That's what customers what - better interoperability between Microsoft, Cisco and IBM, according to Peter Galli's eWeek article following Microsoft's recent Interoperability Executive Council attended by large Microsoft customers. Microsoft claimed that attendees feel Microsoft's web services are well put together but that IBM and Cisco could use help from Microsoft. I find that hard to believe, at least in the case of IBM's BEA, but hey, they only talked to Microsoft for this article.
I can relate. Integration and interoperability are huge challenges, especially for large enterprises where so much effort in these organizations are put into making products and technologies work together. I spent the first half of my career doing just that for telecom and financial companies. Those lessons learned are a lot of what's gone into the Cobia Framework, the underlying software architecture within Cobia that gives Cobia modules all of the open, plug-n-play, distribution transparency and other key capabilities. I've learned, through past hard knocks, that throwing a bunch of software on an operating system and plastering it over with a nice GUI does not an architecture make. It's one of the reasons I believe some vendors don't want you under the hood of their appliance. You might see what a mess things are or how much real proprietary technology (or lack of) you are paying for.
Interoperability is a challenge. Vendors usually only give customers APIs - the details (and you know what they say about the details) are left to the customer. Reminiscent of the phrase; "Some assembly required." Without some real partnerships and alliances, there's not much likely to come from the Interoperability Executive Council's request to Microsoft to work with IBM and Cisco. Asking Microsoft to do this may just be an exercise of tilting at windmills.
This is an area where I believe open source and architectures like the Cobia Framework will play a role. Customers want ease of use but they also want something that will "work and play well together" in their network. Innovation like this is not likely to come from the big vendors, especially when it requires they enable their competitors to compete more effectively against them. Open source projects and products are in a much better position to solve this problem, and that is my aim with Cobia. By creating an open source platform with a well defined software, operating system, network, distributed and interoperability architecture, it is much more feasible to bring networking, VoIP, security, video onto a converged platform and network. As we reveal more plans and capabilities in Cobia I think we'll see how this can happen and fit in with the goals of the vendor community and users.
I don't think MS will join IBM or Sisco, but IBM is gonna join Sisco soon.
Posted by: dell gx620 | July 12, 2009 at 02:55 AM