Open Solutions Alliance

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When the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) launched in February, there was a lot of interest. But some of that interest has been industry head-scratching, wondering about the results and the intentions of the OSA (www.opensolutionsalliance.org). Noted open source business blogger Matt Asay was among the skeptics in his post "Yet Another Alliance (OSA)". He asks three pertinent questions, mostly about the OSA's purpose.

1. Is the alliance about getting people to buy into open source?
2. Is the alliance about getting quick marketing or paper partnerships for vendors?
3. What does this have do for customers?

Matt's first observation is emphatically correct; there's no denying that open source is booming. Open source business models are changing and adapting and customers are flocking to it for reasons other than those that make it good reading on a balance sheet. The software is quickly accessible with demonstrable results for the business often in the same timeframe it used to take to go through the arduous process of buying the proprietary closed source software. Projects are open and flexible, typically bringing to market solutions faster than their proprietary alternatives. Much faster, in fact. This is partly because of the community, which helps to focus the company on market priorities through active communication and collaboration. It also helps deliver the results. In general, using and extending that software is done through the community, which brings a powerful knowledge base and easy access for all documentation in the community forums and wikis.

Working directly with an open source project is easy. Working with multiple vendors at the same time, however, is not. When embarking on a new business project that requires software, the people involved typically ask three key questions:
• Has anyone done this before?
• Does it work with our current systems?
• How should we go about this?

Answering these questions quickly and correctly is critical to customers AND vendors. This is the founding principle of OSA that Hyperic bought into. As a company, Hyperic writes software that manages other software. By nature, everything we do has some level of integration. It's not always easy. Through the proliferation of open source and technologies in general, there's no standard "stack" on which to build a software solution. You're free to choose J2EE, one of the 20 or so permutations of LAMP, commercial closed source alternatives, or a hybrid mix of all of them! Whatever you do, you're going to want to integrate and manage all of that software.

A Case Study Evolving
Hyperic (www.hyperic.com) meets the demands of the marketplace by providing the visibility and tools needed for operational IT workers to diagnose and correct problems quickly, improving performance and availability. It does this so well that the business folks in the glass offices are paying attention. They want to see summary reports detailing the overall availability or downtime of the systems, the average outage or performance episodes, and the percentage of downtime planned versus unplanned. They want operational performance reports on the level of optimization in their virtualization deployment. In short, they want comprehensive reporting.

When reviewing the capabilities of open source projects, we decided that JasperServer from JasperSoft (www.jaspersoft.com) not only met but exceeded our reporting requirements. As a bonus, they're also part of OSA. But that's not the reason why we elected to work with them. That said we're each motivated to leverage OSA to speed our integration and invite the public to participate.

To start the project, we did our own vendor selection. Perhaps in time, this process will be good to open an integration-savvy community. But as OSA is just getting started, we went through that process privately; however, this is exactly the kind of effort OSA will help facilitate and foster for the benefit of business users in the future.

Based on community requests, we decided that, for Hyperic users, availability reports were most important. We started there. We met with the JasperSoft team and completed intensive reviews of our respective infrastructures, data schemas, and APIs. We discovered in the meeting that the JasperSoft community had been asking for better manageability.

A perfect match. And so two projects were born:

1. Embedding JasperReports in Hyperic HQ and
2. Building a Hyperic HQ plug-in for JasperReports

We published the requirements and announced the projects to our communities offering to include anyone who wanted to help. We also agreed that we would publish the lessons we learned and insights we had for standards or best practices on OSA's forums, and asked our communities to review the integrations between our projects on OSA directly. We identified three key areas to review:

• UI Integration - Embedding the JasperReports UI into Hyperic's to become a seamless experience and maintain a level of interactivity will require a significant amount of work. Aside from fusing our UI frameworks and widgets there needs to be a standardization of style sheets that maintain a consistent look and feel. There are also localization requirements as we try to isolate the application architecture for quick translation into other languages.

• Single Sign-On - Fusing user navigation into a single experience and dictating permissions collectively is a challenge for any software integration solution. The requirements for our projects will be bidirectional. Hyperic open source users will only need a single logon to both Hyperic and JasperSoft solutions. Since our enterprise extensions are extensions to the open source project, Enterprise customers have requirements for permissions for information they can see, change, or act on. Single sign-on needs to be solved for universal access, but must accommodate permissions as well. Hyperic HQ will also need universal access to the complete JasperSoft infrastructure, log, and configuration files to provide management.

• Management APIs - Reporting applications aren't known for management standards, since they're not generally considered paramount for transactional systems. After all, the transactions may experience errors or problems, but the reports generated may just be delayed or skipped. However, these reports are increasingly offering serious analysis into general transaction performance and can affect the overall result. Just think of Hyperic's use case, where we'd use these reports to substantiate the required availability SLA of a virtualized server farm. Important insight into the transactional system could improve reporting system availability and performance. Requirements for database performance including query optimization and ETL transformations. Data export/import will be essential.

Not a Corner Case
Most, if not all, of these requirements aren't unique to a systems management/reporting software integration story. In fact, they're very common. We're not going to be the first to discuss these issues. We are, however, going to be among the first projects to discuss our open issues, best practices, and lessons learned in the OSA's open forum created exclusively to speed the adoption and integration of software solutions with open source components. We believe that the best route to foster adoption is by centralizing a knowledge repository on the subject to assist the community at large in their efforts to do similar integrations.

So, to answer Matt's questions more formally:

1.  Is the alliance about getting people to buy into open source?
No, it won't drive them to Open Source; that hasn't been a problem for a while. It may however, help prospective adopters make informed choices about how open solutions will "plug and play" in the context of their current IT ecosystem. Mostly, it will help accelerate the implementation and time-to-value of their open solutions choices by offering help on common integration challenges.

2.  Is the alliance about getting quick marketing or paper partnerships for vendors?
No, although there's some level of extra brand awareness as a by-product of participating. But frankly, participating in any open discussion gets you the same result. JasperSoft and Hyperic as companies didn't have any extra incentive to embark on this project together via membership in the OSA. We decided to do this based on regular due diligence of available projects and a best-fit analysis. Membership in OSA gives us no business or legal incentive to work together. If anything that comes from a common use of the GPL and has nothing to do with OSA membership or provisions. It does mean though that we're both motivated to contribute to this new community. Contributions are an important facet of any open source project since they keep the community alive and build mind share and credibility.

3.  What does this do for customers?
It will help provide a common ground for integration discussions and solutions that will help improve and speed integration efforts essential to every IT project out there.

The age of computing has evolved into an age of integration - integrating technology not only with itself but with business and everyday life. With the sponsorship of vendors and the involvement of the community at large we believe that the OSA will go a long way toward increasing the speed of integration, adoption, and deployment of open source technology, and we hope, ultimately increase the pace of innovation a little bit more.

Two months into this alliance and we're making advances toward our goal - and not just Hyperic and JasperSoft. For more information on all the projects under development on the OSA forum and to watch the developments of this one, see www.opensolutionsalliance.org.