Vendors form Open Solutions Alliance

A handful of open source supporters Wednesday formed an alliance with plans to develop and promote open source business solutions, ultimately making it easier for enterprise companies to adopt open source technologies in their IT shops.

The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) debuted in New York at the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit with intentions to work with vendors and the open source community to improve interoperability among software products and enable faster implementation of open source tools for business users.

"This is a transitional time for open source. People have been predisposed to paying for management technology -- even if it is unsuccessful. People don't always have a lot of time to kick the tires so we are making the effort to make open source more amenable to the adopter," says Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic, an OSA founding member and provider of open source management software. Hyperic also introduced a new version of its flagship Hyperic HQ this week at the show.

To start, the OSA will focus on defining and promoting tools, frameworks and best practices, according to an OSA press release. The organization also will build "meta-communities" by partnering on projects and coordinate joint marketing campaigns to raise awareness of open source applications and suites.

"We're inviting all companies developing and using open source software to work together and ensure the availability of turnkey, enterprise-ready solution suites faster and at a fraction of the cost of traditional proprietary alternatives," said Barry Klawans, OSA spokesperson and CTO at JasperSoft, an open source business intelligence product provider.

The founding OSA members are: Adaptive Planning, Centric CRM, CollabNet, EnterpriseDB, Hyperic, JasperSoft, OpenBravo, SourceForge.net, SpikeSource and Talend.

The OSA joins other industry groups such as the Open Management Consortium, which formed last year to promote interoperable open source management applications.

Companies interested in joining the OSA can find more information here.