The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), marked its one-year anniversary with three new members, a global focus, and advances toward seamless interoperability between commercial open-source applications. 

“The commercial open-source industry is no longer in an early-adopter phase,” said Dominic Sartorio, OSA president and senior director of product management at SpikeSource, an open-source services company. “Now that we’ve entered the mainstream phase of adoption, it’s even more important that open solutions have the fit, form and function that an enterprise organization expects.” 

The OSA facilitates interoperability among open solutions by fostering a multilateral approach as illustrated by its Common Customer View (CCV), an integrated suite of diverse front-office, back-office, business intelligence and business planning applications that presents a view of customer activity and interactions. The CCV was the first of several joint projects to be focused on making open source solutions work together in a cohesive suite of products. The CCV was built and tested by OSA members including Adaptive Planning, Concursive, Ingres, JasperSoft, Openbravo, SpikeSource, Talend and Unisys, and is currently available for purchase through Unisys. Going forward, the CCV will continue to expand.  Future versions will include participation from more members, will introduce loosely coupled integration best practices including SOA and REST, and will serve as a reference implementation of those best practices. 

In January, the OSA underlined its global focus by announcing a new chapter structure. The first non-U.S. chapter will be based in Europe and will debut this spring. The OSA expects to expand further with chapters in Latin America and Asia in the coming year. 

New OSA members include the consortium’s first Asian member, Kaigen Solution K.K., a systems integrator based in Yokohama, Japan, specializing in open source deployments, internationalization and localization. “We are opening an internationalization and localization lab for open source, with expertise in Japanese, Chinese and other Asian languages,” said Kaigen’s principal, Shigeru Shimada.  “We look forward to working with the OSA membership to drive best practices and bring leading open solutions to market in Asia.”

 IONA Technologies, a leading provider of service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure solutions, also joined the OSA recently. 

"Our participation in the Open Solutions Alliance is consistent with IONA's focus on empowering enterprises to adopt open source technologies and to take advantage of the flexibility and innovation that open source offers. We are excited about the OSA because it brings together users and vendors to foster a market-driven, interoperable, and flexible open source ecosystem along with the best practices needed to truly enable successful implementations," said Larry Alston, Vice President and General Manager of Open Source, IONA Technologies. 

In its first year, the OSA has established itself as a customer-focused organization by holding an international series of forums, gathering input from the front lines to inform its interoperability work. In December, the OSA released the findings from its customer forums and detailed the priorities for its interoperability work, which will continue into its second year and beyond. 

Moreover, the OSA plans to facilitate several business development opportunities on behalf of its membership, responding to channel and customer demand for interoperable solutions by leveraging the improved interoperability of its products. “Through our customer forums, end users shared their open source success stories as well as how they are challenged by issues like interoperability and supportability. Furthermore, they view these as issues that the commercial open source community needs to work together to resolve,” Sartorio said. “Go it alone open source won’t get us there. We have to work together more effectively, and we will.”

For more information on The Open Solutions Alliance, please contact Christina Williams christina@pageonepr.com at Page One Public Relations.