Interoperability Conversations – FAQ

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 18:43:38 Z

Interoperability Conversations – FAQ

Q: What is Interoperability?

A: The Wikipedia definition states that, “Interoperability is a property referring to the ability of diverse systems and organizations to work together (inter-operate). The term is often used in a technical systems engineering sense, or alternatively in a broad sense, taking into account social, political, and organizational factors that impact system-to-system performance.”

At Microsoft when we talk about interoperability, we’re talking about enabling different kinds of software systems to work together.

Q: Why is interoperability so important in the marketplace?

A: Interoperability is important to people and organizations as they exchange data between systems in our increasingly connected world. Broad interoperability allows manufacturers to participate in larger markets and to innovate and compete on value-added features of their products and services.

Q: Why is interoperability so important for consumers?

A: Consumers want the ability to create data in many different formats – such as pictures, movies, spreadsheets, documents, and e-mail – and easily exchange their data among different devices – cameras, computers, music players – as well as with other users. Interoperability allows consumers to choose amongst several interoperable solutions giving them more choice and more value from value-added features of competing products and services that work with each other.

Q: Why is interoperability so important for enterprises and governments?

A: Enterprises want the freedom and flexibility to choose the best solution for their needs, regardless of vendor, and for all of these solutions to work well together. Having choices means businesses can find the most appropriate, efficient way to implement or enhance a business process, which often includes creating and manipulating data across diverse systems.

Governments are striving to overcome multiple interoperability issues. First, they wish to provide their constituents with access to online e-government services that successfully coordinate services across jurisdictional boundaries and take advantage of information and processes in legacy systems. Second, governments want to address the issue of digital inclusion. For example, by improving education through technology, governments can create opportunities for social and economic advancement, encourage innovation, and boost local employment in the global knowledge economy.

Q: What is Microsoft doing to address interoperability?

A: Interoperability isn’t a new concept at Microsoft. When we talk about interoperability, we’re talking about enabling different kinds of software systems to work together. Our vision has always been to enable data and information to flow as freely and seamlessly as possible between people, products and systems. That’s why we have more than 600,000 industry partners around the world who build their business on Microsoft platforms, as well as millions of developers who use the information we already share to build products and services.

As a part of Microsoft’s journey to further increase the openness of its products and to provide greater interoperability, opportunity, and choice, the company recently announced a set of broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices. Specifically, Microsoft has chosen to implement four new interoperability principles and corresponding actions across its high-volume products. These principles are:

· Ensuring open connections - Microsoft is ensuring open connections to its high-volume products so that software developers, business partners, and competitors can better interoperate with those products and extend existing products or invent new solutions for customers;

· Promoting data portability - Microsoft is designing its high-volume products and provide documentation to enable customers to access their stored data and use their data in other software products;

· Enhancing support for industry standards - Microsoft is supporting relevant standards in its high-volume products and do so in a new way that promotes even greater levels of interoperability than before;

· Fostering more open engagement with the industry, including open source communities, around interoperability and standards issues - Microsoft is building upon its recent work to increase its communications with the customer, IT, and open source communities to drive a collaborative approach to addressing interoperability challenges.

Q: What steps has Microsoft taken to work with the industry on addressing interoperability challenges?

A: Microsoft recognizes the importance of listening to, and learning from, its customers and partners regarding their interoperability requirements. In June 2006, Microsoft founded the IEC Council, a group of senior representatives from 30 of the world’s top Microsoft customers, whose mission is to identify key interoperability challenges faced by the industry and define potential strategies to address these challenges. Additionally, Microsoft participates in the Interop Vendor Alliance (IVA), a global, cross-industry group of software and hardware vendors that works together to address specific interoperability scenarios. Microsoft solicits the IEC Council’s focus areas and works on them individually and within the context of the IVA to ensure lessons learned from customers end up as scenarios cooperatively addressed within the IVA structure.

We also have a number of very important technical interoperability projects that are currently underway. Our work with Linux and Windows virtualization is an example. We have had a number of important interoperability agreements between Microsoft and open source distributors, Novell, Xandros, Linspire and Turbo Linux, and we've worked very, very closely with the industry both in the form of an interoperability executive council, and an interoperability vendor alliance. Each of these organizations have close engagement with Microsoft, and we've seen some very tangible results in the period of time since they've been in existence. We've been working very closely with organizations like JBoss, SugarCRM, XenSource, Zend, Novell, and SpikeSource on building close alliances to create interoperability between Microsoft products and open source.