GOC

The Open Solutions Alliance, a nonprofit, vendor-neutral consortium, has announced the availability of its first interoperability prototype. The OSA's debut prototype includes specific standards and best practices for delivering a Common Customer View across open applications and is on display at LinuxWorld San Francisco.

 

The CCV prototype integrates data from diverse front-office, back-office and planning applications to present a complete view of customer activity and interactions. The CCV prototype is being built, tested and demonstrated with products from Adaptive Planning, Centric CRM (News - Alert), JasperSoft, Openbravo, Talend and Unisys.

 

"The OSA was formed this year to address interoperability among open solutions. The CCV prototype is the first major fruit of our collaborative labors," said Barry Klawans, OSA spokesperson and CTO at JasperSoft. "We see the adoption of open solutions increasing, and with it the demand for these point products to work together."

   

According to a SpikeSource user survey conducted last fall, business customers rank "acquiring new customers" and "increasing customer loyalty" above all else. Meeting these goals can be difficult when business applications supporting various customer interactions are disconnected and diminish the end customer experience.

 

Companies that can integrate relevant customer data between the increasing number of open source applications they're using will have the most success in attracting new customers, retaining the existing ones and ultimately, increasing revenues as a result.

 

And while several large proprietary vendors offer "customer data hub" applications,these often overshoot the needs of most private and public sector enterprises where deployments of open products are on the rise, OSA officials charge.

 

The CCV prototype is based on the OSA Interoperability Roadmap's proposal and is expected to be the reference implementation for future proposals including Single Sign-On, User Interface integration, data integration, and Application Programming Interfaces.

 

In related news, Palamida, a vendor of software risk management products, has announced the completion of code analysis for the Lightweight Authentication Module, a significant component of the Common Customer View Prototype.

 

With Palamida's IP Amplifier, the OSA was able to use the industry's largest compliance library -- containing open source software ID tags, intellectual property information, and published vulnerability alerts -- to identify and remediate open source license and vulnerability concerns in the LAM portion of the CCV prototype.

 

Having undergone in-depth code level review, corporate users of the CCV can now be assured that it meets important enterprise security and compliance thresholds.