Gasp! Open-source interoperability group finds that interop is customers' #1 concern
Interoperability is surely a big deal. How it ended up being the top concern of an open-source interoperability group's (the Open Solutions Alliance) survey doesn't require much imagination. But the ironic thing in the survey's findings is that the OSA (voiced here by Dominic Sartorio) has come to the wrong conclusion from it:
Most commercial open-source companies are finding a good amount of success. But how many opportunities are they leaving on the table because they're not interoperable?
Please allow me to answer: "Zero." At least, zero to few opportunities are lost from not being interoperable with other open-source projects. Yes, I get quite a few requests to have Alfresco integrate with JBoss and Liferay, and I've done business with both. But I didn't need a committee to tell me that. Customers did. Customers have yet to request integration with Compiere, for example, so we haven't done it. Someday we probably will. But when customers vote with dollars.
Today's interoperability requests for open-source vendors are to work with existing (proprietary) systems from SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, etc. If the OSA wants to be relevant, it should help work on that kind of interoperability. It could be useful there.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Thanks for commenting about this. Actually, we are covering interop with proprietary environments as well. Our report also documents that >50% of these customers want to run on Windows and interoperate with other MSFT products, for example. Oracle frequently came up too. Our interop work is intentionally designed to work across both open and closed domains. Our single signon project is a great example of this - we tested it works with ActiveDirectory.
That being said, the feedback we got from customers suggests that the amount of opportunity being left on the table, even for integrating just open source products, is greater than zero. Anytime a customer (or integrator) has to spend time and money to do something the vendor didn't do, it adds to the TCO profile of the product. The higher the TCO, the greater the chance that some customers simply don't buy.
This does vary by product. I distinctly remember two attendees saying they had issues with Alfresco integration - but to your credit, this is on the low end - other products were mentioned much more frequently.
Also, part of the feedback we got was that content management interop is important. Specifically, CMS as a back-end, with content surfaced in multiple user-facing apps, mostly driven by web 2.0 use cases. We're getting a project started to offer best practices for this. We greatly welcome Alfresco's participation because, well, we would expect Alfresco to be frequently used as the CMS of choice. Also, we want our best practices to be better than Sharepoint's, and it'll help to have some of the best CMS minds looking at this. Send me an email if you're interested!