30 Minute Interview

Delivering interoperability

Radhesh Balakrishnan, Director, Platform Strategy, Microsoft India spoke to Mohd Shariff PA about Microsoft’s interoperability strategy and what this means for the Indian market

Radhesh Balakrishnan

Need for interoperability

Over the past year, we have stepped up our efforts to identify and meet the interoperability needs of our customers. We have launched the Interoperability Executive Customer Council, comprising of senior CIOs from the public and private sectors around the world, who are working closely with us to help us understand their most critical needs. We have also worked with others to formed the Interoperability Vendor Alliance and built interoperability collaborations with vendors such as Novell and Jboss. Additionally we have delivered the Open Specification Promise, and supported Open XML to become an international standard. We are commitment to deliver interoperability by design through consistent, customer-focused activities.

There is lot of hype and smoke and obfuscation surrounding interoperability these days. The best way is to cut through and focus on what is really happening, what steps are actually being taken, rather than the rhetoric. A good example is the debate surrounding document file formats.

Medium and large companies affected

It should come as no surprise that many medium and large-sized organizations usually have mixed or what is sometimes referred to as heterogeneous computing environments. Research data shows that there are two million UNIX servers, and more than 50,000 IBM-compatible mainframes. The Microsoft Windows operating system is also broadly deployed in these organizations, but with so many disparate systems, the issue of interoperability becomes increasingly important. As an example, consider that many organizations are deploying distributed client/server applications, many of which require access to data or transactions on existing systems.

Driving factors for interoperability

In general, Microsoft has seen at least three main drivers for interoperability. One, it reduces operational cost and complexity—customers can continue to have mixed environments for the foreseeable future. Having said that, it’s worth mentioning that homogeneity may, in fact, offer substantial benefits in reducing the operational cost and complexity of an organization’s infrastructure. However, it is unlikely that many organizations have the ability to create a totally homogeneous environment. Second, it enables best-of-breed deployments. Customers may have business requirements that can only be delivered with specific applications or platforms. For example the Windows NT platform provides a rich platform to either build solutions or buy commercial application packages. This best-of-breed environment meets the requirements for rapidly deploying solutions. However, it’s clear that Windows NT needs to work with the other environments in use in the organization; otherwise, the potential benefits of the new solution would be reduced. So interoperability is a key requirement that can help ensure customers meet their demanding business needs. Finally, this can leverage existing investments and customers can have a large and diverse range of systems installed in their environments and more importantly give them choice of technology platform. The move to new platforms needs to be gradual and evolutionary. Interoperability between new environments such as applications based on Windows DNA and existing systems is critical to the success of the Windows platform in the enterprise.

Another key trend is the requirement to Web-enabling existing applications, allowing access to the key systems on host environments, such as the IBM mainframe, from the intranet or Internet. This process effectively extends the functionality of existing applications and protects the investments that organizations have made.

Microsoft’s interoperability strategy

Microsoft is committed to ensuring that the Windows platform works with other key platforms and systems in the heterogeneous computing environment of our customers. In order to achieve this goal, Microsoft will broadly adopt two tactics: it will build bridges and gateways to the key platforms in use by our customers; and it will support key standards that can provide interoperability to systems that also support the standard.

Rather than advocating of replacing equipment in a piecemeal fashion, our goal is to help customers evolve their information technology infrastructures in ways that capitalize on new technologies and products. This commitment to interoperability improves information sharing, reduces computing costs, and capitalizes on past investments. Microsoft is committed to interoperability and therefore committed to standards. Microsoft will continue to work hard within the standards process to help develop and adopt key standards that solve interoperability problems in a market-relevant way.