Interoperability

One big push for interoperability required

Proprietary vendors are strongly endorsing the fact that business solutions have to be interoperable and have started working towards it. Though it is a small beginning a big push is required if more vendors are to pitch in By Kushal Shah

One of the foremost principles of open source is being able to choose whatever you want and use it the way that you want to. Now if that is the case, why shouldn’t I be able to run my documents or applications on any platform that I choose? Well, that is the question on every CIO’s mind. In today’s world, with growing deployments of Linux and continued use of other platforms such as Windows or UNIX, heterogeneity is a fact of life across enterprises and SMBs. One would certainly want applications to run across platforms.

This need has led to the birth of partnerships in the recent past. Within the open source community, the Open Solution Alliance (OSA) has been formed by some of the open source software-services vendors such as Adaptive Planning, Centric CRM, CollabNet, EnterpriseDB, Hyperic, JasperSoft, Openbravo, SourceForge.net, SpikeSource, and Talend in order to promote the usage of open source software with a view to improve integration between products to create cohesive multi-vendor software solutions. On the hand, to support cross platform, open source to proprietary interoperability we have seen partnerships such as Novell-Microsoft (the most talked about) and the Sun Microsystems-Microsoft alliance. A lot of work has been happening with all these partnerships and collaborative work and it is welcome news for consumers—after all they are the ones who stand to benefit and be free to run their IT in the manner that they wish to.

Now what if there is no interoperability? This would be a serious problem for spread of open source products because organizations would certainly hesitate to jump ship from their existing proprietary platforms if they could not be sure of the new solutions working smoothly in a mixed environment. After all, who would want their business proposal written on OpenOffice getting rejected only because it couldn’t be read by their client who is using a proprietary Office Suite? Nevertheless, the industry as a whole is doing many things to avoid such incidents.

Interoperability is consumer driven

Interoperability today is driven by none other than customers. Cross platform compatibility, data integration, virtualization and shared office standards and single sign on are some of the key requirements that customers are asking vendors for today.

Interoperability between platforms is increasingly becoming a necessity so that customers can reduce the cost and complexity of their heterogeneous IT environments and managing the same. At a time when CIOs are being asked to do more with less, and improve utilization—virtualization is a key to solving that problem. “Customers are looking at seamless management and interoperability. On the server side customers want to consolidate using virtualization but do not want to use expensive tools for the same. They want Linux on top of Windows or vice versa and hence interoperability has become a reality for us,” said Sandeep Menon, Country Head, Novell India. On the desktop, he explained that if a customer has about 1,000 desktops running Windows and if he wishes to run a pilot with 200 Linux PCs it would require not only integration with Active Directory but also authentication. Linux users also want to be able to open password protected files and docx documents on their machines using OpenOffice.

Looking at trends in interoperability, Nandu Pradhan, President & Managing Director, Red Hat India said, “The most common interoperability issues customers are experiencing are with regard to centralized identity management, or single sign-on; data integration, including both real-time data synchronization and batch transfer; and portability as customers want their solutions to work across different platforms, particularly the various Linux distributions and Windows.”

Today, CIOs are facing a very complex IT environment with solutions from a number of different vendors. In this context, there is a perception in the open source community that the proprietary vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP respond to this issue by proposing single-vendor integrated stacks where the vendor assumes the responsibility of dealing with integration as long as all the components of the IT stack come from that same vendor. On the other hand, Paolo Juvara, Chief Products Officer, OpenBravo said, “Open source is where innovation is happening in the software industry today, and the members of the OSA believe that no one company/project can satisfy the many differing needs of everybody and produce the best software in all categories. The open source nature of the projects and the transparency that derives from it allows open source vendors to collaborate and jointly address the interoperability problem without sacrificing innovation.”

In the case of Novell-Microsoft alliance, the situation is one of making two platforms work together. “Our collaboration demonstrates the commitment to make Linux interoperable with other platforms. It is all about making these two platforms (Windows and Linux) work together and provide support for the interoperability that customers demand. By working together, we enable customers to choose the operating system that best fits their applications and business needs,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, Director, Platform Strategy, Microsoft India.

What is more important is, to see who is actually doing what to tackle this problem. The reality is that both sides—open source and proprietary—must get their act together if they are to make truly interoperable products for the benefit of consumers.

When it is the question of interoperability, the first thing which comes to mind is partnership and collaboration. To make this possible, the open source community has formed OSA. On the commercial front, the Novell-Microsoft and Sun Microsystems-Microsoft alliances are furthering collaboration in this sphere.

Safeguarding customer interest

The fact is that customers will run mixed environments. They will have certain applications running on Linux and certain ones on Windows. You will not be able to force a single OS on any CIO when he has an abundance of choices and if you try to force a uniform environment, you might damage the business for both parties (Linux as well as Windows) by provoking him to go to some third-party. The end result—a business loss for both. “Customers are asking for highly reliable, secure, and interoperable solutions. Through the improved interoperability and customer indemnification offered as part of this agreement, we anticipate increased business opportunity through both best of breed product solutions and market differentiation,” said Balakrishnan.

The partnership works on three broad fronts—technical, business and patents. Under the technical cooperation agreement, Novell and Microsoft will work together in three primary areas—virtualization, management, and document format compatibility to deliver new solutions to customers. Under the patent co-operation agreement, Microsoft and Novell provide patent coverage for each others’ customers. Finally, under the business cooperation agreement, Novell and Microsoft are committed to dedicate marketing and sales resources to promote joint solutions. “We both agree that we will sell our own products. But if customer wants Linux for X and Windows for Y applications then we should be able to sell both in that cases. Microsoft can distribute coupons for SUSE Linux; in this case customer doesn’t go away from us to some other Linux distributor,” said Menon.

In terms of interoperability, Microsoft has set up an interoperability Lab in Bangalore. The lab will help customers to test interoperable solutions across infrastructure, application and management layers. It observed a strong need in the Indian market for interoperability in two areas—firstly at the core infrastructure layer for networking across heterogeneous platforms and at the application layer; secondly, at the management layer for virtualization to consolidate workloads across multiple platforms to benefit from advances in hardware technology. The Lab is even working on the latest products such as Moonlight (Silverlight for Linux).

Balakrishnan believed “Technologically, we tackle interoperability by working on four key pillars—interoperability by design, collaborations with the community, access to our technologies and industry standards.

Sun Microsystems-Microsoft alliance

Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have signed a 10-year intellectual property licensing and technology collaboration agreement which in turn will reduce costs, increase reliability and help customers to focus more on their core business instead of IT integration initiatives. “The two companies started a variety of projects designed to vastly improve interoperability. Sun’s interoperability with Microsoft products means that customers can integrate Sun products to add value to their heterogeneous computing environments today,” said Naveen Asrani, Manager, Developer Relations -India, Asia South & AustralAsia,

Sun Microsystems. In May 2006, the two companies announced the availability of a collection of Web services components to help drive Web services interoperability between the Java platform and the .Net framework. These Web Services Interoperability Technology (WSIT) components are focused on the areas of security, messaging, quality of service and metadata support and are being delivered through the open source OpenJava EE community as part of Project Glassfish. WSIT is a key component of the internal project code-named ‘Tango’ and part of the ongoing Web services interoperability efforts between Sun and Microsoft.

OSA

OSA was started in order to promote open source products and encourage interoperability amongst the products. It consists of a diverse group of developers, integrators, end users and commercial open source vendors, and includes representation from both member and non-member organizations. The OSA’s interoperability initiatives are all done through a public forum.

These initiatives are loosely divided into two categories such as interoperability community projects and best practices. Interoperability community projects consist of actual code that addresses a specific interoperability problem. These are hosted and maintained on SourceForge and freely available under an OSI-compliant license. Interoperability best practices consists of white papers and ‘how to’ guidance regarding which standards and processes are being promoted for industry-wide adoption. The target audience for this is development managers, integrators and end customers looking for guidance on how to approach a given interoperability challenge.

“Much of the technical work of the OSA is in the development of proof of concept that integrates several open source solutions to address specific business processes. These activities result in both specific product improvements as well as best practice guidelines that we can follow in subsequent developments,” said Juvara.

Another data integrity player, Talend is also a founding member and does significant work in this area. “As a provider of open source data integration solutions, we works closely with other software vendors, open source and closed source alike, to ensure that the proper connectivity is available for their applications to exchange data with other systems. This is not a Linux-specific issue, but Linux is a big focus,” said Yves de Montcheuil, Vice President - Worldwide Marketing, Talend. Further, they partner with a large number of vendors of databases and business applications and jointly develop connectors for their systems.

Challenges abound

Customers are too happy with what has been happening around for interoperability by all the vendors but as we know, they all want more which will only happen over time. For Novell, the challenge came in the form of opposition from the community when they decided to join hands with Microsoft. “We got slagged by the community. We had a mixed response from people; some really liked the bold move whereas some disagreed. There is vibrancy with opposition, discussions and this is part of open source. Anyways, when you take a bold and revolutionary step, it will never be in 100 percent agreement,” explained Menon.

Other technology and business challenges are different for different vendors. “We believe that open standards are an important part of accommodating interoperability. A big challenge to interoperability is that some of the vendors that choose to create their own protocols as well as do undocumented changes to standard protocols. We strongly believe in creating open standards and compete on the implementation of said standards,” added Asrani.

According to Microsoft, a key challenge is not really on addressing the technical interoperability but around less tangible and often more complex issues of semantic, organizational, and legal/policy interoperability issues. “As our distributed information systems become more ubiquitous, autonomous and complex, there is a stronger need for grounding them on common models of data and knowledge,” explained Balakrishnan. This is critical not only for the data but also for the security policies. The handling of heterogeneous security policies is usually not present in a closed and/or centralized environment.

Work is continuously taking place across sections of the industry. What we need is more partnerships on the lines of the Microsoft-Novell and Sun Microsystems-Microsoft alliance and partnerships like the OSA. Such moves will surely benefit the market and customers at large.

kushal.shah@expressindia.com