Open Solutions Alliance
The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) is a nonprofit, vendor-neutral consortium dedicated to driving adoption of comprehensive open business solutions. Among its activities, the OSA will work with open solution ISVs, system integrators, and the broader open source community to improve interoperability among software products by publishing best practices, promoting standards, and making tools and APIs available. This is expected to ensure the availability of integrated, rapidly deployable open application suites to business users.
History
In early November 2006, a group of open solutions and open source application developers got together to form an alliance dedicated to improving interoperability and awareness for enterprise class open business solutions. Open source development had proven itself at the operating system and middleware layers but had yet to make a significant impact at the application level. ISVs participating in the OSA kickoff meeting identified three important areas where collective action could be successful in lowering barriers to adoption of open solutions by business users:
- Define and promote guidelines and best practices for interoperability between applications.
- Foster a multivendor metacommunity of users, developers, and systems integrators.
- Drive awareness and advocacy about the benefits of open solutions for business customers.
All of those present agreed that none of these challenges could be readily addressed by any one vendor in isolation. Issues of awareness, interoperability and community are inherently collective in nature, such that collective action is needed to address them. This led to the decision to create a trade association through which collective activity could be coordinated. The result was the OSA.
In December 2006, The Open Solutions Alliance was incorporated as a 501c6 in the State of California, and the initial founding members officially joined during January 2007.
Members
The members of OSA include Palamida, Bluenog, Chariot Solutions, CSC, Concursive Corporation, CorraTech, Essentia, Ingres Corporation, IONA, Jaspersoft, Openbravo, Redmayne-Bentley, SourceForge.net, Talend, The Open Source Technology Alliance (TOSTA), Black Duck Software and Unisys.
Board of directors
The OSA board consists of the following individuals:
- Anthony Gold (Bluenog), President
- Deb Woods (Ingres), Treasurer
- Srinivas Polisetty (CSC)
- Josep Mitja (Openbravo)