While commercial open-source solutions are being broadly adopted, there are obstacles slowing that adoption, particularly around interoperability, the Open Solutions Alliance has found.
The Alliance, which was established in late 2006 by companies including CollabNet, SpikeSource, SourceForge.net and Unisys as a consortium to help drive the interoperability and adoption of open solutions, sponsored a series of five customer forums in the United States and Europe in 2007, which were attended by more than 100 customers, integrators and vendors. A summary report of the findings from those forums will be issued Dec. 12, which includes a list of the six most common interoperability issues attendees are experiencing.
Among these are 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.
Dominic Sartorio, the president of OSA and lead author of the report, whose day job is director of product management for partner products at SpikeSource, told eWEEK that customers also want user interface customization and portal integration, so that integrated solutions have a consistent look and feel. In addition, customers want content management integration so that shared content can easily integrate with the same back-end content repository; and component compatibility, ensuring that a given version of one component works with a given version of another component, Sartorio said.
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