14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Novell, BEA Systems and SOFTWARE AG are the companies reunited under the Interop Vendor Alliance umbrella with a promise to enhance interoperability among their products. The software and hardware vendors group aims to answer customer feedback that placed product interoperability at the same level with security and reliability.
"Every day, enterprises across the globe face the challenges of streamlining their business processes, getting closer to customers and partners, and making mergers and acquisitions successful. These challenges typically involve making a wide variety of software from many different vendors work together," said Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft. "By bringing together organizations and vendors representing a broad set of interoperability capabilities, the Interop Vendor Alliance will help identify opportunities for the creation and delivery of real-world solutions that will improve the flow of information across the enterprise."
The Interop Vendor Alliance promises to foster interoperability via vendor collaboration by centralizing customer feedback. Additionally, the members of the alliance will enable scenario-based testing for interoperability and, finally, deliver the solutions to their customers.
"In response to customer requests, we have worked with Microsoft in recent years to make our products more interoperable," said Rich Green, executive vice president of software at Sun Microsystems. "Expanding this work as part of the new Interop Vendor Alliance will help us respond to our mutual customers' needs and make it as simple as possible for their employees, customers and partners to access and act on data, regardless of the underlying IT system."