The Open Solutions Alliance, which describes itself as "a nonprofit, vendor-neutral consortium," dedicated to "driving the interoperability and mainstream adoption of comprehensive open products," marked its one-year anniversary with three new members.

 

"The commercial open-source industry is no longer in an early-adopter phase," said Dominic Sartorio, OSA president and senior director of product management at SpikeSource, an open-source services company. "Now that we've entered the mainstream phase of adoption, it's even more important that open products have the fit, form and function that an enterprise organization expects."

 

The OSA seeks to promote interoperability among open products by fostering a multilateral approach, as in its Common Customer View, described by alliance officials as "an integrated suite of front-office, back-office, business intelligence and business planning applications." The CCV was the first of several joint projects to be focused on making open source products work together in a cohesive suite of products.

 

The CCV was built and tested by OSA members including Adaptive Planning, Concursive, Ingres, JasperSoft (News - Alert), Openbravo, SpikeSource, Talend and Unisys, and is currently available for purchase through Unisys. 

 

Going forward, alliance officials say, the CCV will continue to expand.  Future versions will include participation from more members, will introduce loosely coupled integration best practices including SOA and REST, and will serve as a reference implementation of those best practices. 

 

In January, the OSA underlined its global focus by announcing a new chapter structure. The first non-U.S. chapter will be based in Europe and will debut this spring. The OSA expects to expand further with chapters in Latin America and Asia in the coming year.

 

New OSA members include the consortium's first Asian member, Kaigen Solution K.K., a systems integrator based in Yokohama, Japan, specializing in open source deployments, internationalization and localization. IONA Technologies (News - Alert), a vendor of service-oriented architecture infrastructure products, also joined the OSA recently.

 

The Open Solutions Alliance is a nonprofit, vendor-neutral consortium founded in 2007.

 

Late last month the OSA announced plans to expand the organization's global footprint. It will function under a chapter structure with its first new regional chapter planned to address the European open products market. 

 

"More open source projects have originated in Europe than anywhere else in the world, which gives the region a unique foundation for building business value for users," said Bertrand Diard, chief executive officer of Talend, a founding member of the OSA.

 

Pierre Audoin Conseil, a Paris-based analyst firm, announced this month that the French market for open-source software reached 730 million euros in 2007, a leap of 66 percent from the previous year, and Gartner (News - Alert) Research is forecasting that open-source software adoption rates will continue to increase across Europe at the expense of proprietary software.

 

Its new chapter structure will "better enable the OSA to address the needs of ISVs, systems integrators and users who are deploying open products all over the world," according to OSA officials, but with "a regional focus that is tailored for regional differences in culture, business practices, regulatory environments and open source adoption patterns."