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Is Interoperability real? Microsoft says Yes!

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CIOL Bureau
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Interoperable Microsoft! Some years back this might have sounded like an oxymoron, specially when one has seen how traditional IT giants chose to reign the industry. But over the years, customers have seen imperialism  giving way to interoperability and suddenly, vendor lock-in is bowing out as co-existence enters. Disparate platforms now chime at ease as technology pieces from multiple vendors become amenable to jaw-dropping rapport.

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Many IT customers have found a sweet tooth for the IT mosaic. It’s a new and a tad disruptive industry culture that customers are now whistling for. And it’s definitely getting the attention it demands. Microsoft has inked some notable partnerships with other industry majors and has picked momentum on the new direction. Here’s a peek into Microsoft’s graph on the new blizzard called Interoperability, that has changed the way IT used to run and sell. Pallavi Kathuria, Director — Server Business Group, Microsoft India spells out the exact reasons and modus-operandi that are propelling the Redmond emperor on this new map.

'Proprietary’ is how manufacturers lock customers in and competitors out. Why then would Microsoft be interested in interoperability? Does the whole Interoperability stir really appeal to you? How strongly? In what areas?

Microsoft’s continued efforts in ensuring interoperability are largely borne out of our recognition of the fact that our customers are working with mixed IT environments with applications and technologies sourced from diverse vendors. We at Microsoft recognize the important responsibility we bear by virtue of universal usage of our products, and the mission-critical use of our products by customers worldwide on a daily basis. Certain Microsoft products like Windows Server, SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange and Office Sharepoint Server have become so integral to operational continuity of our customers’ businesses that interoperability and data portability is more valuable than ever.

That is why we are working towards increasing interoperability — increasing openness through greater access to our products and more collaboration with others — so that Microsoft’s products help our customers overcome the challenges of a heterogeneous environment. 

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How, in terms of your strategy on products?

Microsoft’s commitment to interoperability has resulted in a cross-company effort, with the goal of meeting our customers’ needs for operating mixed IT environments. This includes a number of elements: how we build and license our high-volume products, the technology bridges we create to connect our products with others, our perspectives on critical issues to foster greater interoperability across the IT ecosystem, and our participation in the IT standards system.

Our approach and efforts towards interoperability includes open connections to Microsoft’s products, via open protocols, open APIs, open access and open source compatibility. It also entails support for standards in our high-volume products in a way that promotes interoperability; data portability, which allows customers to access their data from any software or application in a form that permits its use in other software products and finally open engagement with customers, IT industry and open source communities.

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Does it make business sense to open applications and protocols? How has MS handled the doubts that full documentation and real efforts will happen from MS? More than a rhetoric pledge?

Our primary case for opening connections to Microsoft products is to allow our customers to maximize the value of their mixed IT environments, while continue benefitting from the ease of use of Microsoft’s products that they already prefer, and also allow developers to work with Microsoft products and enhance the overall IT ecosystem. We believe that interoperability is good for our customers and anything good for our customers is good for us.

Yes, our commitment is real and continuous and is best visible through the technology bridges we have been building with various technologies from other vendors. What you will find here is a clear demonstration of “real efforts and full documentation”. We are also contributing code to various open source projects, which started with the contribution of 20,000 lines of code to the Linux kernel for virtualization drivers in 2009. On the cloud, we are the most interoperable platform today with support for PHP, Java, MySQL, Python, Ruby, Eclipse and many more besides .Net.

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Anything specifically happening in India?

 


In India, we have initiatives like Interoperability Lab — The Lab was launched in 2007 in Bangalore and the focus has been on solving key customer issues on interoperability. This includes app-to-app Interop, data portability and availability/performance of open source applications on the Windows platform. Next we have something called Open Source Technology Program.

The program is designed to promote research and development of open source applications on the Windows platform in collaboration with leading engineering institutes in the country. Another one worth citing here is Open XML Translator project -  a project, developed with partners, has created tools to build a technical bridge between the Microsoft Office Open XML Formats and the Open Document Format (ODF). This work is in response to government requests for interoperability with ODF because they work with constituent groups that use that format.

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Can you illustrate more full-scale, off-lab interoperability cases in point?

Microsoft’s interoperability efforts are driven through the lens of customer needs and since interoperability is an industry-wide challenge, collaboration with customers and other stakeholders is critical. One forum where this collaboration takes place is in the Interoperability Executive Customer (IEC) Council, which consists of more than 35 CIOs and CTOs from governments and leading corporations around the world. Working with them, we’re actively resolving issues in the areas of systems management, security and identity management, as well as office productivity and collaboration tools.

A real-world example of our collaboration with customers to enable interoperability is our work with the Portuguese government’s Agency for the Modernization of the Public Administration. This organization used Microsoft technologies to create an interoperability framework to connect and provide a single sign-on to diverse legacy systems running Linux, AIX, HP/UX and Windows.

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Any handshakes with competition in this context?

We also collaborate with our competitors – EMC, Novell, SAP and Sun, for example– to help solve the interoperability challenges of our mutual customers. Take Novell, for example. Microsoft worked with Novell to enable Moonlight, an open source implementation of Silverlight for the Linux operating system. Moonlight gives Linux-based users access to Web experiences that incorporate video, animation, interactivity and stunning user interfaces. It will be provided as an open source plug-in for the Firefox Web browser. In fact, an early version of Moonlight was used early last year to stream President Obama’s inauguration ceremony.  

How crucial are efforts and steps by H/w players and Cloud players in this direction?

Today, as the cloud is fast becoming a key enabler for businesses to build efficiencies in their processes, most large players are collaborating to offer solutions that address key customer pain points. Microsoft announced a large scale partnership with HP this year and we are investing $250m in this venture. Our partnerships with other players include:

Solutions for data center and private cloud management with IBM and Dell Solutions for storage, virtualization and private cloud with NetApp and EMC Partnership with software vendors like Citrix and Qwest to enable various solution scenarios in different industry verticals