Making open source attractive to businesses

The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), a non-profit consortium dedicated to increasing businesses' use of open-source software, has developed an interoperability roadmap and announced its first major project. The interoperability roadmap outlines the specific interoperability problems the consortium expects to address and provides a timeline. The end result for each issue will be a document describing standards and best practices that the open-source community can use as a guide for building and deploying interoperable software. A companion project has the OSA creating prototypes of working code to show that the interoperability principles work in practice. The first prototype is the Common Customer View, which will bring together information held in different members' applications including CRM (customer relationship management), ERP (enterprise resource planning) and business intelligence software and legacy point-of-sale applications. Once complete, when a user updates information about a customer in an ERP application, they will be able to see that new information as they access the same customer's record held in their CRM software.

For more on the Open Solutions Alliance:
- read the article at LinuxWorld