News

OSA To Push Open-Source Enterprise Apps

• By Kurt Mackie
• April 23, 2007

The OSA is fairly new industry membership coalition, having been established about three months ago to spur enterprise application development.

The first major project of the OSA, according to the Interoperability Roadmap, is to establish a "common customer view prototype." The aim is present a complete view of each customer to the business user, regardless of the application (front office, back office and planning apps).

Other aspects of the OSA Interoperability Roadmap to be addressed include:

• Single sign-on for Web applications;
• Management for monitoring and logging;
• Application compatibility for service level agreements;
• Common search functionality;
• Integrated user interface; and
• Real-time data synchronization.

"We are moving quickly to address two of the most important issues for ensuring the adoption of open solutions -- interoperability among applications and awareness of these applications among users," stated Barry Klawans, OSA board member and chief technology officer at JasperSoft.

The OSA plans to vote on service level agreements and project management methods next month, according to the Roadmap, which is an evolving document. Proposals on monitoring and logging aspects are currently being developed.

The OSA has an open membership policy and works to provide advice on best practices and to promote standards on enterprise software development. It plans to make its open-source tools and application programming interfaces publicly available.

The OSA encompasses "independent software vendors, operating system and infrastructure vendors, value-added resellers and systems integrators, and community-focused organizations," according to criteria published on OSA's Web site.

Founding members of the OSA include Adaptive Planning, Centric CRM, CollabNet, EnterpriseDB, Hyperic, JasperSoft, Openbravo, SourceForge.net, SpikeSource and Talend.