The OSA's First Half Year, Part 4: Our Next Six Months

Posted by Dominic Sartorio

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As described in the previous segments, we have collectively gained good experience with interoperability and built important relationships with the end user community. We have shown that there is value in companies and organizations working together in solving these common problems, and have shown the relevance of an organization like the OSA to help guide and facilitate those activities.

So where do we go from here? Answering this question rests on what kind of organization the OSA is becoming, what we want to be "when we grow up". In the last few weeks, the membership has gone through exactly this exercise - Setting vision and goals for itself for the next six months. Below is one slide from the result of this exercise:

That being said, we are not just another trade association that tries to raise awareness or drive sales of its members' products. This may be a by-product of our efforts, but is not the goal. Our goal is to reduce barriers to adopting all open source solutions, and level the playing field against the Microsoft Dynamics of the world. This is a challenging goal that requires addressing the needs of every stakeholder in our ecosystem - developers, communities, integrators, vendors, and end users alike - and fostering collective action among all of them. That's the only way to achieve the ecosystem-wide network-effect that a collective action mandate requires.

To that end, our six-month plan includes some ambitious goals, including:

Common Customer View- Use it as the reference implementation for further interoperability best practices, including adopting SOA to make it easier to add/replace applications, and enterprise infrastructure such as portals and a message bus. Moreover, package these in a consumable form, so that integrators such as Unisys can bring them to customers and solicit real-world feedback.

Grow the portfolio of interoperability components open-sourced on Sourceforge, and encourage developer participation. All are available under permissive OSI-compliant licenses to encourage the broadest possible adoption.

Drive our roadmap of interoperability best practices, addressing more and more common interoperability challenges, informed through hands-on efforts like the CCV.

Continue to raise awareness and solicit end user input through Customer Forums and other events and sponsorships.

Grow our membership and build upon our "network effect".

All of these add up to driving participation across the whole ecosystem. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Consequently we invite a broad array of organizations to join us, including vendors, communities, integrators and end customers - Everybody with a stake in open source solutions. More on that in the next segment!

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