While it comes as no surprise that many medium- and large-sized organizations in the region usually have mixed heterogeneous computing environments, the challenge of interoperability is compounded by the fact that Asia is the fastest-growing server market in the world. In fact, according to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, sales have been strong in Asia Pacific (excluding Japan), with year-on-year growth of 13.7% in 2006.
With organizations running many disparate systems – including Windows servers, UNIX servers, AS/400 systems, and IBM-compatible mainframes – the issue of interoperability has become increasingly important. As a result, businesses in Asia continue to rank the integration of diverse applications and the automation of business processes among their most pressing IT needs.
Interoperability Defined
Interoperability, simply put is having software and hardware from different vendors, multiple machines to communicate and work together. With a common understanding of basic protocols, different software can interact smoothly with little or no specific knowledge of each other. The Internet is perhaps the most obvious example of this kind of interoperability, where any piece of software can connect and exchange data as long as it adheres to the key protocols.
A Look at the Banking Industry
Let’s take financial banks as an example. Not only do these organizations need IT systems (including software, hardware and applications) to work well internally, these are also required to talk to their branches, as well as other banks and institutions that their customers regularly interface with. A company selling solutions to a bank will need to make sure that their core banking applications can communicate effectively with every possible third-party application that large banking clients may have in place. These third-party applications could be running on a range of hardware and operating systems including UNIX and Windows, with the IBM xSeries and iSeries etc.
As a result, buyers at these institutions need to be constantly aware about the costs and additional challenges that they might encounter when they add a new computer system or piece of software. This is a significant issue for any financial institution. If a new piece of technology does not work well — or worse, creates new problems with existing systems — the cost can be high in both an investment perspective and customer loyalty. It is therefore imperative that the software they deploy works with just about any other system to help a bank contain its cost of doing business while providing great service to its customers.
Achieving Interoperability
Customers do not expect complexity to go away but want to find a way of making it all work. There are a variety of complementary ways to achieve interoperability, including:
1. development of software that is “interoperable by design” (e.g., inclusion of XML technology in software to facilitate the easy exchange of data across different applications)
2. licensing / cross licensing of proprietary technologies and essential intellectual property
3. collaboration with partners, competitors, and governments, and
4. implementation of industry standards (including open standards and broadly accessible proprietary standards) in products and services.
For example, by incorporating industry-standard XML technology in software, developers facilitate the easy exchange of data across different applications. Binary files (.doc, .dot, .xls, and .ppt files), which for years did a great job of storing and transporting data, are no longer able to meet the new workplace challenges that include easily moving data between disparate applications, and allowing users to glean business insight from that data.
This led Microsoft to explore XML as a future industry standard in 1997, and the company recently signed a partnership with the Halal Industry Development Corporation (HDC), the company entrusted by the Malaysian Government to direct and co-ordinate the development of its halal industry, to develop the Malaysian Halal Hub Open XML System for the global market.
The country’s ‘International Halal Hub’ is based on Open XML to enable it to be a one-stop internet gateway for trade and exchange of halal goods and services in the Islamic world.
The Emerging Model of Co-opetition
The model that clearly emerges is that of co-opetition or competitive cooperation. Vendors are finding it important to partner with the same companies they compete with in order to ensure they deliver on the needs of what we call ‘shared customers’.
For example, half of JBoss’ business runs on windows. There was a good opportunity for a dialogue for adding value for shared customers – so it was not surprising to see the two companies coming together to address the needs of customers such as the Swedish Medical Center with the physician portal solution, FirstGateways, which included JBoss Enterprise Middleware System (JEMS) on the Windows platform.
OSS = Open Standards = Interoperability Myth
Open Standards and open source software are completely separate concepts. Open standards are as easy to implement in proprietary software as they are in open source software. Also, while open standards assist in enabling interoperability, it is not a “silver bullet”. Think of the VHS video player as an example – the open standards were the data format and tape specifications however interoperability (i.e. moving VHS tapes from one VCR to another) was possible between a huge variety of hardware devices, none of which was developed using an open source methodology. This example also illustrates how product innovation and consumer benefits are not dependant upon openness of code or development processes. The bottom line is that open standards are important but they are just one part of a complex interoperability ecosystem.
Linux/ OSS Lab
Many people hold the perception that Microsoft is only about closed source and that we are anti-open source, but the reality is not as black and white. Customers choose a technology — an operating system or an application — based on its ability to solve a particular problem, not based on whether it is proprietary or open source. We run Linux and a variety of other OSS in our lab which consists of a few hundred servers plus a range of PCs, collectively running over 40 different Linux distributions, together with many different versions of UNIX. Our investments are aimed at continuously learning how those technologies can better interoperate with Microsoft’s technologies.
Conclusion
Customers today have proprietary software and they have open source software. Customers just want it all to work together. This dream is becoming a reality as companies and projects in both the commercial and open source space are working together to solve the interoperability challenge and bring a solution to one of the biggest pain points for customers today.
Chris Levanes is Platform Strategy Lead at Microsoft APAC.
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