn't the best analogy, but with Microsoft Developer Network, they have a whole community where they have code that you can download and samples and snippets you can start with, and reference architecture, and message boards and forums where you can ask questions. To me, that is what we're working toward: a place people can come to share and exchange these types of references. We're not driving a particular technology and we're not driving a certain database, a certain ESB or a certain anything. We're looking at how this stuff can integrate together.
Lora covers the emergence of open software and standards in IT Business Edge's Leveraging Open Source weekly report. Read Lora's article, Microsoft Philipines Partner with Exist Global on Open Source
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