Microsoft Advances with Interoperability Camelot

Microsoft has called its interoperability customer council around the Redmond round table for the second time since 2006. The host of the council meeting, Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft was joined by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and by Microsoft Senior Vice President and General Counsel Brad Smith, Microsoft Business Division President Jeff Raikes together with other company executives to focus on interoperability issues. The Interoperability Executive Customer Council is a Microsoft initiative designed to provide fertile ground for a discussions in which Microsoft would better understand the needs of its customers.

"We wanted to engage in a direct, active discussion with companies that have highly sophisticated IT environments - companies that need to address interoperability issues day in and day out. We wanted their help identifying real-world interoperability scenarios and priorities from the customer perspective, and working with us on solutions. With that in mind, we brought together CIOs and CTOs from large organizations, which included corporate customers in a cross-section of industries and governments in a range of geographies, with the idea of having an ongoing and constructive dialog about interoperability," Muglia revealed.

The last time the council convened was in October 2006 on the Redmond campus following the creation of the group in June last year. Muglia made it clear that Microsoft has put its money where its mouth is, and that in excess of 70% of all the interoperability issues that were raised in the council have already been dealt with.

"We believe interoperability is all about connecting people, data and diverse systems, and our goal is to deliver "interoperability by design." By that I mean we develop products with compatibility in mind from the start. We take a holistic approach to interoperability. First, we think about how we build our products, which includes deciding which protocols we use, which data formats we use, what sort of documentation we create, what kinds of development tools we make available and so forth," Muglia added.