Daniel Ingitaraj (DPE, Singapore)

Building Bridges - Linux and Windows Interoperability: On the Metal and On the Wire

Why Build Bridges?

I would say it is safe to think that Microsoft is going to continue shipping Windows, and Red Hat and Novell will continue shipping Linux. With companies like Wall Mart, Southwest Airlines, City of Los Angeles (Ref:  Microsoft and Novell Celebrate Year of Interoperability for the list of 30 companies that are using mixed source environments) demanding interoperability, building bridges is not an option Enterprises can ignore. 

The market for heterogeneous solutions is growing rapidly. One visible sign of this is virtualization, an “indicator technology,” which by its nature promotes heterogeneity. Virtualization has become one of the most important trends in the computing industry today. According to IDC, enterprise spending on virtualization will reach $15B worldwide by 2009, at which point more than 50% of all servers sold will include virtualization-enabled processors. IDC also forecast that virtualization services market will levitate to $11.7Bn from $5.5Bn.

Reference another Report from Symantec: Data Centre Managers Turn to Virtualization for Peace of Mind

Given the ever improving x86 economics, companies are continuing to migrate off UNIX and specialty hardware down to Windows and Linux on commodity processors.

1. Customers are insisting on support for interoperable, heterogeneous solutions. At Microsoft, we run a customer-led product business. One year ago, we established our Interoperability Executive Customer Council, a group of Global CIOs from 30 top global companies and governments – from Goldman Sachs to Aetna to NATO to the UN. On the Microsoft side, this council is run by Bob Muglia, the senior vice president of our server software and developer tools division. The purpose of this is to get consistent input on where customers need us to improve interoperability between our platforms and others – like Linux, Eclipse, and Java. They gave us clear direction: “we are picking both Windows and Linux for our datacenters, and will continue to do so. We need you to make them work better together.”

2. Second, MS and Novell have established a technical collaboration agreement that allows us to combine our engineering resources to address specific interoperability issues.  As part of this broader interoperability collaboration, Microsoft and Novell technical experts are architecting and testing new virtualization scenarios to jointly develop the most compelling virtualization offering in the market for Linux and Windows and developing the tools and infrastructure necessary to manage and secure these heterogeneous environments.

Two major components of the future of Linux and Windows interoperability: Virtualization and Web Services protocols.

On the Metal focuses on the virtualization interoperability work being done between Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server virtualization, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Xen. On the Wire covers the details and challenges of implementing standards specifications, such as WS-Federation and WS-Management; and how protocol interoperability will enable effective and secure virtualization deployment and management

 

On the Metal : Virtualization

 

Getting Started with Basics:

In non-virtualized environments, a single operating system is in direct control of the hardware. In a virtualized environment a Virtual Machine Monitor manages one or more guest operating systems that are in “virtual” control of the hardware, each independent of the other. A hypervisor is a special implementation of a Virtual Machine Monitor. It is software that provides a level of abstraction between a system’s hardware and one or more operating systems running on the platform.

Virtualization optimizations enable better performance by taking advantage of “knowing” when an OS is a host running on HW or a guest running on a virtual machine. Paravirtualization , as it applies to Xen and Linux, is an open API between a hypervisor and Linux and a set of optimizations that together, in keeping with the open source philosophy, encourage development of open-source hypervisor's and device drivers.  Enlightenment is an API and a set of optimizations designed specifically to enhance the performance of Windows Server in a Windows virtualized environment.

Hardware manufacturers are interested in virtualization as well. Intel and AMD have independently developed virtualization extensions to the x86 architecture. They are not directly compatible with each other, but serve largely the same functions. Either will allow a hypervisor to run an unmodified guest operating system without incurring significant performance penalties.

Intel's virtualization extension for 32-bit and 64-bit x86 architecture is named IVT (Intel Virtualization Technology). The 32-bit or IA-32 IVT extensions are referred to as VT-x. Intel has also published specifications for IVT for the IA-64 (Itanium) processors which are referred to as VT-i. AMD's virtualization extensions to the 64-bit x86 architecture is named AMD Virtualization, abbreviated AMD-V.

There are three Virtual Machine Monitor models.

 

Type-2 VMM: A type 2 Virtual Machine Monitor runs within a host operating system. It operates at a level above the host OS and all guest environments operate at a level above that. Examples of these guest environments include the Java Virtual Machine and Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime, which runs as part of the .NET environment and is a “managed execution environment” that allows object-oriented classes to be shared among applications.

Hybrid Model VMM : shown in the middle of the diagram has been used to implement Virtual PC, Virtual Server and VMWare GSX. These rely on a host operating system that shares control of the hardware with the virtual machine monitor.

Type-1 VMM: A type 1 Virtual Machine Monitor employs a hypervisor to control the hardware with all operating systems run at a level above it. Windows Server virtualization and Xen are examples of type 1 hypervisor implementations

Development of Xen and the Linux hypervisor API paravirt_ops began prior to release of Intel and AMD’s virtualized hardware and were designed, in part, to solve the problems inherent in running a virtualized environment on non-virtualization-assisted hardware. They continue to support both virtualization-assisted and non-virtualization-assisted hardware. In keeping with the OS community’s philosophy of encouraging development of open source code, the paravirt_ops API is designed to support open-source hypervisor's.

Windows Server 2008 enlightenments have been designed to allow Windows Server 2008 to run in either a virtualized or non-virtualized environment *unmodified.* Windows Server 2008 recognizes when it is running as a guest on top of Windows Server and dynamically applies the enlightenment optimizations in such instances. In addition to a hypercall interface and a synthetic device model, memory management and the Windows Server 2008 scheduler are designed with optimizations for when the OS runs on a virtual machine. The Windows Server architecture is designed so that a parent partition provides services to the child partitions that run as guests in the virtual environment.

Native Windows Server Components:

1. VMBus – Virtual Machine Bus – Serves as a synthetic bus for the system.
2. VSP – Virtual Service Provider – Serves as an interface between the VMBus and a physical device
3. HCL Drivers – “Hardware Compatibility List” Drivers
4. VSC – Virtual Service Consumer – Functions as a synthetic device. For example, a filesystem will talk to the VSC controller instead of an IDE controller.

Interoperability Components:

1. Linux VSC – Interoperability component that serves as a synthetic Linux driver.
2. Hypercall Adapter – Adapts Xen hypercalls to Windows Server.

 

Like the WSv architecture, the Xen architecture is designed so that a special partition, in this case Dom 0, provides services to guest partitions that run in a virtual environment.

Native Xen Components:

1. Paravirt_ops is a Linux-kernel-internal function table that is designed to support hypervisor-specific function calls. The default function pointers from paravirt_ops support running as a host on bare metal. Xen provides its own set of functions that implement paravirtualization.

Interoperability Components:

1. Xen Virtualized Drivers – Windows synthetic device drivers must be converted to Xen-virtualized drivers.
2. Xen/Windows ABI – The binary interface that integrates Windows with Xen.

What is being done to engineer Interoperability?

1. SLES on Windows Server. 
2. We’re working with XenSource to provide the Linux VSC and Hypercall Adapter components to make SuSE Linux run on the Windows Server virtualization hypervisor implementation
3. WS2008 on Xen
4. Novell is working with us to provide the Xen virtualized drivers and Xen/Windows ABI to enable Windows Server 2008 to run on Xen 3.0 and beyond

On the Wire : WS Management and WS Federation

What is WS Management : It is a protocol.

What is the state of MS and OSS stacks for WS-Management?

• Microsoft is building in WS-Management as a core capability for System Center
• Sister technology to WMI – normal Windows management interfaces will be available through the WS-Management backplane
• OSS stacks include
  • openwsman (C implementation)
  • wiseman (Java implementation)

 

 

End state of these stacks

1. End-to-end interoperability
2. First-class citizen status for all management consoles against all infrastructures
3. Use OSS management tools to run Windows, including virtualized environments
4. Use Microsoft management tools to run Linux, including virtualized environments

Web-services management interoperability is hard to test - Why?

1. Protocol specifications cannot ever be completely unambiguous
2. Especially the case in the messy world of systems management
3. Multiple providers, multiple infrastructures
4. Virtualized and non-virtualized environments

On the Wire : WS-Federation

What are the key identity interoperability technologies today?

1. Open ID
2. WS-Federation
3. ADFS
4. Cardspace
5. Project Higgins
6. Samba

What are we doing to make them work better together?

1. Helping to develop open source implementation of WS-Federation with Novell
2. Bandit and Higgins work will be advanced
3. More to come

to be continued .......

Interoperability by Design - Connecting people, data and diverse systems.

(Products, Community, Access & Standards)

I. Products:

Novell extending to Windows management: An Internetnews.com article reports how Novell, a well-known Linux vendor and Microsoft partner, has ambitions to become a Windows management vendor. Recently the company released ZENworks Configuration Management, a multi-OS tool that enables patch, policy and endpoint security management on both Windows and Linux. This tool also incorporates technology from security vendor Senforce, which Novell acquired on recently.

II. Community:

Massachusetts Includes Open XML and ODF in State Policy
Massachusetts' revised Enterprise Technical Reference Model 4.0 (ETRM) now includes ECMA 376 Office Open XML (Open XML) and OASIS ODF 1.1 (ODF). Massachusetts has opted for choice of open, XML-based document formats by including both standards in its ETRM. As part of a public statement state representatives note that "Massachusetts is the first state to adopt a policy encouraging open, XML-based document formats. The Commonwealth has set the stage for a new and innovative way to ensure state government operates most efficiently and effectively for its citizens." Read more on Doug Mahugh's blog.

British Library Support for Open XML
British Library presentation on Open XML—Adam Farquhar of the British Library outlines the importance of Open XML and why the British Library cares about it for long term archival of documents. Both the British Library as well as the US Library of Congress played a key role in the Open XML standardization at Ecma. They brought forward key issues that were important to the Library and Archival community.

III. Access:

1. Interop enabled by Microsoft Protocol Programs helps VBrick’s sales to grow over 50%

VBrick Systems showcases the benefits of Microsoft Protocol Programs. According to Bruce Webber, VBrick’s VP Engineering, “Our relationship with Microsoft has broadened the available market for our digital video solutions. Today many organizations are looking to implement live and on-demand video systems in order to reduce costs, increase productivity, and communicate more effectively. Windows Media-based systems offer a high quality video solution for these organizations.” To read more about the VBrick’s experience or download the case study, click here.

2. Microsoft and Xandros expand protocol licensing collaboration

Microsoft and Linux platform provider Xandros announced Tuesday a licensing and collaboration agreement that enables Scalix e-mail servers to better interoperate with Microsoft and others.

a. Microsoft, Xandros target mobile e-mail

b. Xandros, Microsoft Make Scalix Mail Server Exchange Friendly

By licensing the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol and the Outlook Exchange Transport Protocol, Scalix Mail Servers can now synchronize data over wireless networks with Microsoft Exchange Server as well as various email clients that use these and other Microsoft protocols. This agreement, an expansion of the ongoing Microsoft-Xandros collaboration announced June 2007, demonstrates how protocol-level collaboration can benefit customers who rely on a mix of Windows-based and Linux systems. “The expansion of our agreement with Xandros is a strong example of how collaboration through intellectual property licensing can foster innovation that benefits the overall ecosystem,” Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s vice president of Intellectual Property and Licensing

3. Microsoft licenses audio watermarking technology to local company

Microsoft announced Wednesday it is licensing an audio watermarking technology to Seattle-based Activated Content Corp., a leading digital technology and application services company in the audio watermarking industry. The agreement enables Activated Content to insert and extract non-secure data into and from audio files, allowing the company to expand its offerings within the fast-growing area of audio watermarking in the entertainment, advertising and telephony industries. “We are excited about this agreement with Activated Content because they are uniquely positioned to extend this audio watermarking technology to new emerging applications and we feel great about supporting the development of a company based in our own backyard,” Louis Carbonneau, Microsoft’s general manager of the Intellectual Property Licensing Group, told CNet News.

4. Microsoft Shared Source licenses are now in OSI’s hands

On August 9, Microsoft made good on its promise to submit its Shared Source licenses to the Open Source Initiative for consideration as certified open-source licenses comments Mary Jo Foley on Microsoft’s decision to submit two of its Shared Source licenses to the Open Source Initiative. CBROnline and eWeek also report on the news, with CBROnline citing comments from Microsoft's source program director, Jon Rosenberg and eWeek referencing comments from Bill Hilf.

Both licenses have been in use since late 2005, when the Free Software Foundation Europe noted that they appeared to satisfy the four freedoms that define Free Software.
In order to be approved by the OSI the licenses will not only have to be fulfill the 10-point Open Source Definition but also be sufficiently different from existing OSI-approved licenses to avoid license proliferation.While the approvals process is still in the initial stages, early feedback to both licenses on the OSI's license discuss mailing list over the weekend was overwhelmingly positive.

IV. Standards:

MS Exchange Server team joins CalConnect : This week Microsoft’s Exchange Server team joined the CalConnect forum.

CalConnect is a Consortium that is focused on the interoperable exchange of calendaring and scheduling information between dissimilar programs, platforms, and technologies. The Consortium's mission is to promote general understanding of and provide mechanisms to allow interoperable calendaring and scheduling methodologies, tools and applications to enter the mainstream of computing. CalConnect technical working groups work on revising and extending existing IETF RFCs and drafts and creating new work to be submitted to IETF.

OPEN XML Getting Adoption

It is great to see the momentum behind ECMA OPEN XML. What is impressive with this list below is the number of applications on other platforms besides Windows. The Latest news was iPHONE using OPEN XML for reading documents and Neo Office suite for Mac.

 

Windows	Mac OS X	Linux	Other Operating systems or Operating System independent
Altsoft XML2PDF server 2007 AltViewer documents preview Altova XML Spy Corel Office Create Word 2007 documents without Word installed doxc to RTF Madcap Flare Microsoft Office 2000, Office XP and Office 2003 Microsoft Office 2007 Mindjet's MindManager Monarch V.9.0 from Datawatch ODF-Converter OOX-UOF Converter Open ERP Software Open XML Translator Open XML translator for OpenOffice (for Linux and Windows Versions of OpenOffice.org) Open XML Writer PythonOffice (Python API to read and write Excel XML documents from within Python programming language) Sourceforge Project to allow .NET(C#) developer to have component that will interact with Open Xml file Special Templates for Master Thesis Word 2007 Map Editor for Mindjet MindManager Xpertdoc Studio 2007 reporting solution	docx convertor for the Mac docx to html Konverter docx to RTF Konverter MacLinkPlus Deluxe version 16 by DataViz Microsoft Office 2008 Neo Office 2.1 Sun Open XML import filter for spreadsheets Word Counter 2.2.1 docx readers for the iPhone	Gnumeric – open source Spreadsheet Open Office –Novell, Linspire, Xandros, TurboLinux editions Open XML translator for OpenOffice (for Linux and Windows Versions of OpenOffice.org)	Docx2Doc Web Service DOCX convertor on Palm handheld devices OpenXML4J - Open XML framework for Java OpenXMLDeveloper.org (hundred of developers, multiple platforms) PHPExcel - Web Development (PHP) WebService with mailing of Document, docx to HTML Word 2007 file(docx) construction using Java

Singapore Companies adopting OPEN XML:

One of the local technology company Inchone started using OPEN XML in their Learning Management Application. Prior to using Open XML, Inchone encountered issues when mass uploading user profiles to their Learning Management System. Some of the issues they faced were

1. Excel had to be installed at the App Server
2. Performance used to slow down when large number of records were imported or multiple users tried to import simultaneously
3. A service has to be run at the Server to kill the Excel objects that are not closed properly
4. MS Excel License Fees were involved increasing the cost of their application
5. Users needed MS Excel

Now that they have started using OPEN XML in their application. The benefits they could see were :

1. Elimination of MS Excel on the Server and consequently saving on license fees
2. Better performance, since no need to create Excel object at the server
3. Thousands of records can be imported in, by multiple users without any performance issues and the OpenXML file can be zipped.(more than 50% file size saving)
4. No need for services to be executed for clean up
5. Users continue to use Excel to change the user profiles or can use other tools to change the profile (e.g. notepad)
6. Increase in security as the Open XML file can be encrypted

It is great to hear such stories of local companies who are using OPEN XML innovatively  to deliver better quality products and services to their customers.

About OPEN XML:

a. What is OPEN XML  - http://www.openxmlcommunity.org/about.aspx 

b. Why OPEN XML - http://www.openxmlcommunity.org/whyopenxml.aspx 

c. How companies like iLOG, Datawatch are using OPEN XML and solving business problems : http://www.openxmlcommunity.org/casestudies.aspx 

d. Want to get started on OPENXML : OPEN XML Developer Workshop Content 

e. OPEN XML Explained - eBook by Wouter Van Vugt  the 1st book on OPEN XML Development

This 128-page book covers the basics of Open XML, including many of the topics covered in the Open XML developer workshops, as well as several additional topics. The author, Wouter Van Vugt, is a software development trainer/consultant who specializes in the Open XML file formats. You may know from his participation in the forums here on OpenXMLDeveloper.org, or from his blog where he covers Open XML and other .NET development topics.

Interoperability by Design - Part II (Connecting People, Connecting Data and Connecting Diverse Systems)

Here’s where we used to be when it came to interoperability. 1980 was the best of times and it was the worst of times. It was the best of times in that, as long as you stayed with the products of a single vendor, you could be reasonably certain that everything in your infrastructure would work together, from the solutions and applications down through the operating system, computers, and other hardware.

But the price for this type of interoperability was too high. Customers were locked into a single vendor’s solution, a single vendor’s technology—and a single vendor’s prices. Because few vendors could truly meet all the needs of their customers, those customers started adding solutions from other vendors—and built the “smokestack” or “silo” systems with which many customers are still saddled. They built towers of Babel within their own organizations—systems that couldn’t talk to each other or share information. And, of course, as soon as a company tried to share information with others, it ran into this same problem of interoperability. These systems did what they were designed to do very well. They just weren’t designed to do interoperability

 

 

Today, of course, interoperability exists at each of these levels. It has to. Customers are not going to return to the restrictions and high prices of single-vendor environments. That means that any vendor that wants to play in today’s marketplace must support interoperability. The evolution of single-vendor environments into multi-vendor environments adds an entirely new layer of complexity to IT environments. Moreover, how interoperability is achieved is left to the vendor, and different vendors offer different ways to interoperate and different degrees of interoperability, which adds yet another layer of complexity to the IT environment.

As consumers, companies and governments look for new ways to use technology—for new forms of entertainment, new means of competitive and strategic advantage, and new ways to address public policy needs—they will require more connectedness, more interoperability. The quantity and nature of the connection points will increase and those connection points will encompass types of interoperability we haven’t seen before.

With the requirements of interoperability so multifaceted, it should be no surprise that the way to achieve interoperability is equally multifaceted. We believe that interoperability must be achieved by design, and that that design includes four key elements: product engineering, community outreach, access to technology, and standard-setting engagements.

 

 

 

1. Products : The “products” component is about building interoperability into products so that they are interoperable out of the box. This requires everything from documenting protocols, data formats, and APIs, through providing complimentary tools to enhance interoperability. For example, all of Microsoft’s key products include publicly available resource kits, controls, SDKs, DDKs, and connectors to promote interoperability. All of these products are designed to be more than interoperable—they’re designed to promote opportunities for interoperability. In the case of Windows, there are more than 50,000 application providers building products that work with our software. There are more than 100,000 hardware devices that work with Windows. That’s interoperability.

Some Examples:

Microsoft Not a Cathedral; Open Source Not a Bazaar (ASP.NET AJAX works on Linux) 

PHP on Vista with IIS7 ; PHP on IIS7 w/FastCGI

2. Community : As those numbers suggest, the community for Windows-based products is vast. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when we seek ever broader ways to work with others, through industry collaborations, partner programs, training and certification, even collaborations with companies that are sometimes our competitors. In the past year we’ve announced quite a few collaborations with companies that otherwise compete with us, such as JBoss, Sun, SugarCRM, XenSource, and the OpenSource providers. We collaborate with our competitors because it’s in our customer’s interest that we do so. We want Windows customers to be successful using whatever technologies they want to use.

Other vendors aren’t the only members of the interoperability community. An important new development to promote interoperability is the Microsoft Interoperability Community Executive Council. It’s composed of customers throughout the economy and government and will convene every six months. It will provide yet another way for us to listen to customers on this issue.

Some Examples: One-page Java-to-.NET Interop cheat sheet

Connecting Office Applications to MySQL and PostgreSQL via ODBC ; Windows Media Player Firefox Plugin ;

Microsoft-Novell Interoperability Lab – Sneak Peek; Microsoft Forms Interoperability Council

Leading Identity Management Vendors Join Microsoft to Demonstrate Federated Identity Using Web Services

3: Access : Hand in hand with community outreach is the issue of providing that community with access to Microsoft technologies so that they can build interoperable solutions of their own. This is nothing new for Microsoft. We’ve made our source code publicly available for years so that others can create complimentary products. More recently, our Open Specification Promise is a way to address the legal issues surrounding interoperability – it’s a way to put a structure around our technology to make it available to everyone who wants to build a complimentary product, so they know they can do so without concern for patent infringement.

Under this agreement, we’ve released technologies as diverse as Web services specifications, Sender ID, and the new virtual hard disk image format specification. We also make our technology accessible in specific arrangements with other vendors. For example, we’ve licensed ActiveSync technology to Nokia so that its customers can access their Exchange Server e-mail from their Nokia phones. There’s no standard involved here—it’s our technology. But we made it available to Nokia because our common customers are the winners.

Eg : Microsoft Open Specification Promise

4. Standards : We ship more than 500 different products every year and all of them support relevant standards. Our deep engagement with the standards-setting organizations, consortia, SIGS, and other groups involves hundreds of dedicated employees. And the work of implementing standards involves thousands more. Standards are, of course, a crucial component of achieving interoperability. We believe in standards. We work with hundreds of standards-setting organizations and support thousands of standards in our products.

• Standards@ Microsoft : Microsoft products and technologies support hundreds of technical standards such as FTP, HTTP, IMAP, IP, IPSec, Kerberos protocol, POP3, LU 6.2 protocol, MIME, SNA, SOAP, SSL, SNMP, TCP, TLS, UDP, WSDL, WS-*, and XML.
• Microsoft is actively engaged with more than 100 standards-setting organizations and workgroups such as ECMA, ETSI, OASIS, OMA, IEEE, IETF, ISO/IEC JTC1, ITU, and W3C.
• Microsoft engineers have authored or co-authored dozens of industry specifications and standards such as .NET CLI, C# CLI, XML, SOAP, WSDL, MTOM, UDDI, WS-Addressing, WS-AtomicTransaction, WS-Management, WS-Policy, WS-ReliableMessaging, and WS-I Basic Profile.
• Microsoft is working with industry to define a new generation of software and Web services based on eXtensible Markup Language (XML)

Eg; Identity Theft Prevention and Identity Management Standards Panel

This work is only going to grow, for us and for the industry, because as new technologies emerge, and as solutions become increasingly multi-layered, the number and type of standards we need will increase. But there’s an important difference between how Microsoft views standards and how some others view standards. Some say that standards alone are the way to interoperability. I hope I’ve demonstrated that we believe in standards too—but standards don’t create interoperability. They only help to create the opportunity for interoperability. How standards are implemented through product engineering, community outreach, and technology access is crucial.

There’s been a long-term trajectory to Microsoft’s approach to interoperability. A key point in our approach came with our shared source code program back in 2001. But it’s grown rapidly over the years, and especially so over the past year.

With Microsoft’s increased commitment comes an increased promise: To remain true to the principles I’ve outlined here for helping our customers access their data and bridge disparate technologies.

1. To enable interoperability by design through product engineering, community outreach, enabling access to Microsoft technology, and through standards engagements.
2. To work with anyone, anywhere—including our competitors—for the benefit of our customers.

Interoperability by Design - Part I (Connecting People, Connecting Data and Connecting Diverse Systems)

I have been talking about Interoperability last few months and have to say in summary - for 4 people I have met, I have discovered 5 different definitions and views about Interoperability. So pause for a moment if SOA and Web 2.0 have multiple definitions and views, time to add Interoperability to the mix of often less understood, over communicated and misrepresented words.

I thought of looking at the issue of interoperability from a variety of perspectives. But first why should we care about interoperability—and why.

Interoperability matters to everyone—in different ways. What it means to you depends on the type of organization or group to which you belong and the type of problem you’re trying to solve. Of course, at its core, interoperability is about getting technologies to work together—once you cross this differences crop!!

Read Interoperability: what's in a name? — Doug Mahugh for another interesting perspective.

Consumers want to be able to take their music player, plug it into their computer, and get their music – regardless of who makes each device and what software they run. They want to use whichever scanner or printer they can get a great deal on, whichever camera or pocket device they get as a present. And they want those devices to work with their computers four years from now, even though they may have changed computers twice in the interim (viola)

Enterprise customers have a more complex way of looking at interoperability. It’s about solutions from different vendors working together—because, for enterprise customers, vendor interoperability means vendor choice. And vendor choice means the flexibility to adopt the solutions they want regardless of where those solutions originate. Vendor choice also means the ability to adopt the most cost-effective solutions, and the ability to negotiate lower prices to help reduce total cost of ownership. Vendor choice isn’t just a good idea—for many companies, it’s a requirement of their procurement policies. This isn’t just an issue within companies. It’s a major issue among companies that want to work together in consortia, virtual organizations, distribution or supply chains, or other forms of organization.

Customers want interoperability and their vendors want to give them what they want. But for the companies that sell the solutions that must interoperate, interoperability is both a blessing and a curse—and, thus, a source of some tension.

1. The Blessing: Interoperability can create market opportunities for vendors if their products work with, and add value to, the solutions that customers already have or want to buy.

2. On the other hand, enabling that interoperability means using standard or commodity components rather than proprietary components that may add greater value to the solution. It means trading competitive advantage for playing nicely with others.

Both are worthwhile goals and there can be legitimate differences of opinion about when and where one makes that tradeoff. Another concern for vendors is that standards, despite their clear value, can impede innovation. No product was ever born from standard-setting activities.

Interoperability means different things to different people – so how do we define it? Here’s a simple definition that gets more complicated the more you examine it: Interoperability means connecting people, data, and diverse systems.

“Connecting people” focuses on the workflows, the collaborations, and the knowledge sharing that take place within and among organizations at the level of social or interpersonal interaction. These are the operational aspects of interoperability.

“Connecting data” focuses on the need to integrate data stores, optimize information flows, and address semantic issues that arise when structured and unstructured data—such as databases and metafiles—must be exchanged. Here, we need to translate between different ways of expressing information.

“Connecting diverse systems” speaks to the technical processes that are required for interoperability, ranging from simple connectivity between internal systems to industry frameworks that facilitate value-chain workflows.

The “data and diverse systems” part of our definition, the technical aspect of interoperability, is, in many ways, the easiest aspect of interoperability to implement. All it takes is math and science. The more difficult challenge comes when you add people to the mix. Now interoperability moves into the more subtle and ambiguous domains of law, policy, and organizational structure. The questions cease to be about how you can enable interoperability, and instead concern how you should enable interoperability and, indeed, whether you should enable interoperability in the first place.

We will discuss more on Interoperability and what Microsoft is doing to help promote interoperability in the next Part of this blog. As you would have guessed by know Interoperability is an Industry issue and more complex when you look deeper into it.

Surprise, Microsoft Listed as Most Secure OS

An interesting article came to my attention, thanks to catchy headline!.  The article by By Andy Patrizio for www.internetnews.com was based on the Security Threat report by Symantec. Read on ...

Microsoft is frequently dinged for having insecure products, with security holes and vulnerabilities. But Symantec (Quote), no friend of Microsoft, said in its latest research report that when it comes to widely-used operating systems, Microsoft is doing better overall than its leading commercial competitors.

The information was a part of Symantec's 11th Internet Security Threat Report. The report, released this week, covered a huge range of security and vulnerability issues over the last six months of 2006, including operating systems. Read on ...

Vista Sidebar Gadgets - Made in Singapore

For all of the people in Singapore ( I guess there are 4.5 Million of us in the city) some local Singapore Gadgets have gone live at the Singapore Gadgets Site.

Some of the Gadgets you will see there are :

LTA Road Monitoring Gadget
Virtual Map Gadget
CNBC Live News Gadget
MediaCorp Radio Gadget
Singapore Weather Gadget
E-Book World
CPF Voyage of Life

My personal favorites are LTA Road Monitoring Gadget, MediaCorp Radio Gadget ( I have stopped using my FM Radio), Virtual Map (Streetdirectory, Yellow Pages, SMRT, DNA all in a great Mash up example)

We are looking for Singapore Gadget Ideas. If you have some ideas on what kind of Gadgets you would like to see in Singapore, let us know. The best ideas we get and get adopted into Gadgets get some cool Microsoft Hardware prizes.