lustratus LiteBytes

A recent announcement from BEA caught my eye.

BEA has announced it has joined the Interop Vendor Alliance, as a founder member (actually, can you become a founder member of something that has already been founded?). OK – so I admit it – I don’t know what the Interop Vendor Alliance is, so I had to go and look. Oh wow! Apparently,

The Interop Vendor Alliance is a community of software and hardware vendors working together to enhance interoperability with Microsoft systems.

I am so excited. Finally, all those annoying issues of Microsoft interoperability will be fixed! I’m not exactly sure how, but I trust these industry alliances of caring vendors. So what will this alliance do? Well, according to the site, vendors will

…socialize customer feedback with an eye toward increasing technical collaboration that targets common interoperability challenges

…work with customers to identify their top interoperability challenges

…post best-practice guides created as a result of scenario-based testing” and “descriptions, white papers and case studies about their solutions…on the Alliance web site

I am sure that given the importance of this issue, the Alliance vendors will be happy to exchange customer information with each other, and I am quite certain that any naughty vendor simply using this as a marketing ploy will be summarily drummed out of the club. We can all relax – Microsoft interoperability issues are about to become a thing of the past – the Interop Vendor Alliance will save us all.

Yay.

Steve