Interoperability… is that just another catch phrase or is there any sense behind all the hype. You may ask “What’s the big deal about Interoperability??” Let me  first try and address that.

We live in a world of choices – choice of hardware, software and services from several technology providers, competing to offer their solutions to customers. With more and more customers going in for multiple technology stacks, such heterogeneous environment can be quite difficult and costly to maintain for the customers. In today’s economic status, all the customers are looking at ways to minimize costs, by leveraging their existing hardware and software investments while rolling out LOB apps. If the technology stacks are interoperable, customers will have the flexibility to leverage hardware, software and service that’s right for the business. Point 1 - Interoperability is important for customers.   These customers will continue to need IT companies / service providers to develop solutions for them but the solution provider will now have to cater to these cross-platform environments. This could prove to be a differentiating factor for solution providers in the industry and thus, catering to heterogeneous environments must be seen as an opportunity rather than as a challenge. Point 2 - Interoperability is important for IT Companies / Solution Providers.  Now this will obviously require developers to architect and develop solutions that are interoperable across multiple technology stacks. Every developer must be well-versed with the interoperability offerings across the various technology stacks and gear themselves up to be able to quickly leverage platform offerings from the vendors and design / build their solutions keeping a heterogeneous deployment environment in mind and so it’s imperative for them to be skilled to deliver on this. Point 3 - Interoperability is important for developers. I hope I have been able to establish that well. :)

So now you might be wondering .. “Since when does Microsoft care so much about Interoperability??”. ..Well actually … we’ve have been “Interop aware” so-to-speak, for a while now though we are perceived to be otherwise. Interoperability is and was never an after-thought for us. We deliver interoperability right from our core products and technologies; Collaborate and work jointly with partners, competitors and the open source community;  Work with standard bodies and promote interoperability through new and existing standards; Provide developer resources to make it easier to develop products that interoperate with Microsoft solutions. However, we do recognize that some feel Microsoft could do better on driving interoperability in IT and we’re certainly committed to doing more. In our multiple interactions with developers from the open source community from various cities, most of them have been pleasantly surprised with the innovations we have done on what we have to offer such as the fact that PHP is now supported as a first class citizen on Windows wherein you can now hoist your PHP applications on IIS and leverage all the benefits the Windows platform has to offer; Support for Silverlight development in Eclipse and you can now build Silverlight apps and integrate them into your PHP applications, all from within Eclipse; Free out-of-the-box Reporting engine that ships with SQL Express through which you can use to build compelling reports for your data residing on a non-Microsoft SQL server database provider. The list is pretty exhaustive and I would not be able to do justice to all of them in one single blog post. We are committed to share all this information with you and the team will be actively blogging on each of these areas in the days to come.

Stay tuned… More to come…