Microsoft had three big themes during their appearance at last week's Interop 2008 conference in Las Vegas; interoperability, Network Access Protection (NAP) and Unified Communications. Yes, I said interoperability. Over and over again I heard mention that so many were surprised by Microsoft's open stance (pun intended) towards interoperability between Microsoft, partner and other third-party products. What was surprising is that I heard it from network equipment, security and software companies alike. Are Microsoft's actions matching up to their words? It appears so.
If there's a place to communicate your message about interoperability, it's at Interop, which has sizable multi-vendor labs to test and demonstrate interoperability. Microsoft's own Interop booth was primarily consumed with partners showing their products interoperability with Microsoft. And of course Interop has a long heratage of promoting and testing interoperability between vendor products. It's pretty interesting to hang around the labs and hear what the vendors say about the efforts required to get disparate vendors' equipment working together as advertised. It's also a great place to experiment and try new things. The engineers who work the labs are usually some of the busiest people at Interop.
We're hearing some pretty odd things out of Microsoft these days about interoperability, publishing previously highly confidential specifications, and even open source software. But it's more than just words, there's action behind it. Some recent examples include putting Office binary documents under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise, using open source software in Microsoft products, gaining OSI approval of Microsoft's own open source license, and abandoning freeze-the-market practices by announcing and launching products instead of 5 year visions. One effort that really fell short for me this year was a pretty lame attempt at creating "a dialogue" around End-to-End Trust at RSA a few weeks earlier. It felt like it was put together at the last minute or something. I guess you can't ask a leopard to remove all their spots at once.
Here's Micrsoft's own videos with interviews from some of their partners in the Interop Vendor Aliance. You can also read more about Microsoft's presence at Interop at http://www.microsoft.com/interop.
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Mitchell Ashley is CEO and Chief Strategist of Converging Network, LLC, providing product and technology strategies to emerging technology companies. A serial entrepreneur, Mitchell has created many successful products and services in the networking, security, convergence, Internet and IT industries. In addition to blogging for NetworkWorld, Mitchell regularly blogs at TheConvergingNetwork and co-hosts the widely popular Still Crazy After All These Years podcast.
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