Talk on SOA & open source at Indian Ocean Naval Symposium

Last week I was invited to give a talk at the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium's first Technical Summit, which was hosted by the Sri Lanka Navy. My talk was about the role of SOA and open source in building large scale net centric systems for defence purposes. My real objective was to try to encourage both local military as well as regional militaries to set up their own open source activity (similar to what the US govt has done with foss.mil) as well as to share and collaborate at least within the Indian Ocean region.

Service Oriented Architecture for Net Centric Operations based on Open Source Technology

View more Keynote presentations from Sanjiva Weerawarana.

The IONS is a great idea .. all 32 (?) countries which touch the Indian ocean have a lot of common naval issues to deal with. Its wonderful to see India take leadership in setting this up and to see the kind of warm collaboration that appears to be forming. The coolest system was Singapore Navy's Information Fusion Centre (which started very recently) - a full service oriented system that allows regional cooperation and mashing up of all kinds of information sources to give them a complete operational picture.

There were 30+ attendees from 18 countries. Interesting thing to see is whether we can muster up some concrete next steps!

How to handle SOA vendor consolidation

Paul Krill over at InfoWorld has written a great story on SOA vendor consolidation. He notes how even the mighty IBM has to deal with WSO2 because of open standards based interoperability that is inherent in SOA scenarios.

Later he lists the major SOA vendors .. and its great to see WSO2 listed there - and the only open source one to boot.

Paul on open source and open standards

Paul has recently written two very interesting blogs about open source and open standards: Why open standards and interoperability are subtly different and Open Source versus Open Standards.

A related thing is the "Open Source Requirement for Open Source", which I was part of pushing to finalize when I was on the OSI Board. Unfortunately that never got finished and I haven't had the time & energy to try to get convergence and finalize it. However, I still strongly believe those requirements and push for them in whatever standards activities I'm involved in. Interestingly, I believe this fits nicely with Paul's thoughts.