Vendor Accent

Open for Business

Robert S. Sutor predicts how standards will shape business in the next five years

Open standards are an important catalyst for driving new business and innovation. But since they are typically a part of technology, they are often overlooked and sometimes even taken for granted.

Do standards even matter? In today’s digital environment, you bet they do. Practically everything we touch in our physical world, from our entertainment devices, to transportation, financial services, communications, correspondence and even education, works better when based on open standards.

Moreover, as we see the 3D Internet and virtual world applications and services develop, the common communication’s blueprint between these various worlds will be based on open standards—much as today’s Internet protocol allows any component on a network to talk to any other component,creating an infrastructure for collaborating and coordinating resources across the globe. 

Over the next five years, as the performance of information technologies continues to increase while their cost declines, powerful technologies combined with open standards and the Internet, will be used to build a global infrastructure that will give people and industries access to more resources worldwide. The resulting environment will be more cross industry, and will be characterized by collaborative innovation that is beyond our expectations. All this will be made possible by open standards.

Simply put, open standards are a product of independent people working together to collaboratively develop solutions for addressing common requirements and goals that help businesses and ultimately consumers. Where would we be today without standards in electricity, engineering and building codes and other areas? By adopting standards, an industry can achieve uncommon things.

Open standards act as a blueprint, an insurance policy if you will, that allows a variety of technologies and industries such as healthcare, financial services, automotive, retail, energy and others to share information and link it faster, easier and at lower costs. Interoperability is the goal to deliver better goods, services and intelligent data. This gives businesses choice rather than one proprietary solution.

Every business and institution has important data buried throughout the enterprise and its extended partner network; useful data about skills, supply, demand, quality, consumer behavior and more. All that information, regardless of its form, can potentially be integrated, analyzed and exploited in innovative ways, thanks to the emergence of open standards in virtually every industry. Think of open standards as the foundation that will help guarantee that the information created today will be easily accessible and be able to be processed in the future to benefit industries and consumers alike.

Over the next five years we can look for open standards to shape the way we do business in the following ways:

Increased negotiating power and competition will be the norm as open standards will make single supplier situations a thing of the past. Open standards will propel a more competitive marketplace for goods and services resulting in lower prices—and more choices for everyone.

Small and medium sized businesses will benefit tremendously from open standards such as the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Web-based applications. Information will be more easily shared among computing systems, such as desktop, laptop, portable devices, or the data center, without single choice propriety operating systems and application roadblocks.

Virtual Worlds, such as Second Life, ActiveWorlds and others will be a big part of how we interact, exchange information, and do business. These virtual worlds will create new ways of finding and working with customers in the 3D Internet, along with socializing, collaborating, training and selling. Open standards will allow the exchange of information, virtual goods, currency, and even people (albeit, virtual people), among the metaverse.

A new generation of industry-specific standards based on service oriented architecture (SOA) and open infrastructure standards will be created. These will couple technology and business processes in healthcare, education, insurance, banking, telecommunications, and other areas to decrease costs, speed time-to-market, expand available options and resources, improve communications, reduce risk and create more durable solutions.

For example, open standards-based technology will serve as the foundation for a new era in health analytics that will integrate clinical, financial, operational, claims, genomic and other medical data in a secure and private format. This will allow rapid analysis and reporting of vital insights from millions of patient encounters to help prevent and fight diseases.

Open standards are increasing at the heart of innovation and new business. As radically new forms of collaboration take hold—within a company, between companies, with online communities of experts and even with previously unknown individuals worldwide—consider what we could lose in the absence of open standards. Open standards are the glue that will tie all this together and give businesses choice.

No matter what financial metric is used—revenue growth, operating margin growth or average profit over time—those who categorize themselves as strong collaborators consistently come out on top. A retreat from open standards would clearly undermine what our customers themselves believe to be the keen competitive advantage of collaborative innovation.